Sea of Slaughter (21 page)

Having seen what happened to the cod, let us look briefly at what has happened, and is happening, to the other major commercial fish species generically referred to as groundfish. Because the subject is so vast, I have restricted my exposition of it to the waters of Newfoundland and the Grand Banks where, however, the destruction has been typical of what has taken place almost everywhere.

Although never approaching cod in abundance the closely related haddock bore the first brunt of the generalized assault upon Atlantic groundfishes that began with the decline in cod stocks. By 1952, haddock, which had previously been a by-catch species (one taken more or less accidentally during the fishery for cod), was being fished at the rate of about 40,000 metric tonnes a year. At first it was the special prey of Portuguese and Spanish draggers. These vessels used such small mesh in their trawls that schools of young haddock were dragged to the surface along with their larger brethren. Since they were too small to be of any value, they were simply shovelled overboard—quite dead.

A pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force who flew patrols over Canada's coastal waters in the 1950s has described for me what the haddock fishery looked like from the air.

“One morning we raised forty or fifty paired [two vessels towing one enormous trawl between them] Spanish draggers working Green Bank. It was a nice clear day and we could see them away off. What we couldn't understand was—some of them seemed to have a tail. It was shining in the sunlight like a streamer of floating silver paper a couple of miles long. We diverted to see what the devil it was, and when we came over them at about 2,000 feet, we saw it was dead fish. There must have been millions of them stretching out astern of each boat that had just hauled its net and was sorting the catch on deck. Undersized fish were going overside like confetti. It was actually kind of pretty, but our radio op, who was a Bluenoser from Lunenburg [a major Nova Scotian fishing port], was so pissed off he figured we ought to bomb the bastards. It was young haddock they were dumping, and what a bloody waste; but apparently that was the regular thing with the Spanish fleet.”

In 1955, ships working the Grand Banks landed 104,000 tonnes of haddock—and probably killed and dumped that much again. Although everyone in the business knew what was happening, nobody did a thing about it. The useless massacre of young haddock continued unabated. By 1961 the draggers were only able to catch 79,000 tonnes and, soon thereafter, the haddock fishery collapsed. By 1969 it had been abandoned. A report issued by the Canadian government provides the epitaph.

“Most year classes [the young born in any given year] since 1955 have been complete failures. This, as well as heavy fishing pressure... has caused a reduction in haddock stocks to an extremely low level... there are no prospects for improvement in the immediate future.”

Indeed, there were none; nor does there seem to be much of a prospect in the distant future either since, in 1984, haddock were still commercially extinct in Newfoundland/Grand Banks waters—and almost everywhere else as well.

The redfish is a large-eyed, deep-water fish that bears its young alive and is both slow-growing and slow to mature sexually. Hardly fished at all before 1953, it came under direct assault on the offshore banks in 1956 with landings of 77,000 tons. Marketed as ocean perch, it proved so profitable that entire segments of the multinational fishing fleet concentrated on it, landing 330,000 tonnes in the single year of 1959. This was followed by a predictable decline to landings of 82,000 tonnes in 1962. This fishery would soon have been exhausted had it not been for the introduction of new types of mid-water trawls and the discovery of a relatively untouched population in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This precipitated a new massacre, which in its turn began to fail in the early 1970s for want of victims.

By that time almost all the larger and reproductively active redfish had been killed, leading Canada's foremost expert on the species, Dr. E.J. Sandeman, to predict that “prospects are poor for the next several years, and the redfish fishery is expected to decline.”

A most accurate prediction. At the time of writing, the remaining redfish contribute only peripherally to the commercial fishery. There is little evidence of any significant recovery in its stocks.

Flatfish include several exploitable species of groundfish. The northwestern Atlantic forms that have suffered most, because they were most abundant, have been the enormous halibut, together with the sole-like plaice, yellowtail, and witch flounder.

All have been disastrously over-fished since about 1962, when it came their turn to fill the insatiable maws of draggers and factory ships. Before that date, they had been virtually ignored. The halibut, which could measure nine feet in length and weigh close to 1,000 pounds, was of only peripheral interest to the fisheries until recently. In earlier times it was even considered a nuisance because it would take cod bait and so waste the time and sometimes break the gear of cod fishermen. Lieutenant Chappell of the British Royal Navy, doing patrol duty on the Grand Banks in 1812, reported that “The fishermen of Newfoundland are much exasperated whenever an unfortunate halibut happens to seize their baits: they are frequently known in such cases to wreak their vengeance on the poor fish by thrusting a piece of wood through its gills and in that condition turning it adrift. The efforts which are made by the tortured fish to get its head beneath the water afford a high source of amusement.”

Although, prior to 1960, some few halibut were landed by inshore fishermen from Newfoundland waters and sold either pickled or fully salted, it was not until 1963 that the species was attacked by the commercial fishing fleet. Catches began at about 220 tons in 1964 and leapt to at least 40,000 tons by 1970. Thereafter, as was ever the case, the catch declined until today the halibut has become a rarity in seas where it once abounded.

The several species of smaller flatfish in northern waters had no commercial value, and were not fished at all except for cod and lobster bait, prior to the post-Second World War development of effective mass-freezing techniques. Even as late as 1962, the total catch of all species of flatfish was under 33,000 tonnes, most of which was taken as a by-catch. In the following year, plaice was deliberately sought after, and yellowtail and witch flounder soon joined the list of exploitable species. By 1966, the catch of these three had topped 154,000 tonnes. The catastrophic decline that followed elicited these cautious comments from a Canadian fisheries biologist in 1976.

“The heavy exploitation of American Plaice on the Grand Bank has resulted in a sharp redaction in the catch per hour... There is every indication that the [yellowtail flounder] total removal levels [read: catch] will decline drastically in the immediate future..
.
With the reduction of the previously unexploited stock biomass [of witch flounder] catch per hour has been greatly reduced.”

All of which meant, in simple terms, that the flounder fishery was foundering.

And so it goes. Today, industry spokesmen and scientific advisers are extolling the potential profitability of a whole new range of species that might be fished in place of those that have been commercially exterminated. These include such deep-water and even abyssal species as the wolf fish, the porbeagle (a fancy name for the mackerel shark), and a small shark called the spiny dogfish. The thorny skate is also being touted, as are the grenadiers (otherwise known as rat-tails), which live as much as three-quarters of a mile down in the black deeps. New fishing techniques will be required to “harvest” these “resources,” but this should pose no problem to technological men who can travel to the moon and back. It will be interesting to see under what evocative names these species will be marketed.

At this point it would be well to look at one of the major justifications advanced to excuse the fishing industry's biocidal activities. This is the contention that the industry is
duty bound
to constantly increase its landings in order to improve the supply of protein for a human population, much of which lives on the edge of starvation.

This is blatant hypocrisy. In actual fact, the fishing industry of the developed nations, which is by far the largest and most destructive, achieves just the opposite result. Most of its production goes, not to starving peoples, but to those who are already the world's best fed, and who can afford high-priced food. In order to produce high-value (and high-profit) products, usually fillets, the Western fishing industry processes its catches in such a way that as much as 40 per cent of what
could
be used as human food is either completely wasted or is downgraded to make fish meal for animal feeds or fertilizer. On top of which, of course, there is the overriding fact that, by commercially exterminating species after species of the more nutritious and abundant fishes in the sea, the modern commercial fishing industry is actually guaranteeing an increased burden of starvation for the hungry hordes who fill the human future.

This is a new phenomenon. Until 1939, the bulk of the groundfish catch from the northwestern Atlantic was processed as salt fish, a product that preserved as much as 90 per cent of the edible portion of the catch and that was sold at a price affordable to impoverished peoples, for whom it provided a staple source of protein. Profit was certainly a central motive in the industry then, but it was not the all-embracing one it has since become.

Without doubt the most numerous fishes in the seas washing the eastern coasts of North America are still the smaller kinds collectively known as baitfishes. They acquired the name not so much because they provided bait for fishermen as because they were the basic food that sustained other sea animals ranging from sea trout through salmon, cod, halibut, and tuna all the way up the scale to seals, porpoises, and whales.

Baitfishes tend to live in gigantic schools. The best-known species in the northwestern Atlantic are squid, mackerel, herring, shad, smelt, gaspereau or alewife, and capelin. Mackerel are deep-sea breeders; herring and squid mostly spawn close inshore; some capelin spawn offshore on the banks while other populations lay their eggs on landward beaches; the remaining species ascend freshwater rivers and streams to lay their eggs.

Some indication of the prodigious abundance of the baitfishes can perhaps be derived from the following random observations spanning the period from 1600 to recent times:

“The late Monsieur de la Tour had a weir built in which were caught great numbers of these Gaspereaux which were salted down for winter. Sometimes they were caught in so great a quantity that he was obliged to break the weir and throw them into the sea, as otherwise they would have befouled the weir which would thus have been ruined.”

“It is an astonishing sight to paddle down the Restigouche and see the farmers ‘smelting'—scooping up the little fish in handnets. The amount they take is incredible and most of their potatoes spring from this fishy manure.”

“Herring abound in countless shoals. Anyone not familiar with northern waters will suspect me of romancing when I say that I have seen 600 barrels taken in one sweep of a seine net. Often sufficient salt cannot be procured to save them and they are used as manure.”

“An American schooner struck a school of mackerel... and before midnight, fishing with hook and line, the crew had 100 barrels caught... fish are destroyed and wasted in the most reckless manner, but the supply never fails. For a week in the spring, smelts run up all the rivers in an unceasing stream.”

“Men scarce past middle life tell of seeing three hundred herring vessels off their shore at one time... of seeing Pleasant Bay so packed with herrings that men had only to dip them up until their vessel was full.”

“When the capelin drove up on the beaches of Conception Bay to spawn we would stand up to our knees in a regular soup of them, scooping them out with buckets and filling the wagons until the horses could hardly haul them off the beaches. You would sink to your ankles in the sand, it was that spongy with capelin eggs. We took all we needed for bait and for to manure the gardens, and it was like we'd never touched them at all, they was so plenty.”

“The run of squid was so heavy that the boats were filled with scoop nets instead of catching them with jiggers. At low tide so many got left behind that the foreshore was coated a foot deep and out a hundred paces from high water mark... one time they came in so strong the ones behind just forced the ones in front right out of the water and we had to shovel them clear of our boats and gear along the landwash.”

“In the Potomac River the annual catch was 2,000,000 pounds of shad and 4,000,000 of alewives... As much as two million pounds of salted shad was shipped to the United States every year from the Bay of Fundy in the 1890s.”

“In the spring of 1953 on a herring seiner in the Gulf of St. Lawrence we caught a
million
herring in a single set of the seine—a not unusual occurrence at that time.”

Although smelt, shad, and alewives were savaged on their spawning runs as well as being ruinously netted at other seasons, this may not have been the deciding factor in the decline that has now brought them down to as low as 4 or 5 per cent of their former profusion. The ultimate blow seems to have been dealt by dams, diversions, pollution, and other man-made changes to their spawning grounds. In any event, none of these three species now exists in sufficient numbers to be a significant source of profit, and their former ability to sustain vast numbers of predacious fishes in the sea has vanished, too. One ray of light in an otherwise almost unrelievedly dark scene of devastation is to be found in current efforts by U.S. authorities to restore some of their shad rivers. Preliminary results seem good. One can but hope they will continue to improve.

Before the present century began, many of the commercially important fishes in our northeastern waters depended on herring, mackerel, and capelin as the mainstays of their existence. This natural toll was greatly intensified by a human catch made first for food, and then for bait, and finally for a variety of industrial products ranging from fish oil to imitation pearl lustre produced from herring scales. Nevertheless, all three species were still enormously abundant when, in the 1960s, new ways were found to profit from them on a previously unheard-of level of destruction.