Sea of Slaughter (20 page)

Undaunted, Elliott flew back to continue his “enhancement” program—while Brummett took a holiday in Jamaica, perhaps hoping that the heat at home would subside in his absence. It did not. Protests against the wolf slaughter spread across Canada and the United States and on to Europe. In an effort to damp down the uproar, Brummett's department announced that, “for safety reasons,” the area where the “cull” was taking place would henceforth be closed to reporters. The public furore eventually began to abate for lack of information on what was happening, but the kill continued.

Elliott was still engaged in his aerial war as late as April, by which time he had butchered 363 wolves. There is no reason to doubt that he had by then killed virtually
all
the wolves in the affected district.

The Canadian Wildlife Federation has reason for satisfaction, knowing as it must that the British Columbia Fish and Wildlife Service also poisoned, shot, or trapped some 400 additional wolves in other parts of the province during the winter of 1983–84. These “management” operations, together with commercial trapping and sport hunting, probably destroyed at least 1,400 of the “most dangerous, vicious, unrelenting killers in existence.”

In the spring of 1984, Yukon Territory—British Columbia's neighbour to the north—began setting the stage for intensifying its own long-term program of “wolf management” by officially warning parents that the wolf threat had reached such proportions that children should not be allowed out after dark, even in the vicinity of the capital city of Whitehorse. Yukon wildlife scientists are now proposing to nullify this threat by a drastic escalation of their wolf control program. British Columbia's eastern neighbour, the province of Alberta, is also moving in the same direction. In a January, 1984, interview, biologist John Gunson, head of Alberta's Carnivore Management Unit, went on record as saying, “I don't see anything wrong with wolf control to enhance big game hunting. Wolves don't pay taxes, and people do... the problem is, if you want to take a great deal of big game, you have to do away with the wolves.”

Alaska, too, has heard the same message. Biologists in that state have evolved a most sophisticated way to achieve “wolf management.” Wolves, usually only one from a pack, or family, are live-trapped in summer and fitted with radio transmitter collars. Come winter, airborne hunters “cull” wolves simply by homing in on radio signals that lead them directly to the Judas animal and enable them to destroy the entire family to which it belongs. And in Minnesota, the only state in the lower forty-eight with a viable, if relict, wolf population, state and federal authorities abetted by hunter organizations are clearing the way to an open season on what the commissioner of Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources refers to as a “magnificent trophy animal.”

As 1984 draws to a close, it is clear that a concerted effort is being made to apply a final solution to the “wolf problem” in those remaining regions where viable wolf populations still exist. There seems to be considerable likelihood that the attempt will be successful unless a massive protest can be mounted—one that will neutralize the unholy alliance of government game managers, self-serving politicos, and self-styled “conservation” organizations devoted to “enhancing” the supply of big game animals.

The familiar adage assures us that there are more fishes in the sea than ever came out of it. Indeed, there may have been a time when there was truth in this contention.

Not any more.

Ten years ago, Jacques Cousteau, speaking for those concerned about the future of the living seas, voiced his fear that about a third of the stuff of life in the world's oceans had already been destroyed through man's use of it, or his abuse of it. During the decade since, the situation has worsened. We are now facing the possibility that the seas may become virtual life-deserts in the not-far-distant future.

Fishes and marine invertebrates rarely strike a sympathetic chord in the human breast. Nevertheless, they comprise one of the most important skeins in the intricate weave of planetary life. It is only at the risk of undermining our own chances for survival that we can ignore what we have done, and are doing, to the sea-dwellers.

A second compelling reason for understanding the fate of the fishes has to do with truth-telling. During the past half-century, men who profit from the destruction of sea-life have been making increasingly vigorous efforts to escape the onus for laying waste the oceans, by blaming other animals. “Fish out of Water” puts the blame where it belongs, and describes something of the fate we have inflicted on marine animals in and about the Sea of Slaughter.

It is probably impossible
for
a
nyone now alive to comprehend the magnitude of fish life in the waters of the New World when the European invasion began. It may have been almost equally difficult for the early voyagers. According to the records they have left for us, they seem to have been overwhelmed by the glut of fishes.

In 1497, John Cabot set the tone by describing the Grand Banks as so “swarming with fish [that they] could be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down [and weighted] with a stone.” On the lower St. Lawrence in 1535 Jacques Cartier reported that “This river... is the richest in every kind of fish that anyone remembers ever having seen or heard of; for from its mouth to its head you will find in their season the majority of the varieties of salt- and fresh-water fish... great numbers of mackerel, mullet, sea bass, tunnies, large eels... quantities of lampreys and salmon... [in the upper River] are many pike, trout, carp, bream and other fresh-water fish.”

Captain John Smith was no less enthusiastic in extolling the fisheries of New England in 1614. “A little Boye might take of Cunners and Pinacks and such delicate fish at the ships sterne, more than six or ten men can eat in a daie; but with a casting Net, [he could take] thousands... Cod, Cuske, Halibut, Mackerell, Scate or such like, a man may take with a hooke and line what he will... no River where there is not plenty of Sturgeon or Salmon or both; all of which are to be had in abundance.”

We round out the picture with a description of the Gulf of St. Lawrence about 1680: “Here also are seen prodigious quantities of all kinds of fish, Cod, Salmon, Herring, Trout, Bass, Mackerel, Flounder, Shad, Sturgeon, Pickerel, Oysters, Smelt, Skate, Whitefish...”

This chapter deals with the essence of industrial exploitation of life in the seas—with the several species the great commercial fisheries of the northwestern Atlantic were founded on, and which are now, after suffering 500 hundred years of ever-escalating human greed, running out their time.

Initially, cod was king; yet it was only the most valuable species in an entire group collectively known to those who catch them as groundfish. The story of what we have done to the groundfishes constitutes the first part of the chapter. The second deals with the baitfishes—small creatures that used to school in untold billions and upon which all the groundfishes and much other life in the seas ultimately depend. The chapter ends with an account of the destruction of one of the most celebrated of all North American fishes—the Atlantic salmon.

Early voyagers to the northeastern approaches of America encountered two kinds of land. One was high and dry, and they called it the Main. The other lay submerged beneath 30 to 150 fathoms of green waters, and they called it the Banks. The waters of the continental shelf from Cape Cod to Newfoundland form an aqueous pasture of unparalleled size and fecundity—a three-dimensional one with a volume sufficient to inundate the entire North American continent to a depth of a yard or more. In 1500, the life forms inhabiting these waters had a sheer mass unmatched anywhere in the world. This was the realm where cod was king.

The name Cabot used for Newfoundland in 1497 was Baccalaos, that being the one bestowed on it by Portuguese who had led the way. The word means, simply, land of cod. And Peter Martyr (from about 1516) tells us that “in the sea adjacent [to Newfoundland, Cabot] found so great a quantity... of great fish... called baccalaos... that at times they even stayed the passage of his ships.”

The New World banks, and especially the Grand Banks lying to the eastward of Newfoundland, were a cod fisher's version of the Promised Land. By 1575, more than 300 French, Portuguese, and English fishing vessels were reaping a rich harvest there. Members of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's colonizing venture fairly babbled at the abundance of baccalieu. Cod, wrote one of the visitors, were present “in incredible abundance, whereby great gains grow to them that travel to these parts: the hook is no sooner thrown out but it is eft-soons drawn up with some goodly fish.” To which one of his companions added, “We were becalmed a small time during which we laid out hook and lines to take Cod, and drew in, in less than two hours, fish so large and in such abundance that for many days after we fed on no other provision.” A third summed it up: “Incredible quantity and no less variety of fishes in the seas [especially] Cod, which alone draweth many nations thither and is become the most famous fishing of the world.”

Each new arrival on these fabulous fishing grounds found the same thing and had much the same reaction. When the
Grace
of Bristol sheltered at the island of St. Pierre in 1594, her people “laid the ship upon the lee, and in 2 houres space we tooke with our hooks 3 or 4 hundred great Cod for the provision of our ship.” Charles Leigh, reconnoitring the Magdalen Islands in 1597, noted “About this Island there is as great an abundance of cods as is any place to be found. In a little more than an houre we caught with hookes 250 of them.”

At the turn of the sixteenth century, as many as 650 vessels were catching thousands of tons of cod in New World waters, using only baited hooks and handlines. As John Mason, an English fishing skipper working out of a Newfoundland shore station, noted, “Cods are so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them. I have killed of them with a Pike... Three men going to Sea in a boat, with some on shore to dress and dry them, in 30 days will commonly kill between 25 and thirty thousand, worth with the oyle arising from [their livers], 100 or 200 Pounds.”

The slaughter was equally enormous elsewhere in the region. In Cape Breton and the Gulf, according to Nicolas Denys, “Scarcely an harbour [exists] where there are not several fishing vessels... taking every day 15,000 [to] 30,000 fish... this fish constitutes a kind of inexhaustible manna.”

Near the end of the sixteenth century Richard Whitbourne, another fishing skipper, wrote that the average lading for any given ship tallied 125,000 cod. These were from virgin cod populations producing fish up to six or seven feet in length and weighing as much as 200 pounds, in contrast with today's average weight of about six pounds. In Whitbourne's time it was still in the fifteen- to twenty-pound range and the annual cod fishery in the northeastern approaches yielded about 368,000 tons.

By 1620 the cod fleet exceeded 1,000 vessels, many making two voyages annually: a summer one for dry cod and a winter trip from which the cod were carried back to Europe in pickle as “green fish.” Yet, despite the enormous destruction, there was no apparent indication that cod stocks were diminishing. As the seventeenth century neared its end, travellers such as Baron Lahontan were still writing about the cod as if its population had no bounds.

“You can scarce imagine what quantities of Cod-fish were catched by our Seamen in the space of a quarter of an hour... the Hook was no sooner at the bottom than a Fish was catched... [the men] had nothing to do but to throw in, and take up without interruption... However, as we were so plentifully entertained at the cost of these Fishes, so such of them as continued in the Sea made sufficient reprisals upon the Corps of a Captain and several Soldiers, who dy'd of the Scurvy, and were thrown over-board.”

The first hint that the destruction might be excessive (and it is a veiled hint) comes from Charlevoix in the 1720s. After first telling us that “the number of the cod seems to equal that of the grains of sand,” he adds that “For more than two centuries there have been loaded with them [at the Grand Banks] from two to three hundred [French] ships annually, notwithstanding [which] the diminution is not perceivable. It might not, however, be amiss to discontinue this fishery from time to time [on the Grand Bank], the more so as the gulph of St. Lawrence [together with] the River for more than sixty leagues, the coasts of Acadia, those of... Cape Breton and of Newfoundland, are no less replenished with this fish than the great bank. These are true mines, which are more valuable, and require much less expense than those of Peru and Mexico.” That Charlevoix was not exaggerating the value of the cod fishery is confirmed by the fact that, in 1747, 564 French vessels manned by 27,500 fishermen brought home codfish worth a million pounds sterling—a gigantic sum for those days.

At about this same time, New Englanders, who had by now depleted the lesser stocks of cod available on the southern banks, began moving into the northern fishery. They did so with such energy that, by 1783, over 600 American vessels were fishing the Gulf of St. Lawrence, mostly for cod, although they also caught immense quantities of herring. In that year, at least 1,500 ships of all nations were working the North American “cod mines” for all they were worth.

By 1800, English- and French-based vessels had become notably fewer, but Newfoundlanders, Canadians, and Americans more than made up the loss. In 1812, 1,600 fishing vessels, largely American, were in the Gulf, with as many more Newfoundland and Nova Scotia ships fishing the outer banks and the Atlantic coast of Labrador.

Those were the days of the great fleets of “white wings,” when the sails of fishing schooners seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. In addition to this vessel fishery, thousands of inshore men fished cod in small boats from every little cove and harbour. Vesselmen and shoremen alike still mostly fished in the old way with hooks and lines because “the glut of cod” was still so great that nothing more sophisticated was needed.

In 1876, John Rowan went aboard “a schooner cod-fishing close to shore... They were fishing in about three fathoms of water and we could see the bottom actually paved with codfish. I caught a dozen in about fifteen minutes; my next neighbour [a crewman] on the deck of the schooner, caught three times as many, grumbling all the time that it was the worst fishing season he had ever known.”

Between 1899 and 1904, the annual catch of cod (and of haddock, which in the salt-fish business was treated as cod) approached a million tons. During those years, Newfoundland alone annually exported about 1,200,000 quintals of dry fish, representing about 400,000 tons of cod, live weight. By 1907, the Newfoundland catch had risen to nearly 430,000 tons; and there were then some 1,600 vessels, of many nationalities, fishing the Grand Banks.

But now there was a chill over the Banks—one that did not come from the almost perpetual fog. Cod were getting harder to catch, and every year it seemed to take a little longer to make up a voyage. At this juncture, nobody so much as breathed the possibility that the Banks were being over-fished. Instead, one of the age-old fisherman's explanations for a shortage was invoked: the cod had changed their ways and, temporarily, one hoped, gone somewhere else.

The early nineteenth-century discovery of immense schools of cod along the Labrador coast even as far north as Cape Chidley was seen as confirmation that the fish had indeed changed their grounds. In actual fact the Labrador cod comprised a distinct and, till then, virgin population. They did not stay that way for long. By 1845, 200 Newfoundland vessels were fishing “down north” and by 1880, up to 1,200. As many as 30,000 Newfoundlanders (“floaters” if they fished from anchored vessels, and “stationers” if they fished from shore bases) in 1880 were making almost 400,000 quintals of salt cod on the Labrador coast alone.

The Labrador cod soon went the way of all flesh. The catch steadily declined thereafter until, by mid-twentieth century, the once far-famed Labrador fishery collapsed. Attempts were again made to ascribe the disappearance of the Labrador fish to one of those mythical migrations. This time it did not wash. The fact was that King Cod was becoming scarce throughout the whole of his wide North Atlantic realm. In 1956, cod landings for Grand Banks/Newfoundland waters were down to 80,000 metric tonnes—about a fifth of what they had been only half a century earlier.

When a prey animal becomes scarce in nature, its predators normally decrease in numbers, too, permitting the prey an opportunity for recovery. Industrial man works in the opposite way. As cod became scarcer, so did pressure on the remaining stocks mount. New, bigger, more destructive ships came into service and the bottom trawl, which scours the bed of the ocean like a gigantic harrow, destroying spawn and other life, almost totally replaced older fishing methods. Scarcity brought ever-rising prices, which in turn attracted more and more fishermen. During the 1960s, fleets of big draggers and factory ships were coming to the Banks from a dozen European and Asian countries to engage in a killing frenzy over what remained of the cod populations. The result was that, between 1962 and 1967, cod landings increased until, in 1968, the catch topped two million tons. Soon thereafter, the whole northwest Atlantic cod fishery disintegrated for want of fish to catch.

Canada's extension of economic control to 200 miles offshore saved the cod in her waters from extinction. The stocks, which by conservative estimate had been reduced to less than 2 per cent of their aboriginal level, are now increasing, though at probably nowhere near the rate predicted by the statisticians whose task it is to justify government and fishing industry policies. Certainly the cod stock can never hope to regain even a semblance of its former substance so long as we continue the commercial annihilation of the baitfishes that are the cod's staff of life—a matter dealt with later in this chapter.

After the Second World War, the fishing business, which in the past had mainly been composed of small companies, began to exhibit symptoms of the gigantism that was sweeping the industrial world. By the 1960s it was largely in the hands of powerful cartels or national governments. Their reaction to the depredation of the once “inexhaustible” ranks of the cod was that of true devotees to the holy principle of the “bottom line.” Instead of using their wealth, power, and influence to reduce and control the slaughter and so ensure a future for the cod fishery, they engaged in furious competition with one another to catch what cod were left. When not enough could be found to maintain “profitability,” they quite literally spread their nets for whatever substitutes might serve to keep them in the black. The result was, and remains, an orgy of destruction on a scale unique in the long history of human predation in the seas.