Cod Read Free Page B

the snow. You’d come in numb. We didn’t have these modern clothes. Just wool. Or if they had them, we didn’t know.”
    â€œNo,” said Leonard, “they weren’t there.”
    â€œChrist, it was cold.”
    â€œWe didn’t have any choices.”
    â€œCouldn’t even put this much salt beef in.”
    The conversation turns to a favorite Newfoundland topic, how unhealthy their diet is. Traditional Newfoundland food is based on pork fat. Everything is cooked in it and then seasoned with scrunchions—rendered, diced fatback.
    â€œGood for the arteries,” Bernard says with a laugh. “You know what my brother says. You put something in front of him, and he always asks, ‘Is it good for you?’ If you say ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Then I don’t want it.’ ”
    They finish eating—Sam and Bernard share the roe, and Leonard eats the tongue—and head back to harbor. Only forty fish have been tagged, and the biggest is just seventy-six centimeters (thirty inches). Ten years ago, this record fish would have been barely the average size. Only three of the forty are large enough to be capable of spawning.
    The men in the other boat worked three lines and caught their 100 fish with a total weight of 375 pounds. This means the average is less than four pounds at the time of year when Petty Harbour used to get some of its biggest catches—boats with 300 fish having a total weight of 3,000 pounds.
    They set aside the parts for the scientists and divide the rest of the fish into bags containing about ten pounds of fish each. A ten-pound bag should have been one cod, but most bags have two or three. When the two boats come into the harbor, some fifty people, mostly from other towns, are already waiting in a polite line.
    This is Canada. These people have jobs or are on public assistance, mostly the latter these days. They are not hungry but simply yearning for a taste of their local dish. The big fish companies, the ones that owned bottom draggers that had cleaned out the last of the cod before the moratorium, now import frozen cod from Iceland, Russia, and Norway. But these people are accustomed to fresh, white, flaky cod “with the nerves still tingling,” as one fisherman’s daughter put it. Sam had once sent a shipment to New Orleans, and the chef had complained that it was too fresh and the meat did not hold together well. Only fishing communities know what real fresh cod, with thick white flakes that come apart, tastes like.
    Even limiting the cod to ten pounds a person, there is not enough. A few people are turned away, and one of them asks one of the fishermen, “Where are they taking the rest of the fish?”
    The problem with the people in Petty Harbour, out here on the headlands of North America, is that they are at the wrong end of a 1,000-year fishing spree.

part one
    A Fish Tale
    ... SALT COD, SPREADING ITSELF BEFORE THE DRAB, HEFTY SHOP KEEPERS, MAKING THEM DREAM OF DEPARTURE, OF TRAVEL.
    â€”Émile Zola, “The Belly of Paris,” 1873

1: The Race to Codlandia
    HE SAID IT MUST BE FRIDAY, THE DAY HE COULD NOT
SELL ANYTHING EXCEPT SERVINGS OF A FISH KNOWN IN
CASTILE AS POLLOCK OR IN ANDALUSIA AS SALT COD.
    â€”Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605-1616
    Â 
    A medieval fisherman is said to have hauled up a three-foot-long cod, which was common enough at the time. And the fact that the cod could talk was not especially surprising. But what was astonishing was that it spoke an unknown language. It spoke Basque.
    This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters.
    The Basques are enigmatic. They have lived in what is now the northwest corner of Spain and a nick of the French southwest for longer than history records,