In the massachusetts statehouse, high above the gallery in the house of representatives, directly opposite the painting of John Hancock proposing the Bill of Rights, there hangs a five-foot-long wooden codfish. It is painted gold with scarlet gills, and it has been there for exactly a century--ever since it was moved from the old House chamber, where it had hung for a century before that. The transfer of the Sacred Cod on March 7, 1895, was an occasion for pomp and soaring oratory. A committee of 15 legislators was appointed to fetch the fish. Two by two, they followed the sergeant at arms into the old chamber, watched as the cod was lowered onto a bier draped with the American flag, and then marched behind the four pages who carried it into the new hall. There the cod and its entourage were greeted with a deep bow by the senator from Gloucester, the state’s preeminent fishing port. The rest of the assembly rose to their feet and applauded the fish vigorously. Everybody who could make a pretext for touching its fins or for holding it straight on the stretcher did so, the Boston Daily Globe reported the next day. The triumph of the codfish was front-page news in both the Globe and the Boston Herald; each devoted nearly half a broadsheet to the event.
The early 1890s were good years for cod fishing in Massachusetts, and in particular for Gloucester. At the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Gloucester mounted an elaborate exhibit, featuring a scale model of its thriving waterfront. That same year the Portuguese immigrants to that waterfront finished building themselves a church, Our Lady of Good Voyage, and topped it with a gaily painted statue: Madonna with Schooner. Rudyard Kipling was holed up in Brattleboro, Vermont, in the 1890s, writing Captains Courageous, his paean to the Gloucestermen who went down to the sea in schooners and dories. Sailing on the rich offshore banks, from Georges Bank off Cape Cod to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland; staying at sea for months; fishing with hook and line from small boats tossed on large waves, those men sustained an industry whose reach was global. In 1895, fishermen caught 60,000 tons of cod in the waters off New England. In May of that year, two months after the shifting of the Sacred Cod, one man landed the Patriarch Cod--a six-foot-long, 2111Ž2-pound fish. Its likes have never been seen again. Cod do not live that long these days.
Fishing has changed a lot in the last century. On a bleak, sleety morning last November, a few dozen descendants of the captains courageous gathered 15 miles inland from Gloucester, and about as far from Kipling’s Gloucester as it is possible to get. They came, in their flannel shirts and jeans and baseball caps, to a Holiday Inn set in the strip-mall ugliness of Route 1 in Peabody. They sat, in a pink, drop-ceilinged ballroom, under a reflecting disco ball, and listened to their fate being discussed by men in suits--the Groundfish Committee of the New England Fishery Management Council. They watched, more or less mutely, a computer-model presentation of the options open to this committee. The presentation was opaque even to scientists in the audience, and the committee’s discussion was lackluster and at times nonexistent. But it mattered little: everyone knew that the options were all but nonexistent, too. A month earlier the council had decided that fishing for cod on Georges Bank--as well as for haddock and yellowtail flounder, the two other important bottom-dwelling fish--must essentially be stopped. The committee’s task was to work out the details.
That such a long and fruitful history should meet so wretched an end: on that happy afternoon a century ago in the statehouse it could not have seemed possible. This sedate and solitary fish, Congressman James Gallivan of Boston had told the assembly, speaking of the wooden one, ...commemorates democracy. It celebrates the rise of free institutions. It emphasizes progress. It epitomizes Massachusetts. This was not just posturing. Endless resources, free for the taking, are what made America possible, and it started with cod. Cod spurred the settlement of the New World. They were its first industry and export. They fed the Pilgrims. And now, after 500 years, from Georges Bank right up to the Grand, they are all but gone.
Atlantic cod, gadus morhua, have been around a lot longer than we have, probably more than 10 million years. Cod survived even the ice ages, presumably by moving south. Today they live from the Barents Sea north of Norway down the European coast as far south as the Bay of Biscay, and from northern Labrador and Greenland down the American coast as far as Cape Hatteras. As far as biologists can tell, the cod that live today on opposite sides of the Atlantic and even at different points along the North American coast form distinct stocks, or populations. But they are still in occasional touch with one another and still belong to the same species. In 1961, for instance, a fish that had been tagged by British researchers in the North Sea four years earlier was caught off Newfoundland, after a journey of more than 2,000 miles.
