How Deep Is the Ocean?

Olaf Uwe Janzen is an associate professor of history at Memorial
University, reviews editor of The Northern Mariner, and editor of
Northern Seas.

This collection of 18 essays appears in the aftermath of the collapse of
the Atlantic cod fishery; while the essays do not offer a definitive
explanation for that crisis, they do make the crisis more understandable
by placing it within an historical, social, and economic context. The
book offers a broad perspective in time (1500 to the present),
geography, (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick), and theme (the
fishing industries, trade, merchant credit, fisher society,
technological evolution, and state policy). Half the essays cover the
period before 1900. The rest are devoted to this century, when the
fishery underwent profound transformations, from sail to steam, from
saltfish to fresh/frozen, from overseas to North American markets, from
merchant-driven to corporate and state-dominated fisheries. Within this
century, technologies and strategies were introduced that made the
disastrous overfishing of recent decades possible.

So complicated a story is not easily told in a single volume, and gaps
and imbalances inevitably appear: there is nothing on the 18th-century
British fishery; Quebec receives light treatment; there is nothing on
Prince Edward Island; the “Atlantic fishery” of the title does not
include lobster, salmon, crab, shrimp, or other commercially important
marine resources. The essays are also uneven in quality. For example,
the evidence for Sheila Andrew’s essay on family economy in
19th-century Miscou is extremely narrow, while Robert Sweeny’s essay,
which opens on a strong note with a convincing analysis of merchant
credit strategies in 19th-century Bonavista, closes with unsubstantiated
claims about the significance of the informal outport economy.

Nor do the editors link essays with thematic continuity. Andrew’s
essay might usefully be read after Sweeny’s comment on the informal
outport economy; Balcom, Candow, and Baker and Ryan all comment
independently on the transition in production from saltfish to
fresh/frozen fish. Wright defines the state’s adoption of
“modernization” of the fishing industry as a post–1945 phenomenon,
whereas essays by Candow and Baker and Ryan identify the 1920s and 1930s
as the critical moment. How Deep Is the Ocean? therefore does not
provide a comprehensive and coherent discussion of Canada’s Atlantic
fishery. Nevertheless, the essays can be recommended as useful
introductions to many of the new directions in which academic research
into the fishery is headed. Be sure, however, to secure a copy with the
publisher’s “errata” insert, as the book is marred by numerous
unnecessary errors.