A blog about the history of fishing in the Pacific

Isn’t this a marvelous drawing? I was looking for information at OSU’s Valley Library this week and I plugged “Sebastes” into the search engine. Up popped a number of interesting items, including this one, to a publication of the Oregon Experiment Station in September of 1951.  It’s a collection of recipes, pulled together by the Seafoods Laboratory of the Food Technology Department in Astoria, by Margaret R. Lunning and E. W. Harvey.

This is interesting on several fronts. Oregon fishing companies were trying to sell more rockfish fillets and the Agricultural Experiment Station responded with a collection of recipes. The fish had been caught off Oregon since the 1930s, but hadn’t been generally available to the consumer. That was about to change. Pacific Ocean Perch was soon going to be “conspicuous in markets and groceries,” as the pamphlet put it.

Oregon rockfish are similar the the redfish, red perch, or ocean perch caught on the east coast of the U.S., where it is now the “most abundantly produced fish in that area of the country,” (italics in the original).

“The person who enjoys fish but resents a strong, “fishy” taste will find in this delicately flavored flesh a valuable addition to his list of seafood favorites.” The recipes all recommend combining salt with mono sodium glutamate, “a natural salt, which in itself has no flavor, but which accents and enhances the natural flavor of that with which it is used.”

The pamphlet ends with the words, “The whole family will enjoy these new Adventures in “Rockfish” Cookery.”

One of the recipes is called Baked Fillets Margo, and I’d bet a rosefish that it came from Margo Westrheim, the wife of Jergen Westrheim, who worked for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife out of Astoria. Jergen knew a lot about rockfish, and his lovely wife, Margo, must have cooked it often.  Jergen and Margo live in Nanaimo these days, but I bet she makes her signature recipe.

Baked Fillets Margo

2 pounds fillets, cut into serving pieces

1 tsp each salt and glutamate

1/16 tsp pepper

2 cups milk

Butter or other fat

Brush fillets with melted butter or other fat and sprinkle with salt and glutamate. Place in baking dish and completely cover with milk. Bake covered in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes.

Remove fish to warm platter, and keep warm. To serve over fish, make creat sauce as follows: 2 Tbsp butter or fat, 2 tablespoons of flour, 1 cup milk, 1/2 tsp salt, and 1/8 tsp pepper. Melt butter or other fat, blend in flour until smooth.

Add milk gradually, stirring until boiling point is reached.

Reduce heat and cook 3 minutes, add seasonings. Add a bit of parsley or pimiento for color.

One of the stories that I vividly remember from my days working for The Oregonian was a meeting that Oregon Sea Grant agent Bob Jacobsen set up with four of Newport’s older fishermen. One of them was Gordon White and he had me enthralled, talking about trawling in the 1940s, heading out of Newport with just a depth finder to help them find fish. There weren’t coastal cities then, there were coastal towns, small towns, and on the ocean in the dark, there weren’t many lights to guide them back home.

Gordon White was one of the first fishermen to deliver a fish that he called rosies, or rosefish, a species I knew as Pacific Ocean Perch, or POP. The proper name is Sebastes alutus, and it is the current focus of my research and next book (check The Redfish Project entry under research projects for more information,http://oregonstate.edu/pacificfisheryhistoryproject/research-projects/). The book starts here, in Newport, with fishermen like Gordon White, captain of the Yaquina, delivering rosies to the Yaquina Bay Fish Company.  The rose fish looked a lot like a fish that East Coast processors were selling as Ocean Perch. The fish had the same biological name, Sebastes. The company’s owners, Harold Penter and Dudley Turnacliff, started marketing fresh fillets as “Newport Brand Ocean Perch.”

World War II had been a good period for American fishermen. The military signed contacts to buy most of the fish, providing something fishermen had always lacked—a secure market at a fixed price. But with the end of the war, it was back to the uncertainty of the fresh fish market. In 1946, White, fishing a little deeper than usual, in 90 fathoms, found good catches of a small red rockfish. The market increased slowly, with a million pounds landed at Newport in 1949. But that October, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized a shipment of Newport fish and brought a libel action against the company for labeling fillets as ocean perch. [1] East coast fishing companies objected to calling the rockfish a perch.

Times were tight for the New England fishing industry. Since the 1930s, they had been plagued by fillets imported from Canada, where fishermen were paid less. Now there were imports from Iceland and Norway.  State Department documents during this period show that fish was a tool used to advance foreign policy goals. American loans financed new, modern processing plants and refrigeration facilities in Iceland.  If Americans bought Norwegian fish, that was fish not sold into the Soviet Union, weakening a centuries old trade bond between Norway and Russia.[2] With the New England fleet pushed out of its market, it expanded domestically, undercutting the markets created by West coast fishing companies.

More trouble was coming. Fishing was about to be dramatically transformed. The new era began in Aberdeen, Scotland, on a brisk March morning in 1954 when the Fairtry splashed down the marine ways at the John Lewis shipyard. Owned by Christian Salvesen Ltd., the British and Norwegian whaling company, the ship had the stern ramp of a whale factory trawler, stainless steel Baader filleting machines from Germany, and multiple freezers from Birdseye, the American frozen food company.[1] It was 280 feet long, cost $4 million and could fish in a force ten gale (winds of up to 63 miles an hour).[2] Six years in development, the Fairtry brought together, for the first time, modern fish catching, processing, and freezing capacity, and it could stay at sea for weeks at a time.

The first of two Soviet factory processing clones, the Pushkin and the Sverdlovsk, arrived off Newfoundland in 1956. Two dozen Pushkin-type factory ships were fishing in another two years.[3] By 1958, new fisheries with enormous catches were being established from Maine to Greenland to the Barents Sea.

The huge ships appeared in the Pacific as well, first off Alaska, then off Oregon, where the boats targeted rosies. And soon there weren’t any roses around for the local fleet to catch. A fish that had supplied markets during the winter months, leading to hopes of full-time employment in the fish plants, was gone. And as White told the story, there was nothing fishermen could do about it for another decade, until the Fisheries Conservation and management Act of 1976, creating a 200-mile limit. And by that time, the rosies hadn’t come back.

More information: there are many links to the Fairtry, http://iancoombe.tripod.com/id24.html

This one, http://www.aberdeenships.com/single.asp?index=99213

Includes a link to a picture of the launch. To read about the impact of factory trawlers on the New England fishery, read William Warner’s Distant Water: The Fate of the North Atlantic Fisherman, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1977.

---

[1] D.H. Cushing, The Provident Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),  234.

[2] Michael Harris, Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fisheries: A True Crime Story. (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, Inc., 1998), 53.

[3] D. Cushing, The Provident Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 235.

---

[1] Dayton Lee Alverson, “How high can perch climb?” Pacific Fisherman, October, 1954, 25.

[2] Carmel Finley, “The social construction of fishing, 1949,” Ecology and

Society 14 (1): 6. [online] URL:

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss1/art6/

One of the things I love about history is way that bits of information connect and illuminate. I’ve been reading about the  Sebastes family of fish, as I get started on my next research project (take a look at our research projects page). And several of the articles I’ve looked at have a common footnote or citation, Gilbert, 1890. And that means some of the earliest scientific work on Sebastes alutus, or Pacific Ocean Perch, or POP, or Redfish–that work was started by Charles Gilbert as one of the four cruises onboard the Albatross.

In a previous post, An Oregon Fisheries Timeline, I wrote about the start of fisheries science in Oregon, with a cruise by the famous federal research ship, the Albatross. In 1888, the U.S. Fish Commission sent the Albatross to conduct investigations in the North Pacific Ocean during the fall of 1888 and the summer and fall of 1881. The summary of their findings was published in the Bulletin of the U.S. Fish Commission, vol. viii, in 1888. The survey is described as “extensive,” but few fishing spots were developed.

Launched in 1882, the Albatross was the world’s first large deep-water oceanographic and fisheries research vessel.  It had a distinguished 40-year career, and much of it was documented in a special issue of the Marine Fisheries Review, in 1999. As I’ve written before, the Marine Fisheries Review is the premier source of information about the history of American fisheries. And among the best papers published by editor Willis Hobart are the series of articles that retired Seattle biologist J. Richard Dunn has written about the early days of West Coast fisheries science.

Several of those papers are about Charles Gilbert (1858-9-1928).  Gilbert was the brilliant student of David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), the ichthyologist, president of Stanford University, and noted peace activist.  When Jordan became president of Leland Stanford Jr. University in 1891, Gilbert was one of his first appointments.

Jean has a wonderful piece about Gilbert in a book called Collection Building in Ichthyology and Herpetology, a special publication of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists in 1997 (edited by Theodore W. Pietsch and William D. Anderson Jr.) In 1890, Gilbert made  four voyages on the Albatross;  he described 20 new genera and 172 new species of fish.

Some of them were Pacific rockfish, like Sebastes alutus. It’s nice to see the footnote and think about the man who was responsible for it, and the knowledge that emerged from the first scientific surveys of Pacific fish stocks.

One of the reasons I set up this project was that there is a huge amount of information about Pacific fisheries, in a variety of places, much of it now available on the web.  All of Jean Dunn’s articles are available through the Marine Resources Review, published by NOAA. He write about the early work of W. F. Thompson, John Cobb and the founding of the School of Fisheries at the University of Washington, and about Charles Gilbert.