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Chronicles of Canada Volume 31 - All Afloat: A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways

{155} <h3> CHAPTER IX </h3> <h3> FISHERIES </h3> The fisheries of Canada are the most important in the world. True as this statement is, it needs some explanation. In the first place, Newfoundland is included, in accordance with its inclusion under all other headings in this book. Then, all the wholly or partly unexploited waters are taken into consideration, including Hudson Bay and the Arctic ocean. And, thirdly, the catch made by foreigners in all waters neighbouring the Canadian coasts is not left out. Thus the Canadian fisheries are held to mean all the fisheries, fresh and salt, in or nearest to the whole of British North America. This is a perfectly fair basis to start from. It is, indeed, the fairest basis that can be found, as it affords a fixed territorial standard of comparison with other countries; and standards of comparison are particularly hard to fix in regard to fishing. French and Americans fish round Newfoundland, in waters {156} closely neighbouring British territory and far removed from their own; and the fishing fleets of the British Isles work grounds as far asunder as the White Sea is from Africa. Yet all their catches figure in official reports as being French, American, or British. And so they legally are, if the men who make them observe the three-mile open-water distance-limit fixed by international agreement as the proper territorial boundary of government control. Beyond three miles from shore all 'nationals' are on an equal footing. Now, taking the word Canadian in the sense just defined, it is safe to say that Canadian waters contain a greater quantity of the principal food fishes than those of any other country. The truth of this statement depends on three facts. The first is that practically all fish landed in Canada are caught in Canadian waters. This is a marked contrast to what happens in the other great fishing countries, like the United States, the British islands, Germany, Norway, and France, all of which send some of their fleets very far afield. The second fact is the statistics of totals caught. Canada at present catches fifty million dollars' worth of fish from her own waters in a single year. The 'Britisher' and 'Yankee' totals {157} each exceed this, though not by much. But the Yankee total includes a good deal, and the Britisher total a very great deal, caught far outside their own waters. No other country is even worthy of comparison with these. The third fact is that the Canadian total, already advancing more rapidly than any other total, must continue to advance more rapidly still, because Canada has the greatest area of unexploited fish-bearing waters in the world. If the amount caught per head of the total population is made the standard of comparison, then the Canadian catch is more than five times greater than the Britishers', and more than ten times greater than the Yankees'. And if, still keeping to this standard, the comparison is made between totals caught in strictly territorial waters, Canada surpasses both Britishers and Yankees, put together, ten times over. There are nearly 120,000 fishermen in Canada and Newfoundland. The proportion in Newfoundland is, of course, by far the higher of the two. About 60,000 people are engaged in handling fish ashore, and many thousands more are concerned in trading with fish products. One way and another, the livelihood of at least one Canadian in every fifteen, and one Newfoundlander in every two, is entirely dependent {158} on fishing. Statistics are apt to become bewildering unless carefully marshalled in tabular form. But one or two items might be added. There is a fishing craft of some kind, however small most of them are, to every single family in Newfoundland, a proportion immeasurably higher than in any other country in the world. But even more astonishing is the statistical fact that the fishermen of all nations in Newfoundland waters catch each year nearly 1000 cod-fish for every single individual person there is in the whole population of the island. After this, numbers seem rather to weaken than strengthen the argument. But it is worth mentioning that there are nearly 80,000 local fishing boats of all sorts actually counted by the governments of Canada and Newfoundland, from little rowboats up to full-powered steamers of considerable tonnage; that nearly a quarter of the whole number in 1913 already had gasoline or other motors; that the total length of all the Canadian and Newfoundland coastlines is nearly equal to that of the equator; that, excluding all parts of the Great Lakes within the American sphere of influence, the fresh-water fishing area of Canada exceeds the total area of the British Isles by more than 100,000 square miles; and, finally, that the {159} mere increase of value in the fisheries of the single province of British Columbia, within a single year, has exceeded the value of the total catch marketed in several of the smaller states of Europe and America. The two principal salt-water craft that have a history behind them and a sphere of active usefulness to-day are the schooner and its tender, the little dory. A schooner is a fore-and-aft-rigged vessel with at least two masts and four sails—mainsail, foresail, jib, and the staysail generally called a wind-bag. The schooner rig makes the handiest all-round vessel known. It can be managed by fewer hands in proportion to its tonnage than any other, and its sails do the greatest amount of work under the most varied conditions. Other rigs may beat it on special points; but the general sum of all the sailing virtues is decidedly its own. It takes you more nearly into a head wind than most others, and scuds before a lubber's wind dead aft with a maximum of canvas spread out 'wing-and-wing'—one big sail to port and the other out to starboard. The dory is a two-man rowboat which possesses as many of the different, and sometimes contradictory, good points of the canoe, skiff, punt, and lifeboat as it is possible to {160} combine in a single craft. It can be rowed, sculled, sailed, or driven by a motor. It is the first aquatic plaything for the boys, and often the last salvation for the men. The way it will ride out a storm that makes a liner labour and sinks any ill-found vessel like a stone is little short of marvellous. It has a flattish bottom, sheering up at both ends, which are high in the gunwale. The flat stern, which looks like a narrow wedge with the point cut off, is a good deal more waterborne than the bow and rises more readily to the seas without presenting too much resisting surface to either wind or wave. Each schooner has several dories, which fish all round it, thus suggesting what is often called the hen-and-chickens style. At dark, or when the catch has filled the dory, the men come back on board, 'nesting' half a dozen dories, one inside the other. But sometimes a sudden storm, especially if it follows fog, will set the chickens straying; and then the men must ride it out moored to some sort of drogue or floating anchor. The usual drogue is a trawl tub, quite perfect if filled with oil-soaked cotton waste to make a 'slick' which keeps the crests from breaking. The tub is hove into the water, over the stern, to which it is made fast by a bit of line long {161} enough to give the proper scope. And there, with the live ballast of two expert men, whose home has always been the water, the dory will thread its perilous way unharmed through spume and spindrift, across the engulfing valleys and over the riven hill-tops of the sea. These schooners and their attendant dories have a long and stirring history of their own. But they are not the only craft, nor yet the oldest; and though their history would easily fill a volume twice the size of this, it would only tell us a very little about Canadian fisheries as a whole, from first to last. Even if we went back by hasty steps, of quite a century each, we should never get into the wild days of the early 'fishing admirals' before our space gave out. All we can do here is simply to mention the steps themselves, and then pass on. First, the red men, few in number, and fishing from canoes. Then the early whites, dispossessing the red men and steadily increasing. They came from all seafaring peoples, and had no other form of justice than what could be enforced by 'fishing admirals,' who won their rank by the order of their arrival on the Banks—admiral first, vice-admiral second, rear-admiral third. Then government by men-of-war began, and Newfoundland itself became, {162} officially, a man-of-war, under its own captain from the Royal Navy. Finally, civil self-government followed in the usual way. All through there was a constantly growing and apparently inextricable entanglement of international complications, which were only settled by The Hague agreement in the present century. And only within almost as recent times has what may be called the natural history of Canadian fisheries begun to follow the inevitable trend of evolution which gradually changes the civilized fisherman from a hunter into a farmer. As man increases in number, and his means of hunting down game increase still faster, a time inevitably comes when he disturbs the balance of nature to such an extent that he must either exterminate his prey or begin to 'farm' it, that is, begin to breed and protect as well as kill it. Fisheries are no exception to this rule; and what with close seasons, prohibitions, hatcheries, and other means of keeping up the supply of fish, the fishing population is beginning, though only to a very small extent as yet, to make the change. Some day we shall talk of our pedigree cod, but the men of this generation will not live to see it. The change is beneficial for the mere mouths {163} there are to fill. But it means less and less demand for those glorious and most inspiring qualities of courage, strength, and bodily skill which are required by all who pit themselves against Nature in her wildest and most dangerous moods. The fisherman and sealer have only the elements to fight; though this too often means a fight for life. A hundred men were frozen to death on the ice, and two hundred more were drowned in the Gulf, during the great spring seal hunt blizzard of 1914. Whalemen still occasionally fight for their lives against their prey as well. And all three kinds of deep-sea fishery have bred so many simple-minded heroes that only cowards attract particular attention. No modern reader needs reminding that whales are not fish but mammals, belonging to the same order of the animal kingdom as monkeys, dogs, and men. They include the most gigantic of all creatures, living or extinct. The enormous 'right' whales of the story-books have been driven far north in greatly diminished numbers. The equally famous sperm whales have always been very rare, as they prefer southern waters. But the 'finners,' which are still fairly common, include the 'sulphurs,' among which there have been {164} specimens far exceeding any authentic sperms or 'rights.' Even the humpbacks and common finbacks, both well known in Canadian waters, occasionally surpass the average size of sperms and 'rights.' But the sulphur is probably the only kind of whale which sometimes grows to a hundred feet and more. Whaling is done in three different ways: from canoes, from boats sent off by sailing ships, and from steamers direct. The Indians whaled from canoes before the white man came, and a few Indians, Eskimos, and French Canadians are whaling from canoes to-day. Eskimos sometimes attack a large whale in a single canoe, but oftener with a regular flotilla of kayaks, and worry it to death; as the Indians once did with bark canoes in the Gulf and lower St Lawrence. Modern canoe whaling is done from a North-Shore wooden canoe of considerable size and weight with a crew of two men. It is now chiefly carried on by a few French Canadians living along the north shore of the lower St Lawrence. It is not called whaling but porpoise-hunting, from the mistaken idea that the little white whale is a porpoise, instead of the smallest kind of whale, running up to over twenty feet in length. It is dangerous work at best, and a good many men {165} are drowned. As a rule they are very skilful, and they nearly always jab carefully while sitting down. Sometimes, however, the rare occasion serves the rare harpooner, when the whale and canoe appear as if about to meet each other straight head-on. Then, in a flash, the man in the bow is up on his feet, with the harpoon so poised that the rocking water, the mettlesome canoe, and his watchful comrade in the stern, all form part of the concentrated energy with which he brings his every faculty to a single point of instantaneous action. There, for one fateful moment, he stands erect, his whole tense body like the full-drawn bow before it speeds the arrow home. He throws: and then, for some desperate minutes, it is often a fight to a finish between the whale's life and his own. The old wooden whaling vessel under mast and sail is almost extinct. But it had a long and splendid career. The Basques, who were then the models for the world, began in the Gulf before Jacques Cartier came; and worked the St Lawrence with wonderful success as high as the basin of Quebec. The French never whaled in Canada; but the 'Bluenose' Nova Scotians did, and held their own against all comers. 'A dead whale or a stove boat' {166} was the motto for every man who joined the chase. Discipline was stern; and rightly so. A green hand was allowed one show of funk; but that was all. However, there was very little funking so long as Britishers, Bluenoses, and Yankees could pick their crews from among the most adventurous of their own populations. Hardly had the long-drawn clarion of the look-out's B—l—o—w! sounded aloft than the boats were lowered from the davits and began pulling away towards the likeliest spot for a rise. Two barbed harpoons, always known as 'irons,' were carried on the same line, always called the 'warp.' It both could be used, so much the better, especially as they were some distance apart on the warp, the bight of which formed a considerable drag in the water. Other drags, usually called 'drugs,' were bits of wood made fast thwart-wise on the warp, so as to increase the pull on a sounding whale. The coiling and management of the warp was of the utmost importance. Many a man has gone to Davy Jones with a strangling loop of rope around him. Everything, of course, had to be made shipshape in advance, as there was no time for finishing touches once the cry of B—l—o—w! was {167} raised. And if there was haste at all times, what was there not when fleets of whalers under different flags were together in the same waters? The approach, often made by changing the oars for silent paddles; the strike; the flying whale; the snaking, streaking, zipping line; the furious tow, with the boat almost leaping from crest to crest; the long haul in on the gradually slackening warp; the lancing and the dying flurry, were all exciting enough by themselves. And when a whale showed fight, charged home, and smashed a boat to splinters, it took a smart crew to escape and get rescued in time. A Greenland whale once took fifteen harpoons, drew out six miles of line, and carried down a boat with all hands drowned before it was killed. Old sperms that had once escaped without being badly hurt were always ready to fight again. One fighting whale took down the bow oarsman in its mouth, drowned the next two, and sent the rest flying with a single snap of its jaws. Another fought nine hours, took five harpoons and seven bombs, smashed up three boats, and sank dead—a total loss. A third, after smashing a boat, charged the ship and stove her side so badly that she sank within five minutes. {168} Yet accidents like these only spurred the whalemen on to greater efforts, not of mere bravado, but of daring skill. Perhaps the most wonderful regular feat of all was 'spading,' which meant slewing the boat close in, as the whale was about to sound, and cutting the tendons of its tremendous death-dealing tail by a slicing blow from the two-handed razor-edged 'spade.' Perhaps the most wonderful of all exceptional escapes was that of a boat which was towed by one whale right over the back of another. And perhaps the most exciting finish to any international race was the one in which the Yankee, who came up second, got 'first iron' by 'pitchpoling' clear over the intervening British boat, whose crew were nearly drowned by this 'slick' Yankee's flying warp. No wonder old whalemen despise the easier and safer methods of steam whaling practised by the Norwegians in Canadian and other waters at the present day. And yet steam whaling is not without some thrilling risks. The steamers are speedy, handy, small, about one hundred tons or so, with the latest pattern of the explosive harpoon gun originally invented by Sven Foyn in 1880. The range is very short, rarely over fifty yards. The harpoon may be compared to the stick of an {169} umbrella, with four ribs that open when the bomb in the handle explodes inside the whale, which it thus anchors to the steamer. The whole steamer then plays the whale as an angler plays a fish, letting out line—sometimes two miles of it—towing with stopped engines at first, and then winding in while giving quarter, half, and three-quarter speed astern, as the steamer gains on the whale. Even a steamer, however, has been charged, stove, and sunk. And a fighting humpback in the Gulf of St Lawrence is no easy game to tackle with a hand-lance in a pram. Norwegians are thrifty folk, and bomb harpooning is expensive. So when the whale and steamer meet, at the end of the chase, a tiny pram is launched with two men rowing and a third standing up in the stern to wield the fifteen-foot lance. As the humpback's flippers are also fifteen feet long, and as they thrash about with blows that have sunk several prams and killed more than one crew, it still requires the fittest nerves and muscles to give the final stroke. But whaling, in this and every other form, is bound to come to an untimely end very soon unless the whales are protected by international game laws rigidly enforced. At present the only protection is the exhaustion of a whaling {170} ground below a paying yield; when whaling stops till the whales breed back. But soon they won't breed back at all. Modern steam whaling spares no kind of whale in any kind of sea. It has one good point. It is more humane, as a rule. But the odds against the whale are simply annihilating. And the extermination of whales, those magnificent leviathans of the mighty deep, would be a loss from every point of view. Their own commercial value counts for a good deal. Their value to the fisherman by driving bait inshore counts for a good deal more. And their admirable place in nature counts for most of all. Like elephants, lions, and deer, like birds of paradise and eagles, the whales are among those noblest forms of life, without whose glorious strength and beauty this world would be a poorer, tamer, meaner place for proper men to live in. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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