Phonse Cull is a fourth-generation inshore fisherman from Joe Batt's Arm, Fogo Island, Newfoundland. He is 77 years old. He operated a 48-foot longliner in the waters off Notre Dame Bay until July 2, 1992, when the Canadian government announced a moratorium on the northern cod fishery, the largest industrial closure in Canadian history. Over 35,000 fishermen and plant workers lost their livelihoods overnight.¹

He is also, strictly speaking, not a single person. He is a composite drawn from documented accounts of outport fishermen who lived through the moratorium: men like Eugene Maloney of Bay Bulls, who was setting cod traps and learned the news from his wife when he came ashore; John Williams, who spent seven weeks searching for cod in the early 1990s and never found one; and the unnamed fisherman on CBC's cameras who shouted about "six generations down the line."² Every detail of his life is grounded in the historical record. His name is the only invention, and even that is borrowed from the Fogo Island phone book.

We spoke in his kitchen in Joe Batt's Arm on a morning in early April. The harbour was visible through the window. There were no longliners in it.

You were out on the water the morning the moratorium was announced.

Phonse: Setting cod traps. You have to appreciate the comedy of that. July second, 1992, I'm hauling a trap that's basically empty, same as it's been basically empty for three seasons, and I'm doing it because what else would I do on a Tuesday morning? I come in off the water and Marie says, "The moratorium is on. No more fishing." I sat down at the table. She put the tea on. I drank it.

What were you thinking?

Phonse: Nothing. That's the honest answer. You'd think there'd be some big moment, some rage or grief or whatever the word is. There wasn't. It was more like when someone tells you a thing you already know but you've been pretending you don't. The fish were gone. I knew the fish were gone. Every man on this island knew the fish were gone. We'd been watching them go for years. Getting smaller, getting fewer. I'd set traps in places my father could fill a boat and pull up nothing worth counting.

The spawning biomass had dropped ninety-three percent in thirty years.³

Phonse: See, that's a number. Ninety-three percent. I didn't have a number. I had a trap that used to come up heavy and now came up light. Your arms know. Your back knows before your head does.

The government offered relief payments through NCARP, two hundred and twenty-five to four hundred dollars a week. What did that mean practically?

Phonse: It meant I could feed the youngsters and keep the lights on if I didn't also have to make payments on the boat. Which I did. Forty-eight-foot longliner, mechanized hauler, the works. I'd financed her through the federal program because that's what you did. The government helped you buy the boat so you could catch the fish that the government was also letting the foreign draggers hoover up offshore. Then the government told me to park the boat and go to school.

The retraining programs.

Phonse: [laughs] Oh, the retraining. Yes. I left school at fifteen to fish with my father. My father left school at fourteen to fish with his father. Now I'm forty-three years old with hands like boiled rope and they want me in a classroom in Gander learning "entrepreneurial skills." I sat in a room with twenty other fishermen and a woman from the mainland explained how to write a business plan. For what business? Selling fish? There was no fish. Selling the view? This was 1992, b'y. Nobody was coming to Fogo Island to look at the scenery. That came later.⁴

Did you finish the program?

Phonse: I did what I had to do to keep the cheques coming. A lot of men did. Some didn't. Couldn't stomach it, or couldn't do the reading, or just said to hell with it and went to Fort McMurray. The oil sands. That was the other option: go to Alberta, work the rigs, send money home. One fellow put it plain: "The cod fishery was our heritage, and all of a sudden that life was gone. The oil industry is mostly a paycheck."⁵ That about covers it.

Fogo Island had already fought off one government attempt to empty it, Smallwood's resettlement program in the 1960s.⁶ Did that history matter?

Phonse: It mattered because the old ones had a template. They'd already told a government to go to hell once. My father was on the committee. They brought in cameras from the mainland, made films about it, the whole Fogo Process.⁷ And out of that came the co-op, which is the only reason the fishery here is still community-owned instead of belonging to some corporation in Nova Scotia.

But the moratorium was different. Smallwood wanted to move us. You can fight a man who wants to move you. The moratorium didn't want anything from us. It just removed the reason to be here. You can't make a film about the absence of cod.

What made you stay?

Phonse: [long pause]

Everything and nothing. Marie's mother was here. The house was here, paid for, my grandfather built the bones of it. The garden, the root cellar, the berry grounds, the moose country I'd hunted since I was twelve. You leave and you lose all of that. Not just the sentiment of it. The actual food. The firewood. The way you get your truck fixed by your cousin and he gets his roof patched by you. That whole economy nobody counts until it's the only economy you've got left.⁸

But honestly? Stubbornness. Same thing that kept my father here when Smallwood came. Same thing that kept his father here when the merchants in St. John's were paying him nothing for his salt cod. This island runs on stubbornness the way the longliner ran on diesel.

The population of Fogo Island dropped from over a thousand to seven hundred and forty-eight between 1991 and 2006.⁹ You watched your neighbors leave.

Phonse: Every September. The ferry. Families going. Young people going. The school getting smaller. The store cutting hours. You'd walk through Joe Batt's Arm and count the boarded windows.

Pamela Ropson over in Great Harbour Deep said it plain: "Anybody that can see a future here, I think is kidding themselves."¹⁰ She wasn't wrong. She just wasn't right about everywhere.

The moratorium was officially lifted in 2024. The total allowable catch was set at less than ten percent of the 1992 quota.¹¹

Phonse: [short laugh] Yes. A historic milestone, they called it.

What would you call it?

Phonse: A press release.

When you look at fishing communities in the American South and Pacific Northwest now, shrimpers in Louisiana, salmon fishermen in Oregon, communities watching their catch decline and trying to figure out whether to stay or go. Does any of it look familiar?

Phonse: All of it. The part where the fishermen know before the scientists will say it. The part where the government keeps the quotas high because closing the fishery means admitting what's happening. The part where they finally close it and act like they're saving you. The part where the relief money comes with strings that don't fit your hands. The part where your children grow up knowing they'll probably have to leave.

The only thing I'd say to those people, and I'm not one for advice, I'm a fisherman who doesn't fish, what do I know. But the only thing is: I spent thirty years thinking Fogo Island was cod. That the place and the work were the same thing. They're not. The place is the rock and the water and the people too stubborn to get on the ferry. The cod was just the excuse we had for being here. When the excuse went away we had to find another one, or admit we'd been here all along for reasons that don't fit on a ledger.

Footnotes

1. CBC Archives, "Cod moratorium deemed 'The biggest layoff in Canadian history,'" The National, July 2, 1992. https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/cod-moratorium-devastating-for-fishermen ↩

2. CBC News, "What does 2020's pandemic have in common with the 1992 cod moratorium?" September 6, 2020. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/pandemic-moratorium-1.5707568; CBC Archives, "1992: Newfoundlanders protest cod moratorium." https://www.cbc.ca/archives/1992-newfoundlanders-protest-cod-moratorium-1.4693684 ↩

3. Britannica, "Cod fishery collapse of 1992," updated March 13, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/event/cod-fishery-collapse-of-1992 ↩

4. Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage Web, "Economic Impacts of the Cod Moratorium," Jenny Higgins, ©2009. https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium-impacts.php ↩

5. CBC News, "Fish still missing, traditions extinct 30 years after N.L. cod moratorium," July 2, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/cod-moratorium-30-years-1.6506820 ↩

6. Wikipedia, "Resettlement (Newfoundland)," updated July 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resettlement_(Newfoundland) ↩

7. Shorefast Foundation, "About Fogo Island." https://shorefast.org/about-fogo-island/ ↩

8. Hamilton, L.C. and Butler, M.J., "Outport Adaptations: Social Indicators Through Newfoundland's Cod Crisis," Human Ecology Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2001. https://scholars.unh.edu/soc_facpub/2/ ↩

9. Sustainable Heritage Case Studies, "Community-Led Tourism at Fogo Island," January 2022. ↩

10. CBC News, "Fish still missing, traditions extinct 30 years after N.L. cod moratorium," July 2, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/cod-moratorium-30-years-1.6506820 ↩

11. The Fishing Daily, "Newfoundland and Labrador Cod Fishery Reopens After 30 Years," July 1, 2024. https://thefishingdaily.com/latest-news/newfoundland-and-labrador-cod-fishery-reopens-after-30-years/ ↩