William Wood, in 1634, could hardly eulogize them enough. “The bass is one of the best fishes in the country and though men are soon wearied with other fish, yet are they never with bass; it is a delicate, fine, fat, fast fish having a bone in its head which contains a saucerful of marrow... [he then describes the various ways bass were caught, all year long, ending with this description of netting them during the spring spawning run]... the English, at the top of an high water do cross the creeks with long seines or bass nets... and, the water ebbing... [the bass] are left on the dry ground, sometimes two or three thousand at a set, which are salted up against winter or distributed to such as... use them for [fertilizing] their ground.”
In northern waters, the bass seem to have been smaller, or perhaps it was just that the destruction wrought upon them over the centuries left only a stunted remainder in modern times. At any rate, by 1870, John Rowan found them to be only about “20 and 30 lbs” in the St. John River: “Bass spearing is capital sport... a few miles above Fredericton on fine June evenings dozens of canoes may be seen darting about the broad surface of the river... pursuing shoals of bass which rise to the surface, plunge and roll, then dive. The canoes are paddled furiously and barbed spears or harpoons hurled into the midst of them... The striped bass are only killed for sport [on the St. John River, but]... in some Canadian rivers large quantities of bass are taken in scoop-nets through the ice. In the Miramichi alone, I am informed that over 100 tons have been taken in a winter.” Rowan does not tell us to what use these fish were put but, from other sources, it appears they were used mainly for fertilizer.
John Cole in Striper, his 1978 book about the species, gives us an overview of the course of slaughter: “Who can ever measure the numbers taken by... the fleets that made landfall in the New World only to find the harbours writhing with the silver-sided splashings of the stripers?... And will there ever be any counting of the stripers netted in tidal coves, their gleaming carcasses... left by the thousands for colonial farmers to hoist to handbarrows for their trip to the corn fields and their burial there? And, as the nation grew, who ever tallied the bass taken by a growing commercial fishery that utilized hand lines, trot lines, line trawls, gill nets, stake nets, drift nets, runaround nets, seine nets, fyke nets, pound nets, trawl nets, scoop nets, trammel nets, and bag nets specially made to be slid under a river’s winter ice to trap the bass as they crowded in giant schools near the bottom?... And who [can] tabulate the depredations of two centuries of recreational sport and meat fishing by individuals using hand lines... fishing from fifty-foot motor cruisers or wading in the surf?”
Because no one can answer these questions, there can never be a numerical accounting. But surely there should be a moral one for the decimation of the striped bass to what may already be the point of no return. Vanished now from the great majority of the rivers and from most of the coasts where it once abounded, its remnants are threatened, not so much by our overt actions as by the mindless manner in which we are turning the world of waters into a stew of death. Again, Cole tells the tale.
“After uncounted centuries as a presence on the east coast of this nation, the striped bass is dying. This fish, once so abundant it clogged river deltas... is being destroyed... There is no debate about the decline in striped bass populations. Annual surveys of bass reproduction in Chesapeake Bay and the Hudson River... tell the same story... These two bodies of water—which together are the nurseries for 99 percent of the [remaining] stripers of the northeast coast—have been increasingly unproductive each year.
“Why,” asks Cole, “when the waters are cloudy with billions of eggs... why is there no surviving year class? Why does the creature’s population decline until now the rivers and sea hold only a handful of old fish that gather each April for a sterile ritual of reproduction?”
He tells us why. It is because (and the evidence is irrefutable) the waters of the Hudson and of Chesapeake Bay, as is the case with most east-coast waters, have become so toxic with our industrial, domestic, and agricultural wastes that the fry of the striper, together with the young of countless other animals, simply do not survive. “Ten years from now,” Cole says, “at its current rate of decline, the striped bass will no longer roam the inshore waters of the Atlantic... it will have vanished as a viable species.”
The giant mackerel called bluefin tuna is one of the largest, most advanced, and unusual of all fishes. Capable of growing to a length of fourteen feet and a weight of 1,500 pounds, it is a compact mass of streamlined muscle of such superlative hydrodynamic design that it can swim at close to sixty miles an hour. In a sense, it is a “warm-blooded” fish since, almost alone of the finny kind, it can regulate its body temperature. The bluefin can manoeuvre in water with the effortless skill of a bird in air. There is probably nothing in the sea that can catch it... or escape it. Some modern biologists call it the superfish, but human recognition of its uniqueness goes back to the beginnings of history. Prehistoric cave painters evidently shared with the Mycenaean civilization of Crete an admiration for tuna amounting to awe.
Ancient sea-hunters killed tuna when they could, and other men continued to do so down through the ages; nevertheless, such is the vitality of the tuna that they easily held their own until little more than thirty years ago.
Western bluefins spawn in the Gulf of Mexico but range north in spring and summer at least as far as Newfoundland. Prior to 1939, only the younger members of the tribe, mostly two- to five-year-olds weighing from about ten to a hundred pounds, were fished commercially in North American waters. At a rate of a few hundred tons a year, the kill was small enough to be sustained. The giants, which could be as old as thirty-five years, were hardly fished at all and that only by the few who were wealthy enough to own or charter big motor launches from which they fished for sport with rod and reel.
But the 1950s saw the development of a new and deadly interest in the tuna tribes. Canned tuna meat was beginning to be popularized, both for human consumption on the world market and to feed the growing pet population belonging to affluent North Americans. So the commercial tuna-fishing effort rapidly increased, though still directed mostly against the younger fish. As for the old giants, upon whose survival and successful propagation the fate of the bluefin species rested, they became targets for an explosive growth in sport fishing that saw thousands of men and women who were now blessed with surplus income turn to trophy fishing as a recreation.
By 1960, more than 11,000 sports were going out in charter boats every year, hoping to hook and land “trophy” tuna beside which they could have their pictures taken. One of them set a world record in 1979 by landing a thirty-two-year-old, 1,500-pound bluefin in Nova Scotia waters. Its like has not been seen again and probably never will be.
During the peak years of the 1950s as many as 150,000 large bluefins were killed annually in the North Atlantic commercial fishery—but by 1973, the catch had fallen to 2,100. In 1955, the Norwegian fleet alone took 10,000 tons of smaller tuna; in 1973, it caught just over 100 individuals. In former years, Portuguese fishermen regularly killed 20,000 tuna a year in great net traps; in 1972, they caught two fish. One singularly enormous trap that has been operated in the Strait of Gibraltar since the sixth century caught 43,500 tuna as late as 1949; in 1982, its catch was 2,000 fish, all very small.
From the late 1950s, Japan offered the most lucrative market for tuna, which initially was bought from foreign fishing companies. However, with the perfecting of quick freezing and deep-sea freezer/fishing vessels, the Japanese moved into the fishery themselves. When the first U.S. tuna purse seiner Silver Mink (a marvel of technology) went into service in 1958 and quickly became the most successful fish killer ever launched until that time, Japanese, U.S., and multinational commercial fishing interests hurriedly followed her lead. They competed to build bigger, better, more efficient vessels that sought out tuna wherever they were to be found and killed them with fearful efficiency.
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The ultimate tuna boat was Zapata Pathfinder—a 250-foot super-seiner under Panamanian registry that looked more like a Greek shipping magnate’s private yacht than a working vessel. Valued at $10–$15 million, she had a satellite navigation system, carried her own helicopter for tuna spotting, and provided her captain with a suite of rooms embellished with a bar and lounge, a king-size bed, and gold-plated bathroom faucets. She was capable of catching, freezing, and stowing $5 million worth of tuna on a single voyage. She could earn her captain $250,000 a year, but how much she made in overall profits remains unknown, as do the identities of her owners, which are lost to view in overlapping and interlocking companies. Nevertheless, informed observers of the tuna fishery have estimated that Zapata Pathfinder probably returned 100 per cent profit on investment every year she operated. The magnitude of the carnage she and her sisters inflicted on the world’s tuna population in the process of amassing these obscene profits was so great that, by the end of the 1970s, such superseiners had fished themselves out of business.
In addition to building purse seiners, the Japanese made great strides in tuna long-lining, to the point where, by 1962, they were catching 400,000 tons of tuna a year. But by 1980 the entire Japanese fleet of 300 long-liners only managed to catch 4,000 tons of bluefin tuna.
The discovery, in the mid-1960s, that giant tuna were accumulating dangerous levels of mercury during their long lives as a result of pollution resulted in a ban on the sale of their flesh in most Western countries. For a time, conservationists hoped that the remaining giants might be spared to carry on the reproduction of their species. It was a faint hope. By 1966, tuna sport fishing had become so popular that 388 giants were caught and killed off Newfoundland alone that year. Since this was just recreational fishing, the enormous carcasses were mostly dumped overboard after the obligatory photographs had been taken.
By 1968, however, the Japanese gourmet market, fuelled by increasing national affluence, was developing an appetite for jumbo magura—the raw flesh of giant bluefin tuna. Undeterred by the mercury content (if indeed they even knew about it), Japanese epicures were eventually paying as much as $25 a pound for jumbo magura, and the North American “sport” fishery leapt at this opportunity to make windfall profits.
In 1974, charter-boat operators at North Lake, Prince Edward Island—the self-styled Tuna Capital of the World—helped their clients boat 578 giant bluefins, then sold most of the carcasses, quick-frozen, to Japan. Tuna guides and charter boatmen could hardly believe their golden luck. When there were no “sports” to catch the big fish, they set tuna trawls—a procedure roughly commensurate, from a sporting point of view, with using baited night lines in a trout pond.
In 1978, 3,000 giant tuna reached Japan for conversion into jumbo magura, but by 1981 the Tuna Capital of the World was only able to catch fifty-five. I was told at a sportsmen’s motel in North Lake that year that the bluefins “have changed their migration patterns, but are bound to return soon.” As this book goes to press they have not returned, and charter boatmen are selling their boats or trying desperately to find new ways to lure back the sport-fishing enthusiasts—shark fishing, perhaps?
The jumbo magura business was so valuable that, in 1974, the Japanese entrepreneurs who controlled it financed a unique “fish farm” in Nova Scotia with the support and encouragement of Canada’s Department of Fisheries. This farm was permitted to net-trap all the giant tuna it could find in the vicinity of St. Margarets Bay. The giants were then transferred to “feed lot” underwater cages and there fattened with unlimited amounts of mackerel until they reached prime weight and condition. They were then slaughtered, iced, and flown to Japan. In 1974, fifty giant bluefins were so treated, but in 1977 nearly 1,000 were trapped, fattened, slaughtered, and sent off to titillate Japanese palates. The “farm” is now running out of stock. In the last few years it has sometimes been unable to trap more than twenty of the great fishes. Apparently they have gone elsewhere!
Many other members of the tuna family swim under the same dark shadow. Marine biologists John and Mildred Teal wrote an epitaph for the bluefin in their recent book, The Sargasso Sea: “The smaller bluefin tuna, the medium five- to eight-year-olds and the small ones under five years, which live in large schools, have been caught with line, bait and hooks in the eastern Atlantic and with purse seines in the western Atlantic... Large commercial catches are being taken even of very small bluefins weighing less than a kilo each. Once the giants are gone the bluefin will disappear as a commercial fish... The tuna’s depletion is senseless, but we have never let this stand in the way of overfishing for other profitmakers—whales, lobster and haddock.”
Many other great North Atlantic fishes have suffered devastation. One of these is the little-known swordfish. Nicolas Denys, in the early 1600s, wrote of it: “The Swordfish is a fish as large as a cow, of six to eight feet in length... it has upon its snout a sword... that is about three feet long, and about four good inches wide... It is very good to eat in any manner. Its eyes are as large as the fists.”
Originally found on most fishing grounds off the northeastern coast, it was not much sought-after in early times. However, by about 1900 its tasty meat began to be popular in U.S. coastal states and, as refrigeration improved, came to be relished all across the continent as swordfish steak. Originally it was mostly taken by harpooning, but after World War II, with an ever-increasing demand, fishermen began catching it on long-lines. Never abundant, and slow to recoup its losses, it was depleted to the point of rarity by the early 1960s. Scientists then discovered that it contained such high concentrations of mercury and other toxic contaminants that it was dangerous for human beings to consume. It was therefore banned from the U.S., with the result that the fishery for it has been reduced to what a black market can absorb.
The effect of the massive accumulation of toxic chemicals on the surviving swordfish is not known, but it is to be assumed that what is deleterious to us can do the fish no good. At any rate, the numbers of swordfish apparently are still decreasing.
If it is possible to feel concern about the fate of a shark, then the following story should rouse at least some pity for an animal that has been savagely abused. The basking shark is a truly enormous animal—the second largest fish extant. Individuals measuring thirty-five feet in length and weighing an estimated fifteen tons have been killed. Basking sharks are as mysterious as they are huge. Almost nothing is known about them, except that they are completely inoffensive as far as man is concerned and like to go in schools, feeding on minute crustaceans and other forms of plankton they strain through their gill-rakers. A sluggish monster, this great creature takes its name from its habit of drifting slowly on the surface, back awash. This is a habit that has proved fatal to it in its contacts with modern man.
Although its flesh is of no value to us, its liver is. Weighing 1,000 pounds or more, the liver is rich in vitamins that can be extracted for human use. After World War II, it was so assiduously hunted for its liver in the eastern Atlantic as to have been virtually exterminated there. In colonial times, basking sharks were abundant in the Gulf of Maine, and thousands were killed off Cape Cod to produce liver oil for settlers’ lamps. But the monster sharks have long since vanished from the eastern seaboard of the United States.
They were also abundant in eastern Canadian waters, where they were not seriously hunted. However, fishermen found them a nuisance since they sometimes became fouled in nets. In consequence, the Canadian Department of Fisheries declared war on them in the 1940s. (On the Pacific coast Fisheries protection vessels went after them first with harpoons. When these proved cumbersome and seldom fatal, rifle fire and even machine-gun fire were tried. However, bullets seemed to have little immediate effect on such enormous creatures, so the department devised an ingenious weapon—a pointed steel ram with a curved cutting edge honed to razor sharpness. Patrol boats fitted with this deadly device sought out schools of the great f
ishes and rammed them, one by one, either tearing them apart or, in some cases, cutting them in half. One Fisheries patrol vessel cut down eighteen of the giants in one day.)
Basking sharks have been so much reduced that it is now remarkable when as many as two dozen sightings are recorded in any given year along the northeastern seaboard of the continent.
In 1616, when Captain John Smith was extolling the virtues of New England—“You shall scarcely find any bay, shallow shore, or cove of sand where you may not take as many clams, or lobsters, or both as you pleasure”—he was in fact describing the entire Atlantic littoral from Cape Hatteras to southern Labrador.
Some two dozen kinds of clams, oysters, mussels, scallops, and sea snails lived in shoal waters along the Atlantic seaboard, providing a seemingly inexhaustible smorgasbord of easily available food. It was a bounty of which native peoples freely availed themselves, as the grass-covered shell mounds that mark the sites of many of their coastal habitations still testify. European invaders, however, initially made only minor use of this largesse for food. Instead, they used it mainly as a source of bait for the cod fishery.
Oysters disappeared from salt-water lagoons along the west and south coasts of Newfoundland before the seventeenth century began. On the French island of Miquelon, thick layers of oyster shells lie at the bottom of mountainous accumulations of clam shells that were still being added to by bait-seeking fishermen when I stayed among them in the 1960s. But no living oyster has been found in Miquelon’s enormous lagoon since time out of memory. The same holds true of the Magdalen Islands, where winter storms deposit windrows of oyster shells on the beaches, washed up from beds where no oysters still exist.