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.
First was the mass production of fish meal for animal feed and fertilizer. The species initially selected to fuel the ominously named reduction plants that sprang up along the northeastern seaboard was the herring.1 Early in the 1960s, at about the same time the Newfoundland Industrial Development Service was concluding that local herring stocks were “under-utilized,” the herring fishery on the Pacific coast of Canada was collapsing because of overfishing. In the words of the director of the IDS: “What could be more rational than to invite the unemployed British Columbia herring seiners to go to work for us?”
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1 The rationalization for fish meal production defies all logic. As animal food, about 100 pounds, live weight, of fish is required to produce one pound of beef. Two hundred pounds of fish meal used as fertilizer produces no more than three pounds of vegetable protein.
The first reduction plant was built on Newfoundland’s south coast in 1965 and a single B.C. seiner made the long voyage around, through the Panama Canal, to test the waters, as it were. The test was eminently successful. By 1969, fifty of the biggest, most modern B.C. seiners were working the south and west Newfoundland coasts year-round, while half-a-dozen reduction plants filled the skies with black and oily smoke. Herring landings in Newfoundland, which had previously averaged less than 4,000 tons a year, shot up to 140,000 tons. Meanwhile, annual landings from the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence increased from 20,000 to 300,000 tons.
Then, in the early 1970s, herring began to disappear. Fisheries spokesmen reassuringly explained that the little fishes had probably altered their migration patterns but would undoubtedly return before too long. The herring were not aware of these optimistic forecasts—for their once prodigious hosts have not returned as yet. There are those who doubt they ever will... or can.
The herring massacre was only one of several. During the 1960s, a mass fishery for mackerel began off southern New England to produce oil, fertilizer, and animal feed (including cat food). By 1972 it was landing the colossal amount of 390,000 tons a year, but shortly thereafter the mackerel mysteriously faded away. The slaughter off New England, together with several similar massacres in Canadian waters, has reduced the once-fabulous mackerel run up the northeast coast from Cape Cod to Labrador to an insignificant vestige of its former self.
In the 1960s Japanese seiners began pursuing offshore capelin on the Grand Banks. When word of this reached the Canadian Department of Fisheries, its mandarins concluded that capelin must be a money-maker and they thereupon decided to “develop a major capelin fishery.” What had traditionally been an inshore fishery carried on by Newfoundland shoremen, with a catch of less than 10,000 tons a year, was now converted into an international offshore fishery with enormous quotas being granted to foreign as well as domestic fleets. The foreigners, it must be said, mostly used their catch for human food; the Canadians mostly poured theirs into the reduction plants. In 1976, the reported catch, which was almost certainly much lower than the real one, reached 370,000 tons. By the spring of 1978, the offshore capelin stocks had been effectively exhausted.
But not to worry. Inshore populations that spawned on Newfoundland beaches were still available for “development.” These stocks are even now being decimated by Canadian companies, not to provide basic human food, or even fish meal, but to supply a luxury market. Although both sexes of capelin are seined in their millions, only the spawn from gravid females is processed, to be sold to the Japanese gourmet trade. The bulk of the catch is often simply dumped.
By 198
3 most of the inshore capelin populations had been reduced to residual levels. Some biologists believe that this havoc has effectively blocked a recovery of groundfish stocks as well as administering what may well be a mortal blow to the few remaining large colonies of seabirds on Newfoundland’s coasts—colonies that largely depend on capelin for their survival. Still other marine zoologists suspect that the mass destruction of baitfishes in general is seriously affecting the vitality of the remaining grey, harbour, and hood seal stocks together with several kinds of whales, all of which have been savagely depleted by man in recent years.
A few months ago, I asked a disaffected Fisheries biologist (of which there seems to be a growing number) what he thought about the industry practice of exhausting not only the populations of commercial fishes, but their feed stocks as well. Some of what he had to say in reply is unprintable, but the gist can be summed up in these words.
“Listen! For those bastards, there’s no tomorrow. Or if there is, they’ll have moved their money into something else, like maybe processing Third World human populations to make dog food. No matter what anyone in the industry, or in the Department tells you—there’s just one thing on everybody’s mind: make money... make as much as you can before the whole damn bottom drops out of ocean fisheries... The seas are dying, as if you didn’t know.”
If codfish be the plodding plebians of the sea (as viewed by human eyes), then Atlantic salmon are the glamorous aristocrats. Yet this has not mitigated against their destruction at our hands.
From 1865 to 1910, an habitant by the name of Napoleon Comeau was employed to guard the salmon in the rather inconsequential Godbout River on the north shore of the St. Lawrence estuary about 200 miles below Quebec. His employers were a handful of Montreal businessmen and politicos who had leased exclusive salmon fishing rights on the Godbout. Napoleon’s task was to make sure that nobody and nothing took so much as a smolt from the waters that belonged to the self-styled “Lairds of the Godbout.”
For forty-three years, he and his assistants waged war up and down the river and in the adjacent waters of the estuary against “Those base enemies of the regal salmon: white whales, porpoises, seals, bears, minks, otters, mergansers, kingfishers, ospreys and loons.” The guardians also dealt harshly with any human poachers they might find, including the native Indians of the region whose ancestors had fished Godbout salmon for sustenance since time immemorial.
Comeau was not just a remorseless watchdog, he was also the faithful servant, cook, and guide to his beloved employers, of whom he (or his ghost writer) wrote: “Long may the Lairds of the Godbout enjoy their royal sport of matching their science and skill against the cunning, agility and strength of the kingly salmon.”
A meticulous man, Comeau kept careful records of his Lairds’ accomplishments. Although they only fished the river for two or three weeks in any given year, and seldom with more than six “rods,” during Comeau’s tenure they caught 14,560 salmon averaging eighteen pounds each, for a grand total of 258,000 pounds of the regal fish.
The 1903 season was typical. In two weeks, Messers John and James Manuel, James Law, and Colonel E.A. Whitehead killed 543 large salmon weighing a total of 6,334 pounds—of which about fifty pounds of each sportsman’s catch was smoked so that he could take it back by boat to Montreal as proof of his prowess.2 As for the rest of that three tons of “kingly salmon”—it was mostly left to rot in the Godbout valley where some of it served as bait to attract black bears, which were then trapped or shot to ensure that they would catch no living fish.
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2 “Kill” is the verb traditionally used by both sport and commercial salmon fishermen.
There is nothing unusual about this glimpse of sport fishermen in action. During the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, more than 400 such salmon clubs fished the rivers of the northeastern seaboard from Maine to Labrador. Many held river leases giving them exclusive rights to kill the royal fish. Their members included the social, financial, military, and political elite of the continent together with distinguished, often aristocratic visitors from abroad. All killed salmon on a scale similar to that of the Lairds of the Godbout, or at least they did so until there were few salmon left. Yet, for all that, they were latecomers to the salmon slaughter.
The earliest North American reference to Atlantic salmon is contained in the saga account of Leif Eriksson’s voyage to Vinland in 995 when he overwintered somewhere on the coast of Newfoundland. “There was no shortage of salmon there and these were larger salmon than they had ever seen before.”
Not only were they larger, they existed in such multitudes that no mere description could do them justice. But consider this: at the time the European invasion of the Americas began, almost every river together with most minor streams emptying into the Atlantic from north-central Labrador to as far south as the Hudson, as well as those emptying into the St. Lawrence system as far west as Niagara Falls, was home to innumerable salmon tribes or clans. All members of each tribe were hatched and spent their youth in these home rivers, to which they returned to beget the next generation of their kind after spending the years of adolescence in the sea. By conservative estimate, at least 3,000 such salmon rivers provided several hundreds of thousands of spawning beds for an overall Atlantic salmon population that may well have outnumbered that of the several salmon species found on the Pacific coast of North America.
Descriptions from early times can do little more than suggest the salmon’s original abundance, yet they are impressive enough. Here is Nicolas Denys, writing of the Miramichi River in the early years of the seventeenth century. “So large a quantity of Salmon enters this river [that] at night one is unable to sleep, so great is the noise they make in falling upon the water after having thrown or darted themselves into the air [while] passing over the river flats... [Near Chedabucto Bay on Cape Breton Island] I found a little river which I have named Rivière au Saulmon... I made a cast of the seine net at its entrance where it took so great a quantity of Salmon that ten men could not haul it to land and... had it not broken, the Salmon would have carried it off. We had a boat full of them, the smallest three feet long... [On Baie Chaleur] there is found a little river with Salmon of extraordinary length, some have been taken of six feet in length.” In the account of his travels around Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and the Gaspé, Denys lists dozens of such rivers and streams and comments in similar vein on the profusion of salmon in all of them.
John Smith reported that, in what would become New England, there was no river “where there is not plenty of salmon,” a statement echoed by all the early English journalists. The French were equally impressed. Pierre Boucher, in about 1650, marvelled at the “many fine rivers abounding with fish, especially salmon; there are prodigious quantities of that fish there.” The Sieur de Courtemanche, describing a journey along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence sometime around 1705, makes a litany out of the salmon rivers: “Muskware Bay, into which flow two rivers very rich with salmon... Washikuti Bay, equally rich in salmon... Etamamu River, full of salmon... Eskimo River, rich in salmon of extraordinary size... Blanc Sablon River, plenty of very good salmon.”
This plethora was viewed as a noteworthy aspect of life in the New World, but not as something of any great commercial value until after 1700, when it was discovered that there was a market for salted salmon in Europe. Thereafter the kingly fish became an increasingly valuable article of commerce. Initially they were caught by blocking off spawning rivers with weirs, then forking the trapped fish ashore. Nets were later used to bar off river mouths although, in the early years, the salmon were so abundant, and so huge, that the nets often burst under the strain. On virgin rivers neither nets nor weirs were needed. In 1755, a New Englander named Atkins anchored his vessel in the mouth of a Labrador river and caught all the salmon he had salt to cure by having his crew stand in the shallows and gaff the great
silvered fish as they swam by.
George Cartwright fished salmon for export in the 1770s from several southeast Labrador rivers. The run in White Bear River, he noted, was so thick “that a ball could not have been fired into the water without striking a salmon.” He and a crew of three men killed 12,396 in one season on one river, and he lamented that he could and would have easily killed 30,000 if only he had not run out of salt with which to cure them. In 1799 he recorded, “In Eagle River we are killing 750 salmon a day and we would have killed more had we had more nets... I could have killed a thousand tierce alone at Paradise River, the fish averaging from 15 to 32 pounds apiece.” A tierce was 300 pounds of salted fish, representing about 500 pounds of salmon, live weight. By the end of the eighteenth century, Newfoundland alone was exporting 5,000 tierce a year and it is estimated that the North American fishery was exporting annually in excess of 30 million pounds, live weight. In addition to this commercial catch, thousands upon endless thousands were every year killed locally for hog feed, to feed indentured workers, and to be spread upon the fields in lieu of manure.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century the salmon tide was noticeably ebbing in the more settled areas, not alone due to deliberate slaughter but also to the damming of rivers for millponds and to pollution from manufactories, especially tanneries and iron smelters. The results of this industrial destruction showed earliest along the eastern seaboard of the United States. “Previous to the separation from Maine,” complained a Boston man in the 1820s, “large quantities of salmon were packed in Massachusetts; since 1818 none have been... The building of dams and manufacturing establishments... has almost annihilated them in this commonwealth.”