For those on board, and the two still standing on the shore, the weight of the moment hung heavy in the air. Mike Parsons, who, along with his wife Georgina, decided to stay, said of the final days that a “palpable sadness” had enveloped the islands. Although an all-but-inevitable conclusion, leaving hurt. “Bartlett: This is nowhere. There's nothing else there, you know. But still, people got the love of the land where they were born on. I mean, you know this.” As the ferry cut through the low-hanging fog and faded away in the evening’s dying light, and as the 2010s faded from present to past, a tiny town on a couple tiny islands closed a chapter of its story that had begun some200 years prior. What was once a boomtown-gone-bust was now all but a ghost town. That day, the electricity that had powered theH.L. Strong Academy, Aunt Edna’s B& B, the two churches, and the dozens of heartily built homes wrapping around the harbor, shut off. Unopposed by streetlights and the hum of habitation—night and its accompanying quiet settled over the town of two, and Little Bay Islands became the eighth remote community in Newfoundland and Labrador this century to permanently relocate.
The abandonment of Little Bay Islands, and the reason this small settlement existed in the first place, is enmeshed in the intertwined history, politics, and economics of the North Atlantic—all of which, across centuries of European settlement, has revolved around a rather nondescript fish. By the 2010s, Little Bay Islands—a name left plural to acknowledge the community straddling of both Little Bay and Mack Islands—was on its last leg. At its height, more than five hundred called the small-but-bustling town nestled between lush forest and rocky coast home. What brought people to Little Bay Islands and the coast of Newfoundland, had little to do with what was on land, but rather what swam in the surrounding waters. “Thornhill Verma: But the reason why settlers predominantly from Europe came to Newfoundland, Labrador and populated the outports was because of the proximity to this lush resource of wild fish. And that continues to be the case…” Beginning with Paleo-Eskimo peoples arriving around 1,000 BCE, then followed by the Little Passage peoples two thousand years later, indigenous hunter-gatherer societies were the first to recognize the wealth of Newfoundland’steeming coasts. Not long after the Little Passage peoples had arrived, though, these waters became a bit busier. Northern and Western Europeans were next to identify the region’s oceanic potential—and unlike contemporary explorers, they weren’tthere for God… but for cod. Simply put: “Bartlett: [00:10:43] Cod, when my time I grew up, and previous to that, cod was King.
” Cod’s prominence, its centrality to life in Little Bay Islands, and Newfoundland more broadly, spans well beyond Wilfred’s lifetime; going back not just generations, but centuries. When Norse sailors landed on Newfoundlandhundreds of years prior to Columbus’s crossing, they skirted from one cold, barren shore to the next with little more than the prevalent, easy-to-catch, high-in-protein fish to fill their caloric needs. For the Europeans that followed, cod didn’t just represent a calorie-dense source of sustenance, but a resource with which they could turn a profit. Although British and Basque fishing ventures kept tight lips about their favorite spots, it’s likely that enterprising vessels cut across the Atlantic alongside and even before Columbus and John Cabot in the 1490s.
Once Cabot had come across Newfoundland though, the secret was out, as the explorer exclaimed that these faraway waters were so well stocked that all one had to do was stick a basket in the ocean and it’d fill with fish. While European explorers carried with them a penchant to exaggerate, Cabot’s description of fishing in the NorthwestAtlantic maps rather accurately onto the disposition of the Atlantic Cod. An omnivorous bottom-feeder, cod are both perpetually lethargic and ceaselessly hungry, and as such, gladly take the bait and output up much of a fight once on a line. Properly treated, cod keeps, too. “Bartlett: And cod, one thing about codes all salt, put on salt back then, so, I mean, you could keep it for a long, long time, year or two years or three years if you had to. I don't know how long you could if you really need it. But usually, it was cut, split, and sold and then taken back to England and Portugal and Spain.” Countries that, as Catholic, were eager to find alternatives to warm-blooded meats during lent.
As the fish gained popularity across Europe—becoming a staple in markets in the 1500s, and appearing in the pages of Cervantes Don Quixote, Zola’s The Belly of Paris, and Dumas’ Le Grand Dictionnairede Cuisine—European settlements took root along the rocky shores of the continent’snortheastern coast. These hearty, self-reliant, coastal communities, now known as “outports,” drove the growth of Newfoundland from the 1700s onward. Built on and around the water, Little BayIslands—only accessible by boat, angling out at the rich waters of Notre Dame Bay and the Grand Banks beyond but hugging the fragmented and protective coast of Newfoundland—was the quintessential outport. The earliest census of Little Bay Islandsdates to 1825, but some locals like Wilfred Bartlett believe that British fishers may well have established year-round habitation on the islands decades prior. Whether settled in the 1820s or the 1720s, Little Bay Islands embodies the era of fish-fueled European expansion. And without an abiding climate or much in the way of arable land for agriculture like its southern relatives off of Cape Cod, LittleBay Islands, from its inception, would remain a strictly ocean-oriented economy. From the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, Little Bay Islands enjoyed a period of blissful stasis. By 1950, the town, along with the rest of Newfoundland, had become a part of Canada, had added a few more saltbox homes, a couple new processing plants, and was sheltering more modern boats in its harbor. But still, Little Bay Islanders went out each day to work their corner of the cod industry.
At day's end, they picked their kids up from the schoolhouse and headed over to their local union meetings. When they had a chance, they caught up at the Poacher’s Lounge for a drink. When they made it to the weekend, they headed to the crowded grocery stores and crammed into the town’s two churches. When winter turned to spring, they planted root vegetables in home gardens, awaiting the peak summer fishing season. And when they tired after a long career, they handed their work off to their children. At mid-century, Little Bay Islands still happily revolved around the same industry it always had. But, while change isn’t always continuous, it is inevitable. And soon, intruding engines of change showed up right offshore. It came in the shape of a 280-foot BritishFairtry trawling vessel appearing off the coast of Newfoundland in 1951. Alongside an invading fleet of smaller trawlers from across Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan, this would change cod fishing forever. While outsiders weren’t new, as fishers from as far as Portugal seasonally visited Little Bay Islands, the technology was.
“Bartlett: Then all of a sudden, the draggersgot involved where you could drop a net over to start of a boat, or over the side for sidescrollers, and go drag the bottom of whatever is in front of that net certainly comes up, there's nothing left. And not only where we're taking a lot of cod, but we're taking a lot of bycatch, too, because, I mean, if you want a lot of cod and their other things in there you just throw it back in the ocean dead.” In just a decade, traditional methods used by local fishers for generations—hook and line, nets, cod traps—were superseded by floating cities capable of hauling up tons of fish and flash freezing them, all while still at sea. At the same time that massive ships consolidated the fishing industry, politicians sought to consolidate Canada’s coastal population. In an effort to save on expensive government-provided services—ferries, power, healthcare—the Centralization Program of 1954 and the FisheriesHousehold Resettlement Program of 1965 moved thousands from remote outports to population centers. In the 1950s and ‘60s, the waters around little Bay Islands had become overcrowded and towns not so different from it began feeling pressure to relocate. But not only did Little Bay Islands persist during this period; it thrived—its docks, shops, processing plants, churches, and school hummed with activity.
For the moment, there were enough fish to support both the cities at sea pulling it in by the ton and the town’s continued small-scale operations. That moment, however, proved fleeting. With innovation, mechanization, and the ruthless pursuit of efficiency came disaster. By the 1970s, annual fish hauls were tripling the tonnage of those from three decades prior. Cod populations couldn’t keep up. With collapse on the horizon, Canadian officials took action—turning back foreign vessels and placing quotas on the fish. But it was far too little, far too late. By 1990, in some spots, one could hardly find the fish at all. “Bartlett: I faced up Labrador coast five hundred miles north from where I lived, and they had a moratorium up there for two years, couldn't get a cod to eat. But, you know, it is, like I said, nobody listened.” In 1992, the Canadian government banned nearly all cod fishing. The moratorium aimed to revive the stock over the course of a few years. Today, nearly 30 years later, the moratorium is still in place. The collapse of the cod industry put Little Bay Islands in an impossible position. The town was, the town is, in many ways, the picture-perfect fishing community. “Bartlett: Little Bay Islands is one of the most beautiful communities around. It's, it's a beautiful harbor there, in fact, there are two inlets there, you can get a small boat in one end, and a big boat through the other… it’s an island off of a harbor--that's what it is. And it's... no matter how bad the weather gets, it’s still sheltered. And I guess that's one of the reasons why it's not a very big island. People had to go off the island and get enough wood to keep themselves going for shipbuilding, that kind of thing… because according to toan outsiders, it was a small island.
But it was located to the fishing grounds that was the main thing.” Now, though, the most important fish was gone. As an industry, fishing didn’t line the pockets of Little Bay Islanders, it didn’t create massive financial wealth, but it did support a unique way of life. It nurtured the small-town comradery that only blooms after decades of waiting together in the same lines, singing the same hymns, and drinking the same draft beers. It furthered family bonds as mothers and fathers taught their trades to daughters and sons. As the rest of the world moved toward urban centers, Little Bay Islands offered an alternative path for those enchanted by a rural, rugged lifestyle deeply entangled with the surrounding landscape. Fishing made it all possible, and Little BayIslands had stayed loyal. The town had no backup plan, no alternative industry to pick up the slack should something go awry. Here, cod was king. And now, cod was dead. While fishing stayed a consistent economic driver for centuries, the actual, day-to-day practice has proved dynamic; requiring flexibility, and at times, mobility. “Thornhill Verma: [00:31:15] So resettlement is as much a part of outport life in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador as the fishing that brought people there in the first place.
” Some—the earliest seasonal fishing parties, and later, families relocating in search of better home bases—moved by choice. Others—indigenous peoples and outport communities deemed too far from urban hubs—were pushed or forced to relocate. While Little Bay Islands had dodged resettlement by choice or force for well over a century, by the late ‘90s it was becoming difficult to ignore the creeping thought that their time to pull up stakes was quickly arriving.In the years following the moratorium, Little Bay Islanders turned their efforts to crab, shrimp, and capelin—fish that have kept Newfoundland’s economy afloat through to today. “Thornhill Verma: So while the East Coast cod fishery collapse, what's popularly known as the cod moratorium happened in July of1992 and it's still underway today, I think what people don't realize is that this is still a billion-dollar industry--fisheries.” Gone, though, were the jobs that cod provided onshore and at sea. Post-collapse, the newly jobless left in droves. “Jenn: [00:30:01] And in the decade that followed, you had 10 percent of the population of Newfoundland and Labrador, move away.” As Little Bay Islands’ fishers moved to the mainland to find work, institutions that relied on their presence—the grocery stores, churches, and schools—began to falter. In 2009, the crab processing plant, the towns last major employer, shuttered, leaving the women who worked the plant little choice but to relocate or rely on unemployment programs.
In just a few decades, the bustling town—with boats whizzing past its wharves by day and the Poacher’s Lounge filling to standing room only by night—had taken on a melancholy quiet. As families peeled out of town one by one, the murmurs of wholescale resettlement gained momentum. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the term resettlement is a loaded one. “Bartlett: [00:25:13] I don't know, resettlement is a bad word for me, I mean, we did that back in Joey Smallwood’s day and it is a terrible thing to do, uprooted people that, you know, that was there all their lives, and it didn't improve their bit one bit in the world.” In the wake of the cod collapse, the government revived the unpopular mid-century policy in 2010. This time around, the resettlement program offered a proportionally larger payout, prohibited the provincial government from initiating the process, and, if viable, required the community to approve the decision by a 90%vote. Still, more amenable terms aside, such a move was bound to hurt: “Thornhill Verma: But I think the reason why it really strikes an emotional chord in Newfoundland and Labrador, is because it feels like the death of this way of life.
And so I felt that even when we sold my grandfathers home in Little Bay East on the southern shores of Newfoundland and Labrador, here I had this physical link to a community that my ancestry was tied up in for hundreds of years, and then for that to be gone and to not be able to have that physical link to a place that I remember growing up and going with my father to his childhood home and beachcombing along the beach and being able to go out on the dory with my family members, you know, to have that access pulled is more than ‘let's do something different next year, summer vacation.’ It's this connection to place and culture and heritage and tradition. And so I think that's difficult for people.” The opportunity created Little Bays Islands.
When opportunity died, the town was bound to soon follow. As the Grand Banks clogged with oversized trailers, and fishing transformed from a timeless profession to one with an expiration date, outport youth began to look west for the opportunity. “Bartlett: And that's what has happened is no jobs, one time, when the fishery was going to go, in the summertime when you're out of school, well, you got a job at a fish plant, working in the fish plant, or you went in the boat with your father or went down to the wharf, cutting out tongues, you made a living. But now there’s nothing for them to do. Come out of school there are no… very few places to pick up a job in Newfoundland and Labrador today.” In many cases, their own families urged them to move on. “Thornhill Verma: I mean, my grandfather was the last fisherman in our family, and that wasn't by accident. That was by design. My grandfather and my grandmother wanted to make sure that their four boys had an education, and certainly, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are all educated, whether that's on the land and sea or in a classroom, but they very much wanted their four boys to receive a classroom education and to go on and have careers that allowed them to leave the ports.
” As the hope that the fishery would soon recover, Little Bay Islands families and youth made their way to the mainland—leaving behind an aging population deeply tied to the landscape, but unmoored from economic opportunities and far from medical services.With the processing plants shuttered, the school empty, the local bar dry, the fire department closed, and the town doctor went, Little Bay Islands in 2015 was a shell of its former self. For the 95 aging full-timers, 45-minutes away from medical facilities and grocery stores, assuming fair weather, the time had arrived to put resettlement up for a vote. The result: 85 votes for, 10 against—missing the required 90% benchmark by 0.53%. Four years and zero miracles later, they voted again. This time, it was unanimous: Little Bay Islands would resettle.
In the months following the vote, Little Bay Islanders soberly planned their next move, packed their belongings, and, in some cases, converted their homes to operate off-grid, anticipating summer visits. In addition to the $250,000 Canadian dollar little Bay Islanders were to receive for relocating, they retained their property. Gone through, were the costly government-supplied amenities. No more power, no more snow plowing, and more ferry service. Those with unwavering bonds to the place where they grew up, where they raised families, where they felt at home, would be back…but it wouldn’t be the same. It couldn’t be.
As the MV Hazel McIsaac disappeared into the December night, and the Parsons ducked back into their newly off-grid home to ring in the New Year, Little Bay Islands entered an era both foreign and familiar. Over were the centuries of permanent settlement and decades of direct connection to mainland Canada. Returning, though, was the remoteness and self-sufficiency that defined the outport’s earliest days—a uniquely disconnected way of life that drew many to the islands in the first place. In recent years, seasonal visitors, sea kayakers, photographers, authors, and artists have descended upon the striking landscapes and quaint coastal communities of the likes of Little Bay Islands. But fishermen, like Wilfred Bartlett, and grandchildren of fishermen, like Jenn Thornhill Verma, aren’t yet ready to agree to the Devil’sbargain that tourism presents. “Thornhill Verma: My family still lives there. As much as I'm proud that people go there to visit, I want people to go and stay for a long time, not just a good time.” Staying for a long time, though, requires a healthy fishery. A healthy fishery requires something that Newfoundland outport communities can’t procure on their own—future-forward, stringent, protective fishing policy, at the national and international level.
Outports today, while built on a foundation of enterprising and independent spirit, bend to global forces. But then again, Little Bay Islands, and outports like it, have always been at the mercy of economics and politics well beyond their wharves—spanning the Northern Atlantic and beyond. It’s likely too late for Little Bay Islands, but this doesn’t have to be the end for outports. The lesson of Little Bay Islands is not that these places’ rural, small-town lifestyle can’t exist. Instead, it’s that it can’t exist in a vacuum. While proudly independent and situated well on the periphery, the survival of these extremities hinges on their relationships and ties to the center. And while the people of outports get to decide when they resettle, it’s much larger forces that will decide if they have to. I really hope you enjoyed this video
Reviewed by Kashif
on
August 21, 2021
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