History and Context: Reflections from Newfoundland

Abstract

John Crosbie, the Canadian minister of fisheries, stunned Newfoundlanders on July 2, 1992, when he announced the first moratorium on the northern cod fishery, bringing to an end one of the oldest and richest fisheries on Earth. I was then teaching maritime history at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and the news caught me entirely off guard. Though aware of the problems in the cod fishery for some years, I had not realized that things were as bad as they were—or at least I was not certain enough to do anything about it. For almost fifteen years I had been writing a book on the social history of colonial New England’s cod fishery that dealt well enough with the hard lives of fishermen but ignored entirely the possibility that the livelihood they pursued might have been in the long run unsustainable. I had concerned myself only with the way in which the profits from the fishery had been shared and had ignored entirely the process through which the fishery itself was vanishing. And although it seemed true enough that the degradation of the cod stocks had not yet begun before 1850, the period I was studying, I could not run from the feeling that I had been dealing with a problem of the second order. Remarkably, two of my most talented colleagues at Memorial—Rosemary Ommer and Sean Cadigan— were completing parallel studies of the Gaspé and of Newfoundland in the nineteenth century that also focused on the social relations of production in the fishery rather than the question of its ecological sustainability. Although there is no reason to be ashamed of any of these books for what they did achieve, we were in some real way fiddling while Rome burned.