window on Harvey Road in St. John’s, a matted print is positioned at eye level. In the image, brightly painted wooden boats crowd a small, snug harbour, their cheerful colours reflecting wavily in the blue water.
Inside the vessels are coils of rope, piles of net. To the left, striated cliffs jut toward the boats as though about to scoop them into a grass-topped embrace. A small card, with text in calligraphic script, is propped against the window.
It reads, in part, “Skiffs Before the Moratorium.” A second card explains that a skiff is a small wooden boat, twenty-five to thirty feet in length, that was once used in the inshore cod fishery. “[B]ut sadly today,” the card concludes, “many of the trap skiffs one sees are pulled ashore.
” It’s been thirty-two years since the federal government first closed the northern cod fishery. It was historically the colony’s main trade for centuries, but that changed, nearly overnight, in 1992, after a press conference at the downtown Radisson Hotel in St. John’s, when then federal fisheries and oceans minister John Crosbie announced a complete halt.
Fishery workers would be compensated for ten weeks, at the rate of $225 a week, and then go on employment insurance. The meagre amounts were seen as an insult to the workers whose labour was responsible for a $700 million per year industry (almost $1.35 billion in 2024 terms)—and who recognized, in the mass layoff, the spectre of their culture on the brink of extinction.
Of.