Events Leading to the Halibut Convention of 1923
Many years ago, cod fishermen on the New England banks regarded halibut as a pest which
drove cod from their lines. When the exceptional merits of the halibut as a food
fish were discovered, the sons of these fishermen were willing to go as far as the Grand
Banks of Newfoundland to bring back halibut for the eastern markets. By 1850 the
Atlantic halibut had become so scarce on the nearer banks that it commanded a luxury
price. The completion of the Northern Pacific Railway opened the way for tapping the
virtually untouched stocks of Pacific halibut.
The Pacific halibut fishery is comparatively young, having originated in 1888. From the beginning it has been an international deep sea fishery, engaged in by the nationals of both Canada and the United States, principally in extraterritorial waters.
The history of the halibut fishery, until quite recently, was similar to that of many other great modern fisheries. Due to expanding markets and increasing prices, new and more efficient vessels were added constantly to the fleet. Taking advantage of each improvement in type of construction, in power and in methods of fishing, these vessels extended their operations to more and more distant banks as the more accessible ones offered less profitable fishing. Rehabilitation of the fishery, in recent years, has tended to reverse this trend.
From a small fishery off Cape Flattery and the southern end of Vancouver Island, it expanded rapidly in protected waters, and by 1910 extended some 700 miles northward to Cape Spencer in southeastern Alaska. Subsequent expansion extended the fishery both south and north and out to the offshore banks throughout the known range of the halibut on the American side of the Pacific, from northern California to Bering Sea, a distance of over 2000 miles.
Early in the history of the fishery it was realized that the supply of halibut on the older banks was being rapidly reduced but no serious attention was paid to this, as the supply on the new banks seemed inexhaustible. Thus when control of the fishery was first advocated, in 1914, it was not urged for the purpose of conserving the supply but to curtail production. Shortly thereafter, a winter closed season was proposed as a means of eliminating a period of dangerous fishing during which spawning fish of poor quality were caught and to provide a period during which accumulated stocks of frozen fish could be sold. Conservation was an incidental consideration.
After the publication of three reports by W.F. Thompson in 1916 and 1917, in editions of Report of the Commissioner of Fisheries (Province of British Columbia), which proved conclusively a sharp decline in the abundance of halibut on the older banks and showed the need for control of the fishery, conservation was stressed more and more as the object of proposed regulations.
[Excerpted from reports written ca. 1950]
