Changes in fishing technology.

From the late 15th century through to the mid-19th, change came slowly to the fishing industry. By the 1840s, the British migratory fishery had come to an end as the trade passed to branches of English fish merchants operating from ports in Newfoundland. The French continued their migratory fishery and were responsible for many of the technological innovations that changed the industry in the 19th and 20th centuries. They introduced the bultow, or trawl fishing, to replace the traditional handline used from the deck of vessels. The bultow was simply long lines of several hundred metres with hundreds of baited hooks attached at regular intervals. The line was set or moored on the sea floor by fishers operating from chaloupes and flat-bottomed craft called dories. Though more efficient than the simple hook and line method, trawl fishing was widely criticised for catching too many fish and destroying the stocks. Nevertheless, fishers from New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland soon adopted this technique as did the Spanish and Portuguese.

The introduction of the steam engine early in the 20th century allowed fishers to use more complicated and effective catching technologies. The sailing ships were gradually replaced by steamers, followed quickly thereafter by larger and more efficient craft such as side trawlers, stern trawlers and, later, factory freezer trawlers. As the fishing vessels changed and became more effective, so did the gear. Soon fishers were able to fish in any type of weather, and, in fact, some of the vessels rarely left the fishing grounds as crews rotated and freighters transported the finished product to market. Moreover, as the catching capacity increased, many countries involved in the international fishery increased the number of vessels they sent to the fishing grounds. In most industries, technological improvements allowed for fewer processors and fewer workers, often with improved productivity. This was not so in the fishery where the number of vessels continued to increase despite greater productivity. Many nations realized that the ocean offered a cheaper source of protein than they could harvest from the land. They regarded the oceans' fisheries as an international industry with a free and open resource, one that no country could legitimately claim.

After the First World War, French, Spanish, and Portuguese fishers continued to fish on the Grand Banks alongside Americans, Canadians, and Newfoundlanders. Many of the Europeans who came to fish on the Grand Banks were encouraged to do so by bounties paid by their home governments. In the late 1940s, Spanish fishers on the Grand Banks began using pair-trawling, a most effective method of fishing where a large net was towed by two vessels. The Portuguese, on the other hand, ignored much of the technology and returned to the traditional line fishery, carried on from one-man, 5-metre dories.

In March 1954, the first factory freezer trawler and the first commercial stern trawler, the Fairtry, representing the latest in fishing technology, was launched from a shipyard in Scotland and dispatched to the Grand Banks. The Fairtry retrieved its nets by pulling them up a ramp at the stern of the ship rather than over the side as the older otter trawlers had. This allowed the vessel to use larger nets and to fish in almost any weather. The ship was equipped with a quick-freezing facility, automated filleting machines, cold-storage units, and a fish reduction unit.

Meanwhile, state planners in the Soviet Union decided to increase the nation's protein supply through fishing. They quickly replicated the Fairtry and had, by the 1960s, constructed the country's own fleet of factory freezer trawlers. The Soviets approached fishing as they might a military campaign. After reconnaissance ships determined that an area was commercially viable, the whole fleet, including numerous modern factory-freezer stern trawlers and a large number of smaller trawlers, were deployed in the area. A mother, or factory ship, accompanied the fleet to process the catch of the smaller trawlers. One of the vessels in the Soviet fleet was the Professor Baranov, a factory ship 165 metres in length that processed the catch of a fleet of 20 trawlers, each between 40 and 50 metres long. In a single day, it could salt 200 tonnes of herring, reduce 150 tonnes of fish and offal into fish meal, fillet and freeze 100 tonnes of ground fish, manufacture 5 tonnes of fish oil, produce 20 tonnes of ice, and distill 100 tonnes of water. Moreover, fuel tankers, salvage tugs, refrigerated transport ships, and floating repair shops accompanied the Soviet fleet.

By the mid-1960s the West and East Germans, Poles, Romanians, Norwegians, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Greeks, Japanese, Cubans, and Koreans had come to join the Soviets, Americans, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Canadians on the Grand Banks. The West Germans earned a reputation for finding the fish with the aid of sophisticated electronic equipment and, in 1969, perfected the mid-water trawl which allowed a vessel to tow its nets at any depth. Some of the mid-water trawls were 300 metres long, the length of three football fields, and used underwater sonars which were able to scan the ocean for up to three kilometres, making the net very effective. Soon all of the fishing nations were using the new technology.