Rating: 8.0/10.
A history of the cod and its overfishing, one of the most catastrophic crashes of species caused by human activity. Previously, cod was so abundant that it was said you could almost walk across the water standing on the fish. However, after centuries of overfishing, the population has been reduced to near nonexistence today.
The first Europeans to fish for cod were the Basques. Prior to the discovery of the Americas, the Basques were already fishing in the North Atlantic and selling their catch to European markets, keeping the location of their fishing grounds a secret. Cod were very large fish, often over a meter long, and were easy to catch since they swam with their mouths open and would happily eat any kind of bait. The challenge was mostly just the physical labor of hauling them up. Cod were so plentiful and cheap that they became the majority of fish consumed in Europe for several centuries, with most cultures preferring to eat it salted rather than fresh. After the secret was discovered, many countries competed to fish for cod, each developing different ways of preparing it. The book provides numerous historical recipes involving cod.
Cod was vital industry in the American colonies. In New England, the Pilgrims were the first settlers and they lacked farming skills and faced starvation until they learned how to fish. Cod were found in New England during winter and in Newfoundland and Iceland during the summer, as they tended to move around depending on the water temperature. Newfoundland also had a cod industry, although it was smaller due to the difficulty of attracting settlers to its colder and harsher climate. Cod became an integral part of the slave trade, with low-quality fish fed to slaves in the West Indies and high-quality fish used to buy slaves from West Africa.
With the advent of the industrial age, new methods of fishing were invented, such as long-lining, which involved sending a small “dory” ship away from the main ship to set a long line. This was a dangerous activity as the small ship could sometimes get lost in the fog. These innovative fishing techniques were necessary because, by the 19th century, the cod population was already starting to decline. Fishing became even more efficient with mechanized boats and techniques to catch everything in a vast area on an industrial scale in the early 20th century, such as dragging a net along the bottom that would catch everything, including cod that went to the bottom to be safe.
Iceland avoided industrialization until the 1930s, and by then it was evident that the amount of cod in the sea was not infinite. Conflicts arose between Icelandic fishermen and British trawlers over fishing rights off the coast of Iceland, leading to techniques of sabotaging each other by cutting lines and running boats without explicitly going to war. Eventually, the result of this “Cod War” was the establishment of a 200-mile exclusive zone from the coast of each country where other countries were not allowed to fish. After the war, it became apparent to all countries that the industry needed to be regulated and carefully controlled to conserve the fish. Newfoundland originally accepted a similar 200-mile fishing zone, but even then, the catches were dwindling. Finally, a moratorium was put in place in 1992, ending almost all cod fishing.
Cod has now almost disappeared from the wild; it is not completely extinct, but there are so few that commercial fishing is no longer viable. This has harmed the economies of Canada, Britain, and New England, as fishermen are forced out of work due to restrictions on the number of fishing days per year and the size of boats, making it unfavorable to continue fishing. Nowadays, many of them are either out of work, leaving towns without a fishing industry, or they have become tourism operators, such as whale-watching guides.
This book is a fairly fast read and tells the tragedy of the commons story that played out over hundreds of years of fishing and depletion of a finite natural resource, especially accelerated in the industrial age. Even though cod, a fish that once laid millions of eggs, has still been decimated by human activity.
