ICELAND: The Codfish War

Sweeping through a subarctic fog one morning last week, the Icelandic patrol boats Maria Julia and Thor bore down on a pair of British trawlers that had dropped their nets within seven miles of Iceland’s coast. The Icelanders had succeeded in getting nine men aboard the trawler Northern Foam when the British frigate Eastbourne charged at flank speed onto the scene. The nine boarders were quickly subdued, bundled into a motor launch and ferried back to Thor. But Thor’s skipper refused to accept them, on grounds that the British had used coercion in removing them from the trawler. Reluctantly, the skipper of the Eastbourne took the Icelanders aboard his own ship—not as prisoners, but as “guests” of the British Admiralty.

Meanwhile, the Maria Julia pulled alongside the trawler Lifeguard with another boarding party ready to leap. But as the two ships tossed and rolled, the Icelandic boat was holed above the waterline by the Lifeguard’s hull, and her boarders beaten back by a flourish of British boathooks and axes backed up by the threat of fire hoses primed with steaming water from the Lifeguard’s boilers.

When news of this bloodless defeat reached Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik, outraged citizens massed before the residence of Britain’s Ambassador Andrew G. Gilchrist, began pitching stones and bricks. Inside, Ambassador Gilchrist, a 48-year-old Scot with a Vandyke beard, reacted in the approved pukka sahib tradition. He put on a bagpipe recording to drown out the shouts from the street, and remarked of the mob’s marksmanship that “if they were cricket players, they would be better shots.” He further daunted the unruly natives by walking his dog at the height of the uproar and coolly staring down the nearest mobsters. “Nothing to it,” he remarked casually, returning to his window-shattered residence.

Quarrel with Overtones. These odd encounters were the opening skirmishes in a conflict with deadly serious overtones. Iceland is a NATO member, and the U.S. airbase at Keflavik is a keystone in NATO defense. Yet in their anger at Britain, Icelanders, spurred on by Minister of Fisheries Ludvik Josepsson, a Communist, were muttering about withdrawing from NATO and closing down the U.S. airfield.

The quarrel grew from Iceland’s unilateral decision to extend its territorial waters to a twelve-mile limit and to ban fishing by foreigners within that area (TIME, June 16). Britain’s answer was to escort its trawler fleet with frigates of the Royal Navy, far more powerful than the one-gun patrol boats of the Icelandic coast guard. The British point: if Iceland gets away with a twelve-mile limit, other nations with valuable fishing grounds—Norway, Denmark, Canada—might follow suit.

Trying to avoid a “codfish war” with Iceland, Britain had offered two compromise plans, one based on a six-mile limit, the other on a maximum permissible catch for non-Icelandic ships. So far, Iceland had refused to consider either offer, and last week Reykjavik papers were claiming that victory over the British was imminent. They warned that the names of British trawlers inside the twelve-mile limit were known, and if ever they had to shelter in Icelandic ports against the savage autumn gales, the captains would be subject to arrest and fines. At week’s end the captain of the British frigate Russell charged that the Icelandic patrol boat Aegir had “plainly” tried to ram him, and threatened to blow the Aegir out of the water if the attempt was repeated.

A Question of Size. The Soviet Union, which has offered Iceland a $3,000,000 credit toward the purchase of new fishing boats built in East Germany, jumped with heavy-footed glee into this wrangle. Pravda, in an article headed “Modern Pirates,” labeled Britain as an “aggressor” who looks at international law “through gun barrels.” (Asked how he could reconcile Britain’s treatment of Iceland with its tacit acceptance of Russia’s twelve-mile limit, one British official replied with rare candor: “The Russians have got bigger gunboats.”)

The U.S., uneasy because Iceland is the only NATO member economically dependent on Russian trade (30% of Iceland’s exports go to the U.S.S.R.; its imports from Russia have more than doubled since 1954). is counseling restraint on both sides. Yet in a showdown, the U.S. must stand with Britain—for to do otherwise would be to cut the ground out from under U.S. rejection of the twelve-mile limit now claimed by Red China.