Net losses: 'The Rock' endures

The waning cod fishery has profoundly changed Newfoundland, where the native "Newfies" persevere amid change.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS
Published July 10, 2005

[Times photos: Robert N. Jenkins]

A HARD ROAD: The main street of Red Bay, Labrador, in late June. In the 1500s, this spot on the Strait of Belle Isle near the Atlantic Ocean was the whaling capital of the world.

	NATURAL BEAUTY: A sightseeing boat ventures toward a waterfall along the face of a cliff in Western Brook Pond, where perhaps 20 glaciers gouged the Earth for millions of years. The pond is in Gros Morne National Park.
	ROCKS OF AGES: Interpreter Rob Hingston tells visitors to Gros Morne National Park’s Green Point that the overlap of two major geologic periods is visible in the walls behind him.

TORRENT RIVER, Newfoundland - If ever there was a place that made humans earn the right to live amid the natural beauty, it is Newfoundland.

Even in late June, a chill wind can blow dense sea fog onto the coast, and thick gray skies hide the sun. Laundry whips on backyard clotheslines. Icebergs glide to the Atlantic coastline. Shrinking within layers of outerwear, an off-islander has to contemplate the tenacity of the early settlers.

For a couple of centuries, hundreds of villages of two- and three-room houses were occupied along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic coasts. Fishers worked there during the spring and summer, from before dawn to after dark.

The men would row out in their small, open dories, putting in and taking out lobster traps, putting out and hauling in nets of cod and salmon.

Wives and children worked on shore, salting and drying the cod to preserve it, gathering wood for the fires in the dozens of tiny coastline salmon canneries.

"It was cod that brought them here, it was cod that kept them," says Newfoundland native and motel operator Bill Maynard, speaking about the island's Gulf of St. Lawrence coastal residents.

But now, because of overfishing, there are too few cod. Since 1992, the government has not let Canadians catch cod within 200 miles of the coastline. It has been 15 years since Canadians were permitted to commercially catch Atlantic salmon.

Consequently, more than 20,000 former commercial fishers from Newfoundland are receiving subsidies from a government program that already has cost $1-billion more than estimated.

Other fishermen have taken mining or petroleum jobs thousands of miles away, in the western provinces. And many of the island's teenagers also consider their futures may be found by leaving the island their elders call the Rock.

Outdoorsmen like the rugged Maynard are optimistic about the early success of a fish "ladder" that opens more of the Torrent River to spawning salmon. But it will be decades before even this work allows a return to commercial fishing of the species.

The biggest impact has been felt on this western coast, the side nearest the mainland of Canada - but never, really, close to it at all.

When Canada's nonprofit television network produced a splendid documentary several years ago to celebrate the province's 50th anniversary of joining the Canadian confederation, the title of the series was Newfoundland, East of Canada.

Mainlanders make jokes about the "goofy Newfies." That's also the title of a popular song on the Rock in which a Newfie - the locals embrace the nickname - replies how much better life is away from the big cities.

But those who live along the Gulf of St. Lawrence typically pay the government $10 a year so they can cut firewood to heat their homes in the bitter winters. They stack the wood along the one main highway, until they need it. (Surprisingly, no one steals the wood.) Nearby are rows of lobster traps the residents are permitted to use just six weeks a year.

A sizable community here would be 500 people. Businesses such as hairdressers and office supplies are likely to be operated out of the owners' small homes. Most towns have a single gas station.

The old-time general store serves most towns, stocking everything from dry goods to disposable diapers, rental videos to a small selection of produce shipped by off-island farmers.

In the small taverns often adjacent to a motel's restaurant, residents sit on stools in front of video slot machines, pushing the buttons and chain-smoking.

Snowmobiles, which provide transport in winter, are as prevalent as pickups.

The province includes the mainland section of Labrador and is huge, more than twice the size of Florida. But the closing of the fisheries and a few mines has dropped the population from 568,500 in 1991 to about 513,000 in 2001, though estimates show it may be inching back up.

Most of the province's interior has no human habitation, paved roads or government services.

With just seven of 308 seats in Parliament's House of Commons, Newfoundland has no clout at the federal level. Though most Newfies have an us-against-them attitude about their federal government (sometimes dismissed as "Uncle Ottawa"), the Maple Leaf flies alongside the provincial flag from innumerable front-yard flagpoles.

Now, on the island's western shore in Gros Morne National Park, third-generation fisherman Bill Bennett works as an interpreter at the restored house and barn at Broom Point.

Bennett speaks with the Newfoundlander's accent, which drops an "h', here, adds one there, changes "time to "toym" and calls to mind London's Cockneys. He relates that his grandfather "began a fishing operation not five minutes from here, 100 years ago. Me father fished for 50 years, and stopped just this year."

Bennett has traded fishing for recounting the daily chores carried out at Broom Point from 1941 to 1975.

He stands inside a garage-sized, clapboard cottage that was home each of those summers for three brothers, their wives and their four children: 10 people. The three bedrooms were just big enough for a double bed and a bureau; the largest room served as kitchen, dining area and community center.

When the families finally left 30 years ago, they were still using an outhouse.

There was no highway along the western coast until 1968, and the rudimentary roads were insufficient for heavily loaded trucks. Most of what the fishing communities consumed or produced was sent in or taken out by boat.

"You could keep lobsters alive in pens until they were picked up by a collector boat," Bennett says, "but the cod and salmon had to be processed immediately - clean it, gut it and salt it . . .

"The best summer these three families had, they shipped 100,000 pounds of fish at 11/4 cents a pound. That got them $1,250 - split three ways," for four months of work.

That they received any cash was unusual, for the fishing communities worked on a credit system. Merchants who often bought the catch would advance the families their food, nets and other equipment, then deduct these costs from the value of the catch at the end of the four-month season.

Often, the families would be told their indebtedness equaled or was less than the catch's value. If it was less, the families would start in the hole the next April.

In the fall and winter, after tending to the nets and equipment, most of the men would go to work inland, logging for the lumber companies or working in the zinc mines.

Many men would build their own houses in this off-season, felling trees, finishing the lumber, doing carpentry and calling on relatives and friends to help with roofing, siding and shingling. One estimate is that 80 percent of the residents on the western coast are living in houses they or their relatives built.

Until Highway 430 came through along the west coast, the fishing and logging people were isolated. They were cut off from the rest of the island - the provincial capital of St. John's is still at least an 81/2-hour drive from most communities on the St. Lawrence side of the island. And they were cut off from the rest of Canada; the southernmost tip of Newfoundland is 70 miles across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia.

Then the highway was built. It brought modern amenities, but it proved to be a mixed blessing.

"When the road came," Bill Bennett says, "it meant a fisherman for the first time could sell the catch immediately and have money in his hand at the end of a day.

"But it opened up opportunities for the young people" to do more than follow their family's traditional jobs, he said.

Joe Kennedy, also from a long line of fishermen, remembers the highway's arrival, too:

"I was a teenager before I saw an orange. I didn't know what it was," says Kennedy, 57. "Electricity came to my village in my time."

Kennedy worked a lobster boat with his father and brothers before starting a 30-year career with the provincial government's newly expanded commercial fisheries office. Recently retired, Kennedy readily acknowledges it was overfishing that depleted the cod and salmon stocks, but he adds:

"The closure of the fisheries was the largest single economic impact ever on the Canadian economy," Kennedy said. "The federal government estimated the cost of the subsidies and pensions would be $3-billion to $4-billion total (about $2.4-billion to $3.2-billion, in U.S. funds), for 25,000 men impacted."

Instead, about 40,000 men were effected, with 27,000 of them from Newfoundland. That cost Ottawa about $5-billion (about $4-billion U.S.), he said. And the figure continues to rise.

Although the vast schools of pollock, yellowtail flounder and cod are gone, shrimp are on the increase, Kennedy says. There are still thousands of men working, two to five a boat, who are catching what the government will let them take.

Yet, he adds, "In Newfoundland, "fish' is automatically cod.

"If you're standing knee-deep in turbot, hake, haddock and halibut, and you are asked, "Do you have any fish today?, the answer will be, "No.' "

- Robert N. Jenkins can be reached at 727 893-8496 or jenkins@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 8, 2005, 09:45:07]