Atlantic (41 page)

Not that there is universal agreement on how good that information is. There are a large number of bodies that seek to protect and preserve oceans and oceanic life: the Blue Ocean Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, Sea Shepherd, the National Audubon Society, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Alaska Oceans Foundation, SeaWeb, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the National Environmental Trust among them, all with their own agendas and working methods, sometimes working in concert, more often not. One can now acquire (from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, among others) wallet-sized cards that tell you which fish it is currently prudent to eat; some of the better restaurants will identify the fisheries from which their offerings are hauled.

Different approaches are a commonplace within the environmental establishment. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which was established in Britain in 1999, was an early science-based champion of sustainable fishing. It established a set of principles under which it could certify fisheries as being responsible and sustainable and thus recommended to customers: a blue and white oval logo is nowadays fixed (for a fee) to packages of fish that come from these fisheries—which currently make up about 7 percent of the world’s fisheries, including, in the Atlantic, those for South African hake, Thames herring, and (as we shall see later) the inelegantly named South Georgia version of the Patagonian toothfish.

The principle underlying MSC’s approach is based on promoting what it regards as “good” fish. Many American organizations, on the other hand, do their best to organize boycotts of what they consider “bad” fish (as in the campaign by the National Environmental Trust
⁸⁰
to “take a pass, on Chilean sea bass”). Hence the “red list,” which Greenpeace unveiled in 2009. This is a compendium of what it considers the most endangered fish, crustaceans, and shellfish: it contains, at the time of writing, twenty-two species, or groups of species. Eighteen of these are to be found in the Atlantic Ocean, and their endangerment stems almost entirely either from relentless overfishing or from cruelly thoughtless kinds of fishing undertaken within the boundaries of the Atlantic.

Chilean sea bass—the marketers’ adroitly chosen name for the less comely-sounding Patagonian toothfish—is on the list, but is generally found off Chile’s coast, in the Pacific, or else in Antarctic waters. Hoki, which without much public awareness constitutes the great proportion of fish sold by McDonald’s restaurants worldwide, is also regarded as endangered, and is a small, pale-colored creature generally found off New Zealand. Pollock is usually found and fished in Alaska (the MSC regards the Alaskan pollock fishery as worthy of its seal of approval, yet it is on the Greenpeace red list, an indication of the differences to be found in this complex and controversy-ridden marine universe). And swordfish, generally caught by the much-criticized method of
long-lining
, are mainly denizens of the Pacific.

The rest of the overfished majority are found foursquare in the Atlantic Ocean: most of the fisheries for Atlantic cod, Atlantic halibut, Atlantic salmon, and Atlantic sea scallops; the albacore tuna from the South Atlantic; the bigeye, the yellowfin, and especially the magnificent, superfast, and much-valued bluefin tuna (which can command thirty thousand dollars apiece in the famous Tsukiji market in Tokyo, and is partly because of Japanese demand the most threatened grand fish of the entire Atlantic Ocean); the Greenland halibut, the North Atlantic monkfish, the bivalve known as the ocean quahog, the redfish, the tropical red snapper, most skates, most tropical shrimp found off the west coast of Africa, and the fish now delightfully known as the orange roughy, but which, before the marketers got hold of it, was known to fishermen and biologists simply as the slimehead—all these are found between Greenland and Tierra del Fuego, between Cape Town and North Cape, in the depth and shallows, warm and cold, somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of Atlantic waters.

Twice have I encountered the practical realities of the Atlantic’s fishing crisis, once in the northwest Atlantic, then more recently in the deep sub-Antarctic South.

4. NORTH

My first encounter was well up north, off Newfoundland, where there was no specific villain other than the ineptitude of mankind in general, which in the early 1990s all but destroyed one of the great fisheries of the planet. The story of the collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery, which I came across in the late 1990s, in a heartbreakingly beautiful but sad clutch of little communities gathered along the shores of Bonavista Bay, is a sorry tale indeed.

In the abstract, the expanse of shallow seas off Newfoundland—seas that were always portrayed, and rightly so, as rough, cold, swathed in fog, invaded by stray chunks of jagged ice and with storms so terrific and the seafloor rocks so close to the surface that the place was often lethally dangerous—long had a legendary magnificence about them. History books told us of John Cabot, who found the great silvery codfish in such abundance in these waters that he wrote that to catch them one could forget the net or the hook: a simple basket tossed from the gunwales would be filled with fish in a minute, and a mighty cod, knocked quickly insensible with a marlinspike, would be grilling on deck a minute after that. Never before had any seas anywhere in the world been so richly endowed with fish; it seemed entirely credible that oarsmen would complain that Newfoundland sea were difficult to row through, so heaving were the waters with fish; and it truly did seem possible, as others imagined, that you could probably walk from London to St. John’s on the shining muscular backs of millions of cod.

The reality was not much less inspiring. I saw the Grand Banks in 1963, when making my first voyage across the Atlantic. When our
Empress of Britain
stopped briefly there, to rendezvous with an aircraft on a shallow eastern outlier of the Banks known as the Flemish Cap, the sea was at first disappointingly calm and the weather uncharacteristically clear. All changed once we got under way and a few hours later slid west onto the Grand Banks proper. We had only to cross the Banks’ most easterly point, the fish-rich grounds known as
the Nose
, and the fog closed in on cue, the water became unpleasantly lumpy, and we had to ease down to a crawl for fear of colliding with any of a thicket of fishing vessels, or cutting across their nets.

The fog in these parts renders the sea curiously quiet, and I remember standing up on deck, and later out on the bridgewings, matted with moisture and shivering with cold, watching—and listening. There was the slap of the swell against our hull, the soft hiss of the bow slicing through the waves. But most noticeable were the cries and yelps of a score of foghorns, a fishermen’s chorus that swelled loudly, I assumed, in those places where the cod were being found that day, and then fading, and swelling again, until finally a diminuendo, as they ebbed slowly away to nothing, and we eventually steamed off the shoals and to the south of Newfoundland, and then into the deep and relatively codless waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The blanket of mist that day was such that I never saw a fishing vessel—and such images I had of the life of a Grand Banks fisherman came most probably from reading Kipling, and
Captains Courageous
, and later, most memorably, in the 1937 film of the book, which the BBC showed on winter afternoons, and which, in a scene I seem to remember well, had both Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew fighting to stay afloat in one of the alarmingly unstable little dories that cod fishermen used to go after their prize.

That film helped it all come together for me. First there were the sleekly graceful schooners, racing up from the Massachusetts ports—back then the Americans were just as able to fish on the Grand Banks as were the Canadians, whose waters these seemed to be; the Treaty of Paris had long permitted it. Then there were the encounters with the fogs, the storms, followed by the first sightings of the shoals of tiny capelin and herring, then with the ponderously moving whales, and finally the fleet’s eventual arrival at the cod grounds themselves—where they had also met up with the rougher and tougher French Canadian dorymen who had come out from St. John’s and outports like Trinity and Petty Harbor and Bonavista. Then there was the dropping of the dories, no matter the weather or the height of the waves, followed by the long, wet, desperate and tiring hunt from them for the cod that lurked close to the bottom, just a few shallow feet below.

From the smoky comfort of a London cinema, it all seemed unimaginably tough and difficult. The dories were only twenty feet long, and though their prows and sterns rode high above the waves, they were designed with almost no freeboard amidships, so that their owners would find it a little easier to haul in such cod as they hooked on their lines; but then water kept crashing over the side, and whichever man was not straining at the oars always seemed to be bailing, or trying to pour cold water from his sea boots, or shuddering as yet another wave crashed down his neck and the gales blew off his sou’wester. Or else, of course, he was fishing: either hand-lining himself, or helping to pull up a longline that, between the barrels they had used as floats, might stretch five miles long across the sea and might hold a thousand hooks—each of which in the old, rich days of the fishery, might have a massive cod attached, and which needed to be brought up, freed from the barb, and slapped down into the bilge of the boat, where it joined its companions wriggling and writhing between your feet en masse.

You might eventually try to return to your schooner with a full ton of these codfish, a hundred fish, each one maybe twenty pounds, each with a huge gaping mouth, a small goatee dangling from its lower lip, an olive green back, a pale belly, and a long go-fast stripe of white along its side. Newfoundland cod, fat and heavy with a kitchen-ready amassment of succulent innards, are said by fishermen to be the prettiest of all the family Gadidae. The sight of a returning dory filled to the gunwales with them seemed for decades a most potent symbol of the enormous riches of the North Atlantic, a very visible reason for the prosperity of those who lived beside it and were fed by it.

But the mechanics of returning to your schooner in a tiny low-slung boat filled with these fish turned out to be a spectacularly difficult exercise. Even finding your ship was a challenge, especially if you had been away for hours, or maybe longer, and if during your absence the weather had closed in. Even the most powerful lantern hung from the schooner’s fo’c’sle—as it was in the Kipling film, where Lionel Barrymore had hung as powerful a lamp as he could to help his men find the schooner, tantalizingly named
We’re Here
—could be glimpsed from no more than a hundred feet in a thin fog, as little as five feet in a pea-souper. Then only the back-and-forth piping of the foghorns, yours and your skipper’s, stood a chance of bringing you to home.

Moreover, a dory filled with fish lies even deeper in the water than usual, and the seas slopping over sides that were now almost underwater would make the craft ever less stable. Small wonder so many seamen died—in the last seventy years of the nineteenth century, 3,800 Gloucester fishermen were killed, and that from a town of only fifteen thousand—such dorymen as lived to tell went on to enjoy a camaraderie and a sense of shared pride like few other workingmen anywhere. To be a Grand Banks cod fisherman was a noble art, and only the bravest could do it. And when they came home to port, all the bars in all the seashore towns came to know this all too well.

But then in the 1950s came the factory ships, and in an instant the picture changed.

Already the technology of fishing had been improving mightily. Hand-lining was a technique employed by only a minority of fishermen: more controversial methods like long-lining, or setting the near-invisible gossamers of floating gill nets, or even trawling along the ocean floor where the cod lived, had all hugely increased the catch. Everyone had long been happy with the Grand Banks. As more and more fishermen arrived, all was just as it had been when John Cabot came by in the
Matthew
; the world soon came to believe what he had said, and what the Basques had found in the decades following—that there was abundant fish for everyone, that for every fish caught two more seemed to spawn; prosperity for the fishermen and freedom from want for those millions who dined on fish was likely to remain an eternal reality. There were a few—which included many of the older fishermen in the Newfoundland outports, who said they
knew
their fish and their habits, and knew what was fair to take from them—who fretted that it might one day be possible to fish the stocks completely into oblivion, that disaster lurked. They were smiled at indulgently and told not to worry: the Grand Banks were a source of goodness and delight for all, and for all time.

But then had come the shipborne steam engine and Mr. Birdseye’s techniques of freezing fish, then came the fish stick or what in Europe is called the fish finger and the convenience food market, and then was born the idea that fish need not to be brought to land to be processed and filleted and frozen and boxed and labeled, and that all of this could be done afloat, by a big ship that was not truly a fishing boat at all but a floating steam-engine-powered production line for the twenty-four-hour-a-day disassembly of fish and their twenty-four-hour reassembly into convenience food—and all of a sudden long-lining and gill-netting and trawling seemed the least of the challenges that an ocean fishery might face. Now it became a question of simple arithmetic: with the arrival of the factory ships, the amount of fish being removed from the Grand Banks in the 1960s became suddenly astronomical and was becoming plainly—and to use a word that in the 1960s started to ease into the lexicon, and then into the vernacular if not quite yet in vogue—
unsustainable
.