I wasn’t there, but cameraman Sterling Snow was, and he told the tale of what happened. Now, Sterling is a larger-than-life character who tells one hell of a story, and he wasn’t above a little, shall we say, embellishment—you know, just to help the story along.
According to Sterling, they were preparing to set sail from St. John’s Harbour. Our national reporter friend and his Radio-Canada counterpart were down in the galley. The French journalist said, “It could get a little rough—you eat maybe a couple of pieces of dry toast to help keep your stomach settled.” He was not going. He had been out in these boats before and learned his lesson.
Sterling picked up the story just as they were beginning to leave the harbour through the Narrows. Sterling, the captain, the first mate, our national reporter, and local reporter Rick Seaward were all standing on the bridge, looking out the front windows. A somewhat concerned Rick was clutching onto a support beam as though it contained the essence of life itself. (Thank God I was not assigned to go; I am no sailor.) The national guy was bundled into a heavy coat, sweater, hat and scarf as it was freezing outside.
Suddenly, off came his coat. A minute later, off came his sweater. The first mate looked at Sterling and said, in his best Newfoundland accent, “Yer buddy looks some queer colour.” The poor reporter was now a greyish hue of green. He made an abrupt dash past Sterling to the door at the back of the bridge. “I’ve got to get some air!” he wailed.
After a moment or two, Sterling went out to check on him. The poor fellow was drenched with sea spray, shirt torn open almost to the waist, and he was now completely grey, just like the colour of the sea. Sterling said he grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, worried he might get washed overboard, and put him in the small head (bathroom) so he could throw up in the sink.
They still hadn’t even cleared the Narrows. The captain said, “I think it’s gonna get rough, but I can punch on through ’er for a few more miles if ye wants.” Sterling said, “No, that’s okay, bring her around and we’ll head back in.”
The next morning, sitting on the reporter’s desk like a little pyramid was a stack of Gravol.
You can’t beat local knowledge. Or listening closely to the people you are trying to talk to. Often, when sent down to the wharf to speak with fishermen about the state of the fishery, I would first ask the camera person to leave the gear in the van. If the folks on the dock were already busy doing something, say, hauling out a boat, we would join in and help out. Only afterward would we ask if they were okay with talking to us about whatever was going on. Those first few moments were always critical in establishing a connection.
Dirty Water
Not that it always worked. Sometimes circumstances took over and you just had to go with the flow, hoping it didn’t mean swimming for your life.
One morning I was told to go down to a place called Witless Bay. There was nothing funny about Witless Bay. Over a hundred crab workers, upset with their employer, were off the job and in no mood to settle down. Just before we arrived, they had overturned a couple of pickup trucks.
We were down in the middle of the throng when one little fellow piped up to say, “Jesus byes, CBC is taking pictures of all we crowd! Let’s throw ’em in the harbour!” As if that weren’t bad enough, the water’s surface was covered in rotting crab guts and oil. It did not look good. This was definitely not the plan.
At that very moment, I came to fully grasp the old saying, “Sometimes the best defence is a great offence.” I decided to jump right into that little fellow’s face. Shaking my fist, I yelled, “You son of a bitch. You call us up and ask us to come down here and represent your point of view and this is the way you want to treat us? Screw you!” To be honest, pretty much all of me was shaking. I was scared to death we were going into the water.
Then someone else yelled, “No byes, they’re okay—leave ’em alone.” I quickly suggested to the cameraman that we should beat it, and we scrambled up the bank to our van. The RCMP arrived only to have the skinny constable from Marystown pull out his megaphone. “All right ye crowd,” he said. “CBC’s got pictures of all ye, and we’ll get their videotape and you’ll all be charged!”
After yelling to the camera guy to fire up the van, I jumped up on the bumper and shouted, “We don’t work for the RCMP—if they want our video they’ll have to go to court to get it!” With that we jumped into the van and beat a hasty retreat. The RCMP never did come after our tape, and I never again waded into the middle of an angry mob. We were lucky it hadn’t ended in a much worse fashion. We could easily have found ourselves swimming with the fishes that day!
Hook, Line and Sinker
Overfishing was becoming a bigger and bigger issue, not just around Newfoundland but on the high seas. Tensions escalated. Spanish trawlers were arrested as Canada tried to assert some level of control over the amount of fish being hauled from the water. Stories of concern, outrage and desperation surrounded the state of the fishery. Eventually it would all lead to disaster.
Any fool could see it coming. John Crosbie, the federal minister of fisheries for Brian Mulroney, was dispatched to Spain to twist some arms. Both the Spaniards and the Portuguese were being accused of gross overfishing practices, but it was the former who appeared to possess the most efficient fish-killing technology.
I was chosen to try to figure it all out. Money did not seem to be an issue. I proposed we follow Crosbie and at the same time take a closer look at the fishing operations of Spain and Portugal.
Now, Portugal was (and still is) viewed with a certain affection by some Newfoundlanders, particularly in St. John’s. For centuries the fishermen of its White Fleet worked the waters around the island, and they were a fixture in the capital, wandering the streets or playing soccer down on the docks while they resupplied. Fishing being what it was, many of those young men also reeled in local girls, marrying and carrying them back home. It was a relationship that stretched back close to five hundred years.
The earliest footage from out on the banks was shot in 1967 by cameraman John O’Brien on board a ship from the Portuguese White Fleet. John was a man of the deepest integrity, and he had a whip-smart mind. Every day he walked to work, no small distance, he always wore a tie, and when he walked into the camera room, he had a quiet but commanding presence.
John was now sixty years old if he was a day, still lugging around camera gear—the newfangled, bloody heavy three-tube Betacam cameras. They weighed twenty-five-plus kilos, and John was barely sixty kilos himself. His film footage from the Grand Banks had taken people to another world. Portuguese fishermen rowing away from the main schooner in their little dories, carrying tubs full of baited hooks, all alone on the North Atlantic hundreds of kilometres from shore, working from before sun-up until sundown to fish the cod, the bacalhau.
So John was the perfect choice to go to Spain and Portugal. The circle was complete. Kevin Norman was also along as producer. As it turned out, we never saw Crosbie—well, only briefly. Itineraries shuffled and telephone communication proved impossible with the language barrier.
It didn’t really matter. We had come to figure out whether the Spanish and the Portuguese were the villains they were being made out to be. Turned out the answer wasn’t quite that simple. In Canada back then, the average Canadian consumed under thirteen kilos of fish a year. For the Spanish and Portuguese, the number was closer to sixty kilos. To them, fishing was about feeding a nation.
At four in the morning we started taping, as the fishing boats arriving on the docks in Lisbon. Fish was coming from the four corners of the world. It was an amazing sight that stretched out for kilometres along the huge docks.