Servants of the Fish: A Portrait of Newfoundland After the Great Cod Collapse [Hardcover]

Myron Arms (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2004

As the last of the northern cod disappeared from the fishing banks of eastern North America during the waning years of the 20th century, more than just fish faced the threat of extinction. In communities all around the island of Newfoundland, thousands of fishermen and their families suddenly found themselves confronted by a similar threat.Servants of the Fish is the story of these people, who are at once the perpetrators and the victims of this event. As he did in his best-selling Riddle of the Ice, Arms employs the drama of the voyage to bring readers face to face with the people and the geography of the tale he tells. It is the tale of a particular time and place. Yet it is also an allegory of sorts-about predators and prey, about greed and denial, and about our collective ability as human beings to destroy natural systems once thought to be infinite.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In this compelling portrait of the fishermen of Newsfoundland, Arms documents the human side of an ecological catastrophe. -- Lester Brown, president, Earth Policy Institute

Lucid, stimulating, and deeply moving--an important achievement. -- Silver Donald Cameron, author, The Living Beach

The characters are convincing, the prose powerful, the science accurate. The message . . . no concerned citizen can afford to ignore. -- Christopher Flaven, president, Worldwatch Institute

About the Author

Author of serveral well-known books, including the Boston-Globe best-seller "Riddle of the Ice." Myron Arms holds graduate degrees from both Harvard and Yale, and is a professional small-boat sailor. His research for this book includes nine sailing journeys to Newfoundlwith long inteviess with residents.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 250 pages
• Publisher: Upper Access, Inc.; 1ST edition (August 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942679296
• ISBN-13: 978-0942679298
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #787,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Many faces of little-known places, and a warning to the world, June 1, 2007

By 

Sasha Paris - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Servants of the Fish: A Portrait of Newfoundland After the Great Cod Collapse (Hardcover)

As humans affect the natural world, so does it affect us. This basic fact can be easy to forget in places where technology masks our interactions with the earth's systems. But it is vividly evident in Newfoundland, where the abrupt collapse of cod populations prompted a fishing moratorium in 1992, ending an industry that had been the island's lifeblood for centuries.

Why did the cod vanish? In the summer of 1996, American writer Myron Arms sailed around Newfoundland's coast, searching for answers to this question. Servants of the Fish is a memoir of his journey, of visits to a variety of communities and interviews with residents and of his personal struggle to understand this devastating event and its implications for the world at large.

Arms examines many facets of a very complex issue. Most of the people featured are fishermen and their families, though scientists, politicians, tour guides and others are also given voice. Everyone offers their own reasons for the cod collapse, from harvest of capelin (a major cod food source) by foreign factory ships to inadequate research by fisheries scientists to climate change. One man claims that the destruction of commercial sealing by activists in the 1980s allowed seals to multiply unchecked and eat all the cod, and that the fish won't return "until we gets rid of them seals once and for all." A proud Briton blames the "damn Canadians" in the government for treating their fishery as an expendable commodity. Arms listens to all of these proclamations and takes each with a grain or three of salt, understanding that nobody--including himself--knows the whole truth.

Whatever the reason for the cod collapse, it affected everyone. Some communities are emptying as people depart for more promising places, leaving eerie reminders of what once was. Many fishermen are living on welfare or trying out the chancy new shrimp and snow crab fisheries; their accounts of lost livelihood and fear for the future are deeply sobering. Others have taken up with new businesses, including mussel farms and tourist attractions, but are equally disturbed by what has happened. The former Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, apparently unfazed and looking forward to the prospects of oil drilling, provides a jarring counter-note.

These encounters are interspersed with descriptions of his passage along the rugged coast, among icebergs, ships and whales. Every chapter covers one community, and most begin with a description of its appearance from sea. Though some may find such interludes boring and unnecessary, they weave the piece together and give readers a better sense of the area. Likewise, Arms' reflections on the history of various places, of previous visits, of scientific research relating to people's claims, can make the narrative confusing at times but add greatly to its overall depth.

Not everything is bleak. Many characters, even those hit hard by the cod's loss, are ebullient and filled with stubborn hope that they can still make lives for themselves. Some sections are a joy to read, such as an encounter with a formidable and charming farmer. There are stories to inspire us, like that of a scientist who worked with fishermen to single-handedly save up to a third of Newfoundland's whales by finding ways to keep them away from fishermen's nets and free those that were entangled--a win-win act of human ecology at its best! But an undercurrent of sadness runs strong across the land, as people confront a problem to which few can offer solutions. Lest we start feeling too removed from the situation, Arms offers occasional piercing reminders that Newfoundland is only one part of the world where resources are being destroyed at a tremendous rate. The message: if our course is not changed in a thoughtful way, it will be only a matter of time before more and more places suffer Newfoundland's fate until there is nowhere else to turn.

With compassion, intelligence and a knack for conversing easily with almost anyone he meets, Arms has assembled a mosaic of people sharing a harsh, finite home, and of their efforts to survive without the cod that has linked them all. For anyone interested in the interactions between humans and our world, and what can happen when they go seriously wrong for too long, Servants of the Fish is a very valuable read.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An engrossing social history, October 30, 2004

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Servants of the Fish: A Portrait of Newfoundland After the Great Cod Collapse (Hardcover)

Servants Of The Fish: A Portrait of Newfoundland after the Great Cod Collapse is an engrossing social history of the individual people and of society as a whole in the wake of the threat of northern cod extinction along the fishing banks of eastern North America. Narrated in brisk, straightforward prose, it tells of those who dedicated their lives to fishing, and who were both precipitators and victims of the ecological catastrophe. A plain-terms narration, equally accessible to the lay reader and the concerned ecologist or environmentalist alike.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The moratorium from the view of an outsider, June 16, 2007

By 

MWC (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Servants of the Fish: A Portrait of Newfoundland After the Great Cod Collapse (Hardcover)

I was 12 when the moratorium was imposed, and though I grew up in the big city (I'm a Torontonian,) I have a lot of family out in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and spent a lot of time out there when I was growing up and consequently, the moratorium was a big part of my teenage years.

Arms' social history of life in Newfoundland after the moratorium is fascinating. He is thorough in his reasearch, relying not just on the fishermen to provide him information, but the scientists and politicians (however unpopular) as well. In the end, he comes out with a well-rounded view of post-moratorium Newfoundland, its displaced fishermen and those who have adopted a new fishery to support themselves, the general cuisine of the island that relied so heavily on its cod industry and the science behind why the temporary moratorium was still at the book's publication (and remains 15 years on from its imposition) in place.

Overall, an excellent read if you want to know more about Newfoundland at the turn of the new century, the codfishing industry, the people who had and have made a living on the water and/or the science of why, 15 years later, the cod population has failed to recover as the DFO expected it to do within a few years.