Capelin is a small fish but larger than an Anchovie. It is of considerable importance to the Fishery of this Country. What I have to say of Capelin is of so strange a nature that I am very much afraid you will doubt my veracity.
— The Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas, an able seaman aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Boston, 1794 

Summer doesn’t start in Newfoundland and Labrador, so they say, until the capelin roll. Only once thousands of fingerling fish start tossing themselves en masse onto the province’s beaches to spawn will the skies clear and the rain abate as the season shifts over, one to the next. Or as the St. John’s novelist Edward Riche says of the capelin: “My experience is that summer weather will not arrive in Newfoundland until they have completed their piscine orgy.”

Whether or not they can trigger seasons (spoiler alert: they can’t), the tiny species that science knows as Mallotus villosus is, in the parlance, a focal forage fish. That’s another way of saying they’re high in fat and rich in energy — very nutritious — and that everything eats them — seals, whales, seabirds, other bigger fish. 

Dallying down near the bottom of the food chain, capelin don’t exactly dominate the popular imagination. And yet their significance to the balance of the North Atlantic’s marine ecosystem is hard to overstate. While cod sustained the Newfoundland economy and way of life for centuries, it was the capelin they were devouring that brought them inshore by shoal upon teeming shoal.

With the collapse of the cod fishery and the federal government’s 1992 moratorium, some 30,000 Newfoundlanders found themselves out of work. Thirty years later, the cod remains — culturally, at least — almighty. While the niche that the tiny capelin has carved into the province’s history, character and local sympathy isn’t as well known, it still runs deep. And I’m here to try to fathom what I can of that. 

To wander a beach in June or July and see the capelin tide for the first time is to wonder whether this constitutes a natural calamity in progress, rather than an ancient natural phenomenon. However, in the moment, it’s easy to join in the festive spirit that capelin weather, and the rites it generates, brings to these shores.

As recently as five or six years ago, the arrival of the capelin coincided more or less with Newfoundland’s July 1 Memorial Day weekend, commemorating First World War soldiers of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment. But that wasn’t at all the norm: from 1991 through 2010 and starting again in 2015, capelin spawning has been a mid-July to early-August affair, due to colder water temperatures. 

My capelin quest starts in late June in Trinity, a three hours’ drive northwest of St. John’s. By the time I arrive, there’s word of orcas off Bonavista, just to the north, which means they’re feeding on capelin. Within a couple of hours, I hear from a retired fisherman that a buddy of his filled his buckets over at English Harbour, where the capelin always show up first on this stretch of coast. So first thing Sunday morning, fog o’clock, that’s where I go.  

Nobody’s out yet, and it’s still too early for the wind or any view that’s not haze. The smell is salt and wet. English Harbour is a scattering of socked-in houses behind me, facing out on the ghost of an ocean haunted by the sad mooing of a warning horn on the headland, known as Horse Chops. It’s just me and gulls on the shale, waiting. I’ve been advised that it’s not quite warm enough yet for capelin, and that the salinity may not be right, or the wind. Another fisherman says that if I pour a little beef pickle on the beach, the capelin will be in directly. But they have to be out in the bay.

The longer I linger, the more I’m convinced the gulls are looking to me to conjure capelin. In the end, we’re all disappointed.