COD

If only I'd been born as a cod fish,
Sought after by all in the land.
To many I'd be a real fetish,
Protected from a greedy old man
By laws that are cruelly outlandish,
By the shores of old Newfoundland.

The poem's author, former inshore fisherman Ray Elliott, leaned against his stove looking at fishery scientist George Rose's new book, Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries.

"When my father was 80-years-old, someone asked him to tell them what he knew about fishing," he said, turning the book over in his hands. "My father looked at him and said, 'Sure, a 10-year-old knows as much about fishing as I do - the fish are down there in the water and you're up on top'. I suspect Dr. Rose would have been closer to the truth if he had said that rather than writing a book."

Within a week Mr. Elliott was quoting Dr. Rose.

Cod and human history on the Northern Peninsula were threads of the same cloth until 1992's cod moratorium.

Mr. Rose begins the tale four-billion years ago with the curl and crush of tectonic plates that would form the Grand Banks. He follows the evolution of cod to the arrival of John Cabot, the settlers and the factory trawlers that brought the world crashing down.

Shakespeare couldn't have written a grander tragedy - ineffectual management organizations, weak-kneed lawmakers and industry-driven science combined to end one of the world's greatest fisheries. There seems to be plenty of blame to go around.

"The fisheries records of the 1950s and 1960s read like a casualty list in a losing war," states Cod. "Under the International Convention for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF), any country could ignore any recommendation that displeased them by filing a formal objection."

ICNAF was founded in 1949 to manage the Grand Banks and waters off Greenland - it proved useless despite being touted as riding the cutting edge of fishery science.

Massive government subsidized trawler building programs were beginning in Europe, Russia and Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. Meanwhile, barely out of his teens, Mr. Elliott was forsaking the cod traps and dogteams of Lock's Cove for a diesel mechanic course in St. John's.

He went to work on barges traversing the Great Lakes, but soon gave up that life. Preferring the freedom of the inshore fishery, despite knowing there wasn't any money in it, he went home. In 1970 he, his brother Walt Powell and three other fishermen set off for Labrador with two longliners, four cod traps and some 25 gillnets. They caught one codfish.

"We had to get a rock cod to go with it to make it a meal," remembered Mr. Elliott.

That year the Labrador inshore fishery's landings dropped from 18,000 tons to 5,000 tons.

Meanwhile, foreign fishing trawlers took 400,000 tons from the same Northern cod stock.

"ICNAF has done a first class job...not only for Canada and Canadian fishermen, but also for the fishermen of all the countries which are represented here today," deputy federal fisheries minister Alfred Needler told an ICNAF meeting the following year in Halifax.

It made many angry.

The Bonavista inshore fishery soon collapsed, large cod were being replaced by smaller tom cod in traps and the inshore fishery turned from a living to a subsistence economy before being snuffed out in 1992. Some have called it the largest layoff in Canadian history - rural Newfoundland and Labrador's reason for existence was the cod fishery.

Blame Confederation? Blame foreign fishing trawlers? Blame ourselves for letting it happen?

Cod spreads the blame around.

But Mr. Elliott, who the lost the world he understood - Lock's Cove was resettled - sees the destruction of cod stocks through 71 years of laughing, crying and sighing at the ways of the world. Life has taught him that something so grand and precious can't be trusted to the hands of men.

"Some say it was driven by greed - but I say it was driven by survival," said Mr. Elliott. "Survival and common sense aren't the same thing."

Europe, Russia and Japan were rebuilding after devastating world wars - they had economies and mouths to feed. Newfoundlanders had boats to pay for and lives to lead. He's unwilling to blame humans for being human.

Also, incompetence is good for a laugh.

With a giggle he tells of the 'Aspenite City' in Punch Bowl, Labrador.

Inshore landings were down throughout Newfoundland by the late 1970s. News spread fast when good catches were reported south of Black Tickle, Labrador. Instead of protecting the fish, government built a new wharf and a hastily-erected town of chip-board - longliners steamed in from around Newfoundland and the Quebec North Shore. Within three years the codfish were gone from Punch Bowl.

"There was no way to survive and protect the stock. You can't expect people to starve," said Mr. Elliott. "Blame isn't helping anybody, but at least we can look at the causes."

So where to from here? Have we learned anything? Can the cod stocks recover and will we let them?

"I don't think there's any doubt that cod stocks can recover - some are recovering now," Dr. Rose said in an interview with the Pen. "The south coast cod (fishery management area 3Ps) and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (4R) stocks are in a recovery phase. It will take a while, but it's definitely on its way."

He uses the example of Norway's herring fishery.

From being one of the world's largest fish stocks, at some 25-million tonnes, it was pillaged by trawlers during the 1970s until only one small population in one fjord remained.

"The Norwegians guarded that fjord like gold for 30 years and damn if it didn't come back," said Dr. Rose. "It's back up to tens of millions of tonnes, but it took a lot of care."

That care, he argues, we need to take by not "jumping" on the stocks as soon as we see signs of recovery.

"I'm not against some fisheries - they have a value that's not only economic, but in terms of data gathering and maintaining the skills," said Dr. Rose. "We just have to be very careful of how much fish we take."

We also need to be vigilant.

He points out that the 'pirate fleets' that decimated the cod are now doing the same off Africa, where weak states can't protect their fish. Some boats still operate outside Canada's 200-mile limit on the tail of the Grand Banks, unimpeded by the 'ineffective' Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization, according to Dr. Rose, which replaced ICNAF.

"Foreign fisheries are still knocking the Grand Bank stock down - that stock has the potential to recover the quickest if we'd just leave it alone for a little while."

But he admits hope, and some pride that Mr. Elliott approves of his book.

My skin is like wrinkled sandpaper,
The codfish is slippery and smooth.
My voice, it squeaks and it wavers,
The codfish is not so uncouth.
My breath smells of Tums and Lifesavers,
The old codfish swims on as in youth.