PROLOGUE
LA POILE, NEWFOUNDLAND
JULY 2, 1992
THE OLD MAN STOOD at his kitchen window, staring down at the
rooftops of his
village. His shoulders were stooped. His hands and forearms
glistened with a maze
of scars, like the back of an old whale. His cobalt eyes, framed
in a full beard and a
shock of steel gray hair, focused vaguely on the empty streets
below. Behind him, a TV
set droned in measured cadences from its place on the kitchen
table.
The man waited, as I did, for an event that everyone in
Newfoundland
had been talking about: a news conference due to be televised at
seven o'clock that
evening by the Canadian Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans.
Rumor had it that
the minister was about to make an announcement about the future of
a fishery that
had once been the largest in Newfoundland--possibly the largest in
the world--the
northern cod.
The fish had been growing scarce in recent years; fishermen all
over the
island were worried. The old man had been saying for days that the
news would not
be good. "Get it in your minds," he'd said to several neighbors
gathered on the
government wharf earlier that morning, "there's going to be
another round of cuts."
One of the men rolled his eyes and cursed under his breath.
Another coughed up a
great dollop of phlegm and spat it against the side of the
government storehouse.
Later, after the others had left, the old man admitted to me that
he didn't
have the slightest idea what new austerities the fisheries
minister might be planning
to announce. "We needs to prepare for the worst," he'd said. "For
'tis like heading
out onto the banks in your dory fishing. Count on fine weather and
you’re sure to
wander into a gale. Prepare for the worst and maybe you'll find
your way back
home."
The old man’s name was Henry Coyne. I’d met him five years earlier
in this
same village of La Poile, an isolated community of about two
hundred people nestled into
a narrow rockbound finger of the sea on the mountainous southwest
coast of
Newfoundland. The village was little changed from the way it had
been for four
centuries: a small cluster of buildings perched tenaciously on the
rock, connected by a
network of footpaths. Nobody owned an automobile in La Poile, for
the only access was
by boat. The nearest paved road lay fifty miles inland across
caribou trails and
abandoned logging tracks.
Henry Coyne, like many of his countrymen, was a natural born
talker,
gregarious, generous almost to a fault. Perhaps he'd become this
way because of
the intimacy of the village setting and the close family ties that
bound virtually
everyone in his community. Or perhaps he'd just grown tired of the
long months of
isolation and the scarcity of visitors "from away." But whatever
the reason, he had
adopted me and my crew of young American sailors from the first
moment he'd
spotted us five years earlier in the summer of 1987.
"You like fish?" he'd hollered that first summer, pulling his dory
alongside our
sailboat as she entered La Poile Bay. When the answer came back in
the affirmative,
he'd grabbed a fat, thirty-inch cod from the heap that lay at his
feet, held it up by the
tail, and tossed it onto the sailboat's deck. The fish was so
fresh its gills were still
quivering.
We met again two years later. I was traveling that year with a
different
group of sailors--but the boat was the same: my 50-foot fiberglass
cutter, Brendan's Isle.
Once again the old fisherman spotted our dark green hull sailing
up the bay, and once
again he graced our arrival with a fresh fish. That evening I
found myself sitting at a table
in the kitchen of his little house, talking until late into the
night about the growing
problems in the fishery. I met his wife Ruth--since passed
away--and his two daughters.
One was living at home taking care of her ailing mother. The other
was recently married,
working as a clerk in a small dry goods store in the village.
Thus it was that on my third visit to LaPoile I felt I was coming
back to visit
old friends. I and my crew had set out that summer on yet another
lengthy sailing voyage
around Newfoundland, traveling along the coasts of an island that
had become, for me, a
kind of obsessive destination. I just couldn’t seem to get enough
of this place--partly
because of the grand scale and stark beauty of its
landscapes--partly because of people
like Henry Coyne--honest, good-hearted people who would befriend
you in a heartbeat
and for whom generosity was a way of life.
The first sign that something was wrong came moments after our
sailboat
had passed the lighthouse at Ireland's Island and cleared the
ledges at the Naked
Man. No sooner had we turned up into La Poile Bay proper than the
familiar shape
of Henry's open dory appeared out of the mist. The fisherman
hollered out a hello.
I eased the boat into the wind to slow her progress. Henry pulled
his dory alongside
and grabbed onto the sailboat's gunwale.
We stood face to face exchanging greetings for nearly a minute
before I
glanced down into the belly of the dory. Under the foredeck lay
half a dozen
ocean perch--"redfish" as Newfoundlanders call them--their bulging
eyes glazed
over with a thin gray film. Beneath the center thwart lay a trio
of scrawny cod,
each one no more then a few pounds in weight. The rest of the
boat's floorboards
were clean--and utterly empty of fish.
The old man looked sheepish, almost embarrassed, as he followed my
gaze.
Then, as if he'd just remembered something, he reached down and
grabbed one of
the cod by its tail. Before I could stop him, he'd flipped the
fish over the gunwale
and onto the sailboat's deck. "She's small," he said. "But she'll
make a meal.”
I didn't have the heart to tell him to take it back.
That afternoon in the village the talk was all about the news
conference that the
fisheries minister was scheduled to deliver in a few more hours.
Henry asked me if I had
a TV aboard my sailboat. When I indicated that I did not, he
invited me to come to his
cottage after supper for a coffee. If I had the stomach for it, he
said, I could witness an
announcement that might change the lives of every man, woman, and
child in
Newfoundland.
At seven o'clock sharp, the TV in Henry's kitchen went silent.
Several
seconds later, the screen switched to the figure of the Canadian
Federal Minister of
Fisheries and Oceans, John Crosbie, appearing live from a
conference room in the
Radisson Hotel in St. John's, Newfoundland.
"My fellow Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans," the jowly,
white-haired
minister began, "...it is about the northern cod that I wish to
speak to you this
evening…”
Henry turned from the window where he had been standing and stared
at the
screen. The minister continued speaking in a flat brogue,
explaining the historic
importance of the cod fishery to the people of Newfoundland,
describing its central
place in the island's economy. Finally, he arrived at the subject
everyone had been
waiting for.
The cod, he intoned, was in trouble. Population numbers for all
major
breeding stocks around the island had been shrinking. The "total
allowable catch,”
as defined by his own department, had been falling for a number of
years. Suddenly,
however, population numbers for the largest and most important of
the breeding
stocks, the northern cod, had collapsed catastrophically across
huge areas of the Grand
Banks and Labrador Sea.
In response to this crisis and after long and careful
deliberation, the minister
said, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans had decided
to impose a two
year moratorium on all fishing for this species in the waters of
eastern Labrador and
Newfoundland--effective immediately. This moratorium period, he
said, would give the
fish a chance to replenish their numbers. Fishermen, meanwhile,
would have one week
to remove all traps, nets, and other fixed gear from the water,
after which they would be
compensated on an emergency basis for income they would lose after
the closure.
During a brief pause in the minister's words, I looked across the
kitchen at the
old fisherman. He was standing next to a chair, gripping it with
white-knuckled fingers.
"God help us," he whispered, staring at the TV screen. “God help
us all.”
Crosbie's voice droned on, enumerating the details of the
government's
plan, even as the image on the screen switched to a hallway
outside the conference
room. The doors to this room had been barred, forcing the general
public to
assemble outside and listen to the minister's remarks over closed
circuit TV.
Several hundred people--many of them fishermen--were milling
around this area
when a small group began calling Crosbie's name, insisting on
admission to the
conference room, demanding that the minister hear their
grievances. When the
square-faced Crosbie continued to speak, seemingly unmoved by the
events taking
place outside, the men charged the conference room doors, ramming
into them
repeatedly with their bodies and arms and shoulders.
"Poor bastards," said Henry, gazing glassy-eyed at the melee on
the screen.
"Poor simple bastards, for what are they going to do now?"
He walked slowly up to the TV set, stared at it for several
seconds longer,
and switched it off. Then he turned and looked at me. "Prepare for
the worst,
is what I said. But how does a man prepare for the end of
everything he's ever
known, everything he's ever depended on? How does a man prepare
for the end of
the world?"
For Henry Coyne, the impacts of the cod-fishing moratorium were
not as
immediate as they were for many of his countrymen, for the areas
affected by the
original ban did not include the southwest coast of Newfoundland
and the fishing
banks surrounding La Poile. But, here as elsewhere, the fish had
disappeared,
and ten months later, in response to mounting evidence of
dangerously low cod
stocks, the terms of the moratorium were extended to include all
fishing areas
around the island and to carry forward into the indefinite future.
I did not return to La Poile for six years after the summer of
1992--did
not return to coastal Newfoundland at all except for a few brief
stops two years
later during a voyage to Labrador and western Greenland. Yet the
impressions of
that evening with the old fisherman have remained burned into my
memory. I've
not been able to forget his face or his words, have not been able
to forget the
helplessness and devastation he felt at the collapse of what was,
for him, the
foundation of his way of life.
The original cod-fishing moratorium was set for two years. Despite
official assurances to the contrary, however, the fish did not
rebound. Instead,
estimates of the "total biomass" of northern cod actually
decreased to the point of
commercial extinction during that period, while other major
breeding populations
were added to the list of those that were in trouble. The
no-fishing ban was
expanded to include several additional species of groundfish
(turbot, white hake,
American plaice, witch flounder, redfish) whose numbers had also
fallen dramatically.
By the summer of 1994, the closures had idled some 7,000 fishing
boats and 38,000
fishermen and plant workers. It was the largest layoff in a single
industry in Canadian
history.
As I traveled along the coast of western Newfoundland during that
summer
of 1994, I was preoccupied with another matter--headed north to
investigate some
of the relationships scientists have discovered between Arctic ice
production and
changing global climate. Yet everywhere I looked I saw signs of
the failed fishery.
Fishermen whose families had settled this land and who had lived
here for generations
were pulling up stakes and leaving. Communities that had once been
active fishing
centers were turning into ghost towns; the fabric of an entire
society was coming apart.
I began talking with a few people that summer--people like Henry
Coyne,
whose fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers had fished
here and who
couldn't conceive of any other way of life. When I returned home
to the United
States in the fall, I began talking with others--ecologists,
fisheries biologists, fishing
company executives, university professors, politicians,
sociologists. I began reading
everything I could about the crisis in the world fishery, about
ocean ecosystems,
about the Grand Banks, about the life-cycle of the northern cod.
Perhaps, I thought, if the situation in Newfoundland were a unique
and
isolated event--affecting only a handful of people in a remote and
seldom visited
corner of North America--perhaps then the rest of the world could
afford to
ignore it. But I knew this was not an isolated event. As
scientists had been
observing for more than a decade, traditional fisheries were in
trouble everywhere.
Some had already collapsed; others were poised to do so. The same
devastation
that was now taking place on the Grand Banks and in the fishing
communities of
Newfoundland had been occurring in similar settings all over the
planet.
And indeed, the ocean fisheries were not the only natural systems
being
threatened these days by the impacts of human exploitation.
Observers had been
expressing increasing concern in recent years about retreating
rain forests in
Brazil, dying coral reefs in Hawaii, shrinking glaciers in
Antarctica, drying rivers
in China, falling water tables in California. In this context, at
least, Newfoundland
was Everyland and we were all Newfoundlanders--for what was
happening on this island was but a single instance of what was
happening on the island we call Earth.
When I returned to the United States and began thinking about the
events
that had been taking place in Newfoundland, I found myself
grappling with a number
of questions. First came a series of environmental and scientific
questions centered
around the collapse itself: why had a species of fish once as
abundant as the ripples on
the waves suddenly disappeared? Why had the crash happened so
abruptly? And why,
after nearly six years of moratorium, were the fish still not
coming back?
The second set of questions was even more complex, for these had
to do
with the Newfoundlanders themselves and their inevitable
involvement with the cod
collapse. No matter who or what was finally blamed for the
catastrophe--foreign
factory ships, destructive fishing technologies, poor government
management, bad
“in house” science--there was a sense in which almost everyone had
played a part.
"There are no clean hands in this," one fisherman exhorted to me
during my last
voyage north. "Everybody was catching fish."
Everybody was catching fish--yet clearly, nobody had intended to
destroy a
natural resource that formed the social, economic, and, some would
say, spiritual
backbone of an entire society. Everybody was catching fish
because, from the time
the first Europeans had sailed to this place more than five
hundred years earlier,
everybody had always been catching fish. Catching fish in
Newfoundland was as
natural as breathing.
Were the people of Newfoundland the victims of some huge natural
disaster--or its architects? If the victims, how did such an event
occur? And if
the architects, how did their design get so far out of control?
How did an entire society,
intelligent and wise in so many ways, fail to perceive what was
happening? fail to
respond to the warning signs? fail to modify its behavior in time
to avert catastrophe?
These are large questions--many of them still unanswered
questions. The
scientific literature that has emerged since the cod fishing
moratorium suggests a few
answers. The small but thoughtful body of social analysis suggests
a few others. But the
more I thought about these questions, the more I realized that the
most important answers
still lay hidden out there in the remote fishing villages of
Newfoundland. If I ever hoped
to learn them, I would need to sail once more to these places, pay
attention to the changes
that had taken place, and listen to people talk.
The book that follows is the story of this quest. The journey
itself began in early
June 1998, as a crew of young sailors and I set out from the
northeast coast of the United
States aboard Brendan's Isle, bound once again for the island of
Newfoundland. During
the next three months we traveled almost four thousand miles,
exploring bays and
sounds, visiting towns and villages all around the twelve-hundred
mile perimeter of this
island, talking with the people who lived there.
Some of those we met were old friends--people like Henry Coyne
that former
crews and I had encountered during the seven previous voyages that
Brendan's
Isle had made to these coasts. Others were new. But every person
we met--dory
fishermen, government employees, trawler captains, scientists,
fish brokers, school
teachers, politicians, artisans, university students,
shop-keepers, pensioners--all shared
a common bond with the sea that surrounds this place and with the
incomprehensible
numbers of fish that once had flourished here.
I understood from the beginning that the story I would learn from
these
people would not be simple. I knew there would be no villains or
heroes in this
story, no criminals or saints. There would only be human
beings--kind, generous
people, for the most part, trying to get along in a difficult
situation, doing the best
they could. I also knew that the story was going to change
me--although in the
beginning I wasn't certain how. I only knew that what had happened
in
Newfoundland was an event that had to do with all of us--a result,
some would
say, of the way we think about ourselves and the way we understand
our
relationship with nature.
Newfoundland is a victim, both of her own and of the world's
excesses.
Newfoundland is a warning signal, a microcosm of the island we
call Earth. For
three months my crew and I sailed there, trying to learn what had
happened,
trying to understand why. Our task, however, was not easy--for
like fishermen
lowering their nets to scour unseen depths, we soon found
ourselves searching
across a vast expanse of human hopes and ambitions, aspirations
and fears,
exploring a complex terrain that would surrender its secrets only
to those who
were patient and willing to listen.
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