Shellfish biologists, pondering the disappearance of oysters from so much of their aboriginal North American range, have tended to attribute this to climatic changes. They do not seem to realize that the easily harvested oysters were used as commercial fish bait. Apart from the apparent idiocy of abusing what is now a luxury food in such a manner, they cannot see how such a slippery, watery creature could have been kept upon a hook. The answer is simple enough—the fishermen parboiled oysters, a trick they probably learned from Micmac Indians who still make oyster bait on occasion, considering it the most irresistible lure available.
The indefatigable Nicolas Denys gives us a mid-seventeenth-century glimpse of the munificence of the oyster beds in parts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick where no oysters are now to be found. “From this cove [Port Mulgrave] there are lagoons of salt water in which are found good Oysters, which are very large, and of Mussels great abundance... here [at Havre Boucher] is found also an abundance of Oysters and Mussels... [at Antigonish] there are excellent Oysters and, at the entrance to the river on the left are still more of them... They are piled like rocks one over the other... [at Pictou are] Excellent Oysters, they are immense... Some are found there larger than a shoe... they are all very plump and good of taste...” And so it goes right around the southern Gulf coast to Gaspé. Once, they were abundant. Now, there are none, or almost none.
The profusion of oysters on Prince Edward Island was legendary, and they continue to survive there, although now much restricted and reduced in numbers. In Cape Breton’s Bras d’Or Lake as many as thirty schooners at a time once baited with the shellfish at St. Patrick’s Channel.
Oysters were but one source of shellfish bait. Clams and mussels served as well. Some nineteenth-century banking schooners loaded as much as ten tons of clams for a single voyage. The clams served a dual purpose: as ballast during the outward voyage, and as bait once the banks were reached. However, the inshore fishermen, inhabiting almost every nook and cranny along the cod coasts, did the most deadly damage. Shellfish bait was conveniently at hand, easy to dig or rake in any required quantity, easy to handle, much relished by the cod... and it was free.
Nor were the “hang-ashores”—colonists and settlers—behindhand in profligate destruction of shellfish. Herds of hogs were often turned onto the tidal flats to root out and fatten up on clams of all sizes and species. In 1848 the Indian commissioners for Nova Scotia indignantly reported that this practice had “consumed all the best shellfish on our whole shores.” Farmers invaded the flats and shovelled mud, spawn, and adult clams into wagons and hauled the stuff off to their fields where it not only served to lime the ground but acted as manure as well.
Consumption for food did not become a major factor in the decimation of shellfish until late in the eighteenth century, by which time enormous quantities of oysters and clams, especially the cherrystone variety (young quahogs), were being shipped to towns and cities almost everywhere in Canada and the United States. However, probably the deadliest blow of all was the incidental mistreatment of shellfish beds. It has been estimated that 80 per cent of those in existence in the sixteenth century between Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod have been effectively eliminated by domestic, industrial, and agricultural pollution; by tidal wetlands reclamation and land-fill projects; and by massive outflows of detritus resulting from human-induced erosion. As maritimers know all too well, even the beds that still remain are sometimes so heavily contaminated that shellfish from them are unfit or unsafe to eat.
One species failed to catch our acquisitive eye until the twentieth century. This was the scallop, an offshore animal that was enormously abundant on the more southerly fishing banks until as recently as the 1960s. It was not much sought after until this time, but since then has been fished with such intensity that, during the present decade, the catch has declined to the point where the entire scallop fishery is now in jeopardy. There is nothing in our recent history to give us reason to expect any lessening in the devastation of the scallops until they are commercially extinct. It is predicted that they will have reached this state by 1990.
When Anthony Parkhurst was on the east coast of Newfoundland in the latter part of the sixteenth century, he could “take up in less than half a day [with an eel spear] Lobsters sufficient to find 300 men for a day’s meat.” Charles Leigh, on the Cape Breton coast at about the same time, noted: “In this place are the greatest multitude of lobsters ever heard of; for we caught at one haul with a little draw net above 140.” It was the same in the New England plantations in 1629, as reported by Higginson: “Lobsters [are so many] that the least boy in the Plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them. For my own part I cloyed with them, they were so great, and fat, and luscious. I have seen some myself that have weighed sixteen pound; but others... have had so great lobsters as weighed twenty-five pound.” William Wood, writing of the same time and place, adds, “Their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten [except by the Indians who] get many of them every day for to baite their hooks withal and to eat when they can get no bass.”
The use of lobsters for bait was something the newcomers could understand, and they took to that practice on a grand scale. Around 1720, inshore fishermen from Newfoundland to Cape Cod were in the habit of sending boys equipped with double-pronged fish forks to the shore at low tide, there to stab a day’s supply of bait from amongst the lobsters sheltering under the sea wrack and in crevices between the rocks. Aaron Thomas, visiting Newfoundland about 1794, tells us: “Lobsters are in such plenty that they are used for Bait to catch the Codd Fish with... I went out in a small Boat to inform myself of the fact... I was not in the Boat more than Half an Hour during which time one man hooked fifty-nine Lobsters.” Thomas also tells us that lobster was a sort of universal feed for settlers’ livestock, including “Fowl, Cows, Ducks, Goats, Geese, Cats, Horses, Calves, Pigs, tame Sea Gulls [used for food], Sheep and Dogs... when I threw the Claw of a Lobster to a Cat, a Goat and a Hog would start after it... when the body of the Fish was chucked off, the Fowls, the Cows, and the Gulls and the Sheep would join in pursuit.” This was common practice everywhere along the northeastern coasts. In fact, pigs were still being fattened on lobster in some remote regions of Newfoundland until as late as 1940.
Inshore fishermen were not alone in using lobster for bait. From as early as the 1760s, banking schoonermen regularly shipped tons of the crustaceans, and the practice continued until the middle of the nineteenth century. Ashore, many colonists and settlers refused to eat what they called “poor man’s meat” but found a use for lobsters anyway. In 1852, a Canadian official noted, “Lobsters are everywhere found on the coasts... in such extraordinary numbers that they are used by the thousands to manure the land. Every potato field... is strewn with lobster shells, each potato hill being furnished with two, and perhaps three lobsters.”
Lobsters were still considered commercially worthless in Nova Scotia as late as 1876 when John Rowan described the colonists killing the animals for fun. “On still summer nights, lobster spearing parties are the fashion among Halifax people. A birch-bark torch carried in the bow of the boat enables the spearer to see the lobsters crawling among the seaweed at the bottom.” Killing lobsters was literally child’s play. “I have seen two hundred lobsters taken in one tide by a couple of little boys wading about among the rocks armed with cod-hooks tied to sticks.” Rowan also comments on their agricultural uses. “On one occasion, I saw several acres of potato ground manured with them. To give some idea of the little value put on lobsters, I may mention that they boil them for their pigs, but are ashamed to be seen eating lobster themselves. Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation.”
What changed this attitude was the mid-nineteenth century discovery that lobster meat could be cheaply canned in giant steam cookers, and that there was a lucrative market for the resultant product, not only at home but in Europe, too. What then ensued ha
s sometimes been referred to as the Lobster Klondike, though it was a gold rush of another kind.
Lobster factories sprang up along the New England coast in such profusion that it was said the smoke from their high chimneys competed with the fog in obscuring local landmarks—an exaggeration perhaps, but not such a far-fetched one. By the 1860s, there was hardly room for one more lobster factory on the American coast, and so the avid entrepreneurs began shoving north until their factories, reinforced by Canadian, British, and French plants, dotted the coasts of Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada from end to end. The example I have chosen to illustrate what followed is the west coast of Newfoundland.
The first factory was erected there in 1873. By 1888, twenty-six canneries were employing 1,100 fishermen, any two of which in their small boat would expect to catch as many as 1,000 lobsters a day, for which they received the scarcely munificent sum of $5. That year, the fishermen of Newfoundland’s west coast delivered enough lobsters to fill 3 million one-pound cans.
The wastage was atrocious. Only meat from the tail and the two large claws was used. The bodies, many of them females festooned with spawn, were shovelled back into the sea where they washed up on the shores to produce a stench that could be smelled miles away. During the 1870s, it had taken, on average, only two lobsters to fill a can; as the slaughter mounted and the older and larger lobsters were destroyed, it took first three, then four, and finally as many as eight “little fish,” which by then were all that could still be caught in any quantity.
By 1898, seventy canneries were fiercely competing with one another along the west coast, belching black-spruce smoke high into the skies from early spring until late autumn. By then, however, they only managed to produce a million cans among them. The lobster population was melting away. Four years later, production was down to 310,000 cans—about a tenth of what it had been in 1888.
Substantially the same sequence of events took place everywhere along the northeastern seaboard, except that in some regions—notably the southern New England states—the story ends with the virtual extinction of the lobster. The days when lobster was one of the most available and abundant animals along the Atlantic shores are long since at an end. From a peak of at least 140,000 tons in 1885, lobster landings in Canada and Newfoundland had plummeted to 43,000 tons by the early 1920s. By the 1970s, landings were down to about 20,000 tons.1 Although this latter figure has doubled since then, some biologists believe current population levels are still perilously close to a disastrous crash should the death rate escalate, either due to increased human predation or to some accident of nature.
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1 These figures are expressed as live weight. Production in 1885 was reported to have been 100 million one-pound cans, but a minimum of three pounds of live lobster was required to fill each can. The 1920s total is based on approximately 30 million cans plus about 5 million pounds sold live. Current catches are usually reported as live weight.
The lobster is, in fact, a classic case of a species precariously balanced between the desire of “resource managers” to placate their political and commercial masters with increased production and the need to preserve and even strengthen a perilously depleted population. Some men were aware of the danger as far back as the 1870s, when a far-sighted adviser to the Nova Scotia government recommended that the lobster fishery should be closed at least during the height of the spawning season. The suggestion was rejected by the provincial legislature, “probably [because] by making a closed season, the catch of lobsters, which is a source of considerable profit, would be greatly lessened, therefore they adopted the alternative of making it illegal to take undersize lobsters, or females in spawn. [However,] this law is not enforced, and the process of killing the bird that lays the golden eggs is being applied to the lobster fishery, as it is to the salmon fishery, and as it is to the lumbering business.” Those comments, be it noted, were written 100 years ago, yet they remain as applicable as they ever were.
An analysis of the modern lobster fishery, by Harold Horwood, spotlights the danger: “As of 1982 Canadian lobster catches amounted to about 40,000,000 pounds annually, mainly one-pound lobsters; the larger ones being too scarce to be of statistical importance. The proportion of these one-pounders taken from the lobster population each year varies slightly, but 80% is close to average for the entire maritime region.
“Of the 20% of one-pounders which escape capture in any given year, a further 80% are taken the following year, as pound-and-a-half lobsters. These are still too young to breed. Indeed a female lobster has usually to escape being caught in three successive annual fisheries before she bears her first eggs. Consequently only four out of every thousand one-pound lobsters will, on the average, live to reproduce. But in some regions, sexual maturity is delayed yet another year, so that the egg-bearers are reduced to an average of eight in every ten thousand.
“On the basis of firm experimental evidence, lobster biologists believe that increasing the minimum size of lobsters that can be taken by 50% would, within five years, double the size of the Canadian lobster catch. The difficulty is that you have to sell the politicians on the plan, and they usually prefer to opt for short-term benefits which keep their constituents happy, rather than long-term ones.
“It would take only five years to double the lobster population and take the species out of danger... but who among those with the power to implement the plan really cares what happens five years hence?”
During preparation of this book I talked to marine scientists from three continents, experts who were in a position to speak freely and independently. All agreed that life in the sea is being diminished at a fearful and accelerating rate. Not only the larger forms are affected. Both fisheries strategists in the West and state planners in the East are now implementing ways to harvest plankton, the basic food upon which all animate life in the oceans ultimately depends. Plankton includes an enormous range of minute plants and animals, all of them tiny and many microscopic. Already Japan and the Soviet Union are spearheading what is intended to become a massive fishery for krill, a crustacean which, though only a few millimeters long, is amongst the bigger planktonic forms. Existing in nearly infinite numbers, krill provide the primary source of food for thousands of bigger creatures ranging through fish and seabirds all the way to the largest creature on Earth, the blue whale. Depletion of the “krill meadows” on the scale now being planned will result in intolerable damage to the populations of countless animals higher up on the food chain.
The probable long-term results of harvesting plankton on a major scale are so appalling that a senior scientist with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans privately assured me that it could lead to the effective extinction of most kinds of fishes we have relied on in the past or which we might hope to exploit in the future.
“Although it would be an unimaginable disaster for marine life in general,” he added, “it is probably the most rational approach to exploiting the food potential of the ocean. Its virtue is that it cuts out the middleman, as it were, allowing us to gather the proteins and other nutrients produced by plankton without the energy loss involved in having fishes, sea mammals, even birds, process and concentrate it for us first.”
He concluded, rather ominously: “Will it happen, or is it just science fiction? Look at the record of our past successes with industrial fisheries. And don’t ever underestimate what we can and will do if there’s a good buck in it.”
Part IV | Lost Giants of the Sea
Many historians are of the opinion that the cod fishery was the irresistible prime attraction that first drew Europe to the northeastern seaboard of America. Although true of the English and most of the French adventurers to a degree, early Portuguese, Spaniards, Basques, and Biscayan French all had something more than cod in view. That something was train oil, from marine animals.
Foreshadowing modern times, late fifteenth-century Europe found itself increasingly s
hort of oil. In those days, it came mostly from rendering the fat of terrestrial animals or from vegetative sources. These were no longer equal to the demand. However, as many seafarers, particularly those from the Iberian peninsula, knew, seemingly limitless quantities of oil existed in the seas. Seals, walrus, and whales were all singularly well-endowed with oil-rich fat that could be readily rendered into train. As the sixteenth century began train became ever more valuable and in demand; and more and more ship-owners from southwestern Europe began to make its procurement their principal business.
Before the Sea of Slaughter became what we have made of it, it was the Sea of Whales. Thirty or forty million years ago, the progenitors of modern whales were secure in the womb of ocean to which their ancestors had returned after aeons of sojourning on land. Ages before the naked ape appeared, whales had become one of the most complex yet stable forms of life on the planet. Had it not been for the appearance of our kind, there is little doubt but that the whales would have remained the great presences dominating the seas that they still were when Europeans crossed the North Atlantic to possess the New World and its adjacent waters.
Many of these men came seeking train. The shocking history of what that avaricious pursuit meant to the whale nations makes other atrocities committed by modern man seem relatively mild.
13. The Better Sort
A bleak November sky broods over the Strait of Belle Isle while a sleet-laden nor’east gale howls across a gourd-shaped harbour on the northern coast. Bitter blasts rattle the red clay tiles that roof a score of wooden shanties crouched along a rocky shore. Wind whines through the rigging of several dimly seen anchored vessels before gusting out into the Strait over a mounded island that juts like a stopper in the harbour mouth.