On the Broken Shore. James MacManus
these research trips ever since.
It was Buck who had opened his eyes to the power of the fishing lobby when they took his boat out to the Stellwagen sanctuary, 842 square miles of federally protected ocean between Cape Ann and Cape Cod, ten miles north of Provincetown at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay. They had made the first of several trips to Stellwagen a month after Leo had arrived on the Cape. The point about Stellwagen was that it wasn’t a sanctuary and it wasn’t protected, as Buck showed him. On calm days Buck would turn the engines off over the bank, a kidney-shaped shelf that rose to within 100 feet of the surface, and let the boat drift. Around them were the whale-watching boats, and as the day drew on the fishing boats working out of Gloucester, Portland and Portsmouth up the coast.
They would open their beers, unwrap cold steak sandwiches, and Buck would tell his story. The shallow waters of the bank were the heart of the sanctuary, but beyond lay deeper water, dropping at some places to a depth of 600 feet. The steep sides of the bank created rising currents which brought nutrients into the shallows. In turn the fish followed, and they brought the whales.
The fish brought the fishermen, and the whales brought the tourist boats. And both were killing Stellwagen. But the main culprits were the fishermen.
‘That’s me,’ said Buck. ‘Well, people like me. We’ve fished this place to hell and back. Know what? They should have no-take zones in every marine sanctuary, especially here. No fishing. Full stop. But the politicians daren’t do it. Gutless cowards.’
As Leo discovered, it was all true. The fishing industry along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts could easily withstand the creation of a fully protected reserve over Stellwagen, but all that happened was a seemingly endless series of studies commissioned by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration – and the continuation of bottom-trawling over the bank.
So 80 species of fish and 22 species of marine mammals were being studied to death by Federal bureaucrats, fished to extinction by the local boats, and all the while gawped at by the 300,000 tourists who cruised these waters in the summer months.
That was the way Leo put it in his lectures, and in a guest column for the Herald.
Leo watched Buck at the wheel, his deeply lined face jutting out from an old captain’s cap, his rough hands almost stroking the polished wooden casing of the compass. He wanted to tell Buck that he had been fired. This would be the last trip they would make together on the Antoine, and Buck needed to know. Now seemed as good a moment as any. He watched the older man’s face as he registered the news. Like most Cape Codders, Buck was intensely proud of the Institute, the work it did and the jobs it created. He had lived in its shadow most of his life.
Buck peered ahead, rubbing a cloth on the windscreen.
‘How come?’
Leo explained about his interview with the Herald and how the Boston Globe had picked it up and how in the age of the 24-hour news cycle his words were soon out on the wires on radio and television.
‘What did you say in the interview?’ Buck kept his eyes on the sea and a hand on the wheel.
Leo told him he had used the example of Hoover the talking seal, long dead but still the subject of some controversy, as a metaphor to expose the arrogant mindset of the marine science establishment in general. And he had thrown in the fishing lobby and Stellwagen and all that stuff.
When he had finished, Buck slapped him on the back.
‘Congratulations! No more students, no more getting up for nine o’clock lectures. Now you can get a real life. You never could stand all that hassle up there, could you?’
‘I like teaching, Buck.’
‘You can teach anywhere,’ said Buck, spinning the wheel and bringing the bow of the boat around so that it pointed shoreward. ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes.’
Monomoy Island appeared out of the haze, a low-lying smudge on the horizon that gained shape and colour as the boat drew closer to it. As Leo scanned the white, yellow and pink of the island’s sand and rock, covered in the grey-green of coarse sea grass and gorse, he made a mental note to sign up for a week’s watercolour course with Gloria Gulliver.
She was a Cape divorcee in her mid-fifties who wore startling low-cut one-piece swimsuits in the summer, revealing a heart-shaped strawberry birthmark on her right breast. Leo focused on the image of her breasts, holding them in his head as he had in his hands. Her breasts in his hands, his mouth on her lips, the unforgettable Mrs Gloria Gulliver.
He looked back at the strangely unfamiliar shoreline. Wind, tide and the autumnal Atlantic gales had reshaped the island since he had last seen it. It happened to the whole Cape coastline almost every year, rendering charts outdated almost as soon as they were published. Navigation depended on local knowledge and every spring, fishermen working out of Chatham, Coldharbor and Hyannis had to plot the new shoals, skerries and channels carved out by tide, current, and wind.
Back in 1942 a whole island had vanished. It was called Billingsgate, after the old fish market in London, and had a school, a lighthouse and a small fishing community. The sea took them all, as it will the whole Cape in time. Occasionally winter storms would excavate an old wreck from the depths, bringing it perilously close to the surface.
Buck had lost his last fishing boat that way. The nets snagged on the funnel of a tramp steamer that had gone down in a sudden autumn storm in 1917. In the heavy sea the stern of Buck’s boat had been pulled under. It went down in seconds as the sea flooded the rear deck. Buck and his three crew had got off in their liferaft, and had been picked up two hours later. He bought another boat, of course. He always had a fishing boat but it was the tug that brought in the steady money.
Kemp had already decided that he would ask Buck to help him with his appeal. He was the only fisherman he knew who would stand up and tell the truth about the fishing lobby. Fish stocks were in freefall because of overfishing. Seals were being culled in their hundreds of thousands because they were blamed for the declining stocks. The fishing industry and the powerful politicians behind them were slaughtering seals for no purpose.
If there was going to be an argument, Buck was a good guy to have on your side. He had done it before at a conference in San Diego that Leo had persuaded him to attend as a guest speaker: the raw voice of the sea telling a gathering of marine biologists what was really happening to fish stocks and why.
That was how Joe Buckland, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands, desperate for the large rum that Leo had refused him and wishing himself rather in the eye of a hurricane at sea than in that place, came to stand in front of 300 delegates at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Leo had told him that Scripps was the oldest, biggest and most important centre for marine research science in the world. Looking at the large, oak-panelled auditorium with its motto inscribed in Latin on the proscenium arch, he believed it.
Buck had wowed them from the start.
‘I have been asked to talk to you about why fish stocks are falling, why the cod has gone, why other fish are going too. Halibut, marlin, you name ’em, they’re going. The problem is simple. You’re looking at it right here in front of you. I’m a fisherman. But I’m only half of the problem. You ladies and gentlemen are the other half. You eat too much fish,’ he said.
‘I’ve been told to get to the point early, and here it is. Hands up who knows what a steaker is.’
Not a hand in the hall went up
‘Steakers are what fishing people call the best cuts of fish, the ones with real big steaks on them. And you know what? Fishermen throw back dead into the sea any fish that doesn’t look like a steaker. Every fishing boat does it. They’ll deny it, but they do. Fishermen throw more fish back into the sea dead than they land for market. Not just us here in the US. They do it everywhere. That’s why the stocks have collapsed.’
Buck was applauded as he left the stage, and afterwards some very charming women smiled sweetly at him and pressed drinks into his hand. He told Leo he reckoned he made a wrong