The Spanish Basque city of Bilbao, with its ironworks providing the anchors and other metal fittings for Europe’s ships, was one of the ports that grew with the boom in shipbuilding created by the cod trade. According to historian Samuel Eliot Morison, at no time in history, not even during World War II, has there ever been such a demand for replacement of sunken ships as between 1530 and 1600. European ambition was simply too far ahead of technology, and until better ships and better navigation were developed, shipwrecks and disappearances were a regular part of this new adventure.
In this rapidly expanding commercial world, the British had one great disadvantage over the French, Spanish, and Portuguese: They had only a modest supply of salt. Most northern countries lacked salt and simply produced winter fish that was dried without salting. It was called stockfish, from the Dutch word stok, meaning “pole,” because the fish were tied in pairs by the tail and hung over poles to dry, as is still done out on the lava fields of Iceland every winter.
But the English wanted to produce a year-round supply of cod for a growing market, and since neither the North Sea nor Iceland was cold enough for drying fish in the summer, they became dependent on salting. Some fish were simply sold salted and undried, which became known as “green” not because of the color but because it was considered a more natural state than dried fish. But in an attempt to conserve their limited salt, the British invented a product that was to be favored in Mediterranean and Caribbean markets for centuries: a lightly salted dried cod. The Norwegians called it terranova fisk, Newfoundland fish, but later used the name klipfisk, rockfish, because it was dried on rocky coasts.
As green and salted-and-dried fish became available, they were preferred to the unsalted stockfish and brought substantially higher prices. The British experimented with new products such as a summer-cured dried cod from the Grand Banks known as Habardine or Poor John. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Trinculo says of Caliban, whom he finds on the beach, “He smells like a fish—a very ancient and fish-like smell—a kind of, not of the newest, poor john.”
Winter cures were known to be superior. Other variations were developed. Some fish was salted directly, and some was pickled in brine in barrels. Some of the pickled and some of the green were later dried to give them more durability. There was not only a wide choice of products in cured Newfoundland cod but also, no doubt, a great range of quality. “As to their Quality, Many of them Stink, for’tis a certain Maxim, that if Fish or Flesh be not well cured and salted first, they cannot be recovered,” John Collins, an accountant to the Royal Fishery, wrote in Salt and Fisheries.
It is not by chance that a Royal Fishery accountant was publishing a book on salt in 1682. The British fisheries had by then been wrestling with the salt problem for centuries. Collins pointed out that brackish water around England could be boiled, which yielded more salt than did evaporating seawater. He discussed the relative quality of salt and offered this recipe for one of the better English salts.
... the manner of boyling the Brine into Salt at Namptwich. They boyl it in Iron Pans, about 3 foot square, and 6 inches deep; their Fires are made of Staffordshire Pit-Coles, and one of their smaller Pans is boiled in 2 hours time.
To clarify and raise the Scum, they use Calves, Cows and Sheeps blood, which in Philosophical Transaction, No 142, is said to give the Salt an ill flavour.
Wich is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “a place that has salt,” and all the English towns whose names end in wich were at one time salt producers. But they could never produce enough for the Newfoundland cod fishery.
Collins warned against French salt, which he said was unhealthy. He probably had several reasons for saying this, aside from a general dislike of the French. There was a great tradition of French contraband, and salt was a favorite item because the French had a near obsession with evading the salt tax and, in fact, most taxes. “Oh, the rain washed it away” or “Someone must have stolen it” was the familiar litany recited to salt tax collectors. The British also had a hated salt tax and had their homes searched for off-the-books salt. But the French salt tax, the gabelle, was particularly hated and was one of the grievances leading to the French Revolution. Like many reforms of the Revolution, the abolition of the salt tax lasted only fifteen years and then was reinstated until 1945. One way of getting around the salt tax was to make your own, by boiling brackish water, and probably much of this illicit salt smuggled to England was indeed, as Collins said, unhealthy.
But the French Terreneuve merchants filled their holds with legal, high-quality French salt, which made good ballast, and sailed to Newfoundland. They returned with salt cod in the holds where the salt had been.
Salt was a great advantage of the Bretons. Under the agreement by which the duchy of Brittany became part of France, Bretons were exempt from the gabelle. And since sixteenth-century salt was made from evaporation, it was a southern product and southern Brittany was the most northerly point in western Europe where salt making was commercially viable.
Nearby Brittany could have supplied the British salt needs, but the French were the enemy. It was Portugal, with its saltworks in Aveiro—which, not by coincidence, became and still is Portugal’s salt cod center—that had what was considered Europe’s best salt. Bristol merchants went into a number of joint ventures with the Portuguese. In exchange for salt, the British government gave Portuguese ships protection from the French. In 1510, the king of Portugal complained to the king of France that French ships had taken 300 Portuguese vessels in the past ten years.
The mutually advantageous British arrangement with the Portuguese lasted until 1581, when Portugal merged with Spain. It was a bad moment for a seagoing nation to throw in its lot with Spain. In 1585, the British attacked and destroyed the Spanish fishing fleet, and the military fleet was destroyed in its disastrous attempt to invade England. The Spanish fleets took the Portuguese down with them. The Portuguese continued to fish the Grand Banks until expelled by the Canadian government in 1986, but after their short-lived merger with Spain ended their British alliance, they were never again a dominant force in the Newfoundland fishery.
By the time England broke its alliance with Portugal, not quite a century after Cabot’s first voyage, Newfoundland cod was more than commerce to the British; it was strategic. In fact, what finally spurred the British to become the dominant players in the Newfoundland fishery in the second half of the sixteenth century was providing enormous quantities of dried—not salted—cod to the British Navy’s ships-of-the-line fighting France. They fed their Navy with it and sold the surplus. Quick to catch fish, the English were slow to learn the European market and had trouble selling their fish to Mediterranean countries where the population demanded high-quality salted and dried fish. After a century-long free-for-all, the Spanish Basques were reemerging as dominant suppliers to the Mediterranean world—despite losing their secret.
British law greatly encumbered its own attempts at trade. Since Newfoundland cod was strategic, its commerce had to be tightly controlled, as though cod were a weapon of war. The Spanish and Portuguese had also viewed cod as strategic, because it sustained the crews on their increasing number of tropical voyages to the New World. But the Iberians also had enormous home markets for cured cod. England had the smallest market for cured cod of any of the cod-fishing nations. The English, who ate less fish, had their own highly developed home fisheries. Yet the British Crown inhibited foreign trade in cod, forbidding British ships to sell directly to European ports.
The British were landing what for that time was enormous quantities of fish. Western ports continued to grow. Plymouth on the Cornish peninsula, stretching west toward the new lands, became increasingly important. There were fifty Newfoundland fishing ships based in Plymouth alone, about which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote in 1595, “If these should be lost it would be the greatest blow ever given to England.”
In 1597, this fifty-ship fleet returned from the Grand Banks, sailing up the south Cornish coast to Plymouth. It
was a sight unknown in our age—some 200 canvas sails crowding the sky as the fleet made its way into the sheltered harbor against the green patchwork hills of Devon. These two-masted ships on which dozens of men lived and worked for months were only 100 feet long. Merchants would have preferred bigger ships with bigger holds, but sailors wanted to navigate the treacherous new rock-bound world with small vessels. Merchants from Holland, France, and Ireland packed into the small port town, waiting for the Plymouth fleet so they could buy their fish and ship it out again to Europe’s markets.
The British continued to miss out on this commercial opportunity. In 1598, a Newfoundland fleet sailed into Southampton and sold most of the cod to French merchants, who resold them to Spain. By then, Catholic religious wars with the Huguenots, the Protestants in La Rochelle, reduced the French fleet. With Portuguese, Spanish, and French fleets all in decline, the British began to understand the commercial potential of their Newfoundland fishery. By the end of the sixteenth century, British ships were finally allowed to take their Newfoundland cod directly to foreign ports. The newly freed British traders forced open commerce in cod, and other trade followed.
But this opening of trade would seem minor in hindsight, because early in the seventeenth century, when it was just beginning, an even more important change in world trade was seeded. A small group of religious dissidents who had fled England were staring at a map in their Dutch refuge and had noticed a small hook of land that was labeled with an intriguing name—Cape Cod.
THE SHAME OF IT
STOCKFISH
Beat it soundly with a Mallet for half an hour or more and lay it three days a soaking, then Boyle it on a simmering Fire about an hour, with as much water as will cover it till it be soft, then take it up, and put in butter, eggs, and Mustard champed together, otherwise take 6 potato (which may be had all the year at Seed-Shops;) boyl them very tender, and then skin them. Chop them, and beat up the Butter thick with them, and put it on the fish and serve them up. Some use Parsnips.
The like for Haberdine and Poor-Jack, I should be ashamed of this Receipt if we had no better to follow, and think it too mean to mention any thing about Green Fish or barreld Cod, but the watering and soaking before they are boyled.
—John Collins,
Salt and Fishery, London, 1682
Also see pages 237-41.
4: 1620: The Rock and the Cod
FISHIEST OF ALL FISHY PLACES WAS THE TRY POTS,
WHICH WELL DESERVES ITS NAME; FOR THE POTS THERE.
WERE ALWAYS BOILING CHOWDERS. CHOWDER FOR
BREAKFAST, AND CHOWDER FOR DINNER, AND CHOWDER
FOR SUPPER, TILL YOU BEGIN TO LOOK FOR FISH-BONES
COMING THROUGH YOUR CLOTHES. THE AREA BEFORE
THE HOUSE WAS PAVED WITH CLAMSHELLS. MRS. HUS-
SEY WORE A POLISHED NECKLACE OF CODFISH VERTEBRA;
AND HOSEA HUSSEY HAD HIS ACCOUNT BOOKS BOUND IN
SUPERIOR OLD SHARK-SKIN. THERE WAS A FISHY FLAVOR
TO THE MILK, TOO, WHICH I COULD NOT ACCOUNT FOR,
TILL ONE MORNING HAPPENING TO TAKE A STROLL
ALONG THE BEACH AMONG SOME FISHERMEN’S BOATS, I
SAW HOSEA’S BRINDLED COW FEEDING ON FISH REM-
NANTS, AND MARCHING ALONG THE SAND WITH EACH
FOOT IN A COD’S DECAPITATED HEAD, LOOKING VERY
SLIPSHOD, I ASSURE YE.
—Herman Melville, on Nantucket, from Moby Dick or The Whale, 1851
For Europeans, the known world doubled in the course of the sixteenth century. The Dutch had two possibilities to offer the English Puritan refugees : the tiny, well-protected port on the tip of the island of Manhattan, or Guiana, on the shoulder of South America. Of the two, Guiana seemed to offer better opportunities.
More than fifty years earlier, a Spaniard named Juan Martinez had been sent there as a death sentence. He had been found responsible for an accident in which a magazine of gunpowder exploded, and his punishment for negligence was to be dropped off at the unknown northeastern coast of South America in a canoe without supplies. His canoe drifted into the hands of local tribesmen, who blindfolded this first European they had ever seen and brought him to a magnificent city of palaces. After seven months, they loaded Martinez with gold and sent him on his way, again blindfolded. That, at least, was Martinez’s story when he arrived in Trinidad.
Martinez’s fabled city became popularly known as El Dorado. He died soon after in Puerto Rico, and the cause of death, according to many throughout the centuries, was that the gold of Guiana is cursed. In the early 1600s, it was already known that hunts for this El Dorado, even by the great Sir Walter Raleigh, had always ended disastrously. But then, so many voyages to the New World did.
With the world so greatly expanded and seemingly so empty and unknown, searching had become a European passion. Provisioned with nourishing cured cod, some headed to South America looking for gold. Others went to North America looking for cod. But what most who went to either place were really still looking for was Asia. In the sixteenth century, Newfoundland was charted as an island off of China. Europeans had sailed as far south as Maine’s Bay of Fundy and not found a passage. The Spanish and Portuguese had worked south from Florida to the subantarctic tip of Patagonia and had not gotten through either. Still, the idea wouldn’t die.
With the backing of Lyons silk merchants, the French Crown commissioned a Florentine, Giovanni da Verrazzano, to search for a short westward route to China. But France’s Italian failed, just as Spain’s and England’s had. In his 1524 voyage, Verrazzano turned north, following an endless coastline from Cape Fear in present-day North Carolina. He noted that the indigenous people were “nimble and great runners,” optimistically pointing out that he understood this to be characteristic of people in China. He sailed up the coast, found New York Harbor, Narragansett Bay, and an arm-shaped hook of land, which he named Pallavisino after an Italian general. Then he continued up to the coast of Maine, which he called Land of Bad People, and on to what he called “the land that in times past was discovered by the British.” Having exhausted his supplies and found “7000 leagues of new coastline” and still no passage, he gave up and returned to France, where he insisted that there was a whole New World out there.
But ideas are not easily conquered by facts, and seventy-eight years later Bartholomew Gosnold was still looking for the passage to Asia. In 1602, Gosnold sailed beyond Nova Scotia, following the coast south to New England in search of a passage to Asia, where he intended to gather sassafras, which was highly prized because it was thought to cure syphilis.
North America abounds in sassafras. The Native Americans used the leaves to thicken soups. It never cured syphilis, but the roots made an excellent drink later known as root beer. Gosnold did not find China, but he returned to England with sassafras. “The powder of the sassafras,” reported one of his officers, “cured one of our company that had taken a great surfeit by eating the bellies of dogfish—a very delicious meat.”
Europeans still did not understand how large this thing was, this obstacle in the way of Asia. Gosnold’s seemingly unsuccessful 1602 voyage ended up in history books chiefly because he renamed Pallavisino, as Cape Cod, after having reported that his ship, while in pursuit of Asian sassafras, was constantly being “pestered” by these fish.
In the moneths of March, April and May, there is upon this coast better fishing, and in as great plentie as in Newfoundland.... And besides the places were but in seven faddomes water and within less than a league of the shore, where in Newfoundland they fish in fortie or fiftie fadome water and farre off.
From the European point of view in that “age of discovery,” Gosnold had “discovered” New England. Yes, it had been discovered before, but in more than seventy-five years no one had been interested in Pallavisino. Gosnold’s name for it, Cape Cod, like the name El Dorado in the South, opened up this new territory.
In 1603, Bristol merchants checked out Gosnold’s story and reported not only plentiful cod but e
xcellent rocky coastline for drying fish in what is now Maine. One merchant, George Waymouth, after seeing the Maine coast, reported “huge, plentiful cods—some they measured to be five foot long and three foot about.” The fact that he also confirmed the presence of sassafras seemed to get lost.
The new area was called North Virginia. In 1607, an attempt to establish a settlement there, near what is today Brunswick, Maine, resulted in the first New England-built seagoing vessel, constructed by the colonists in order to flee for England after enduring one winter. North Virginia was “over-cold,” they explained, and uninhabitable.
Gosnold’s map vanished, but John Smith either had seen it or at least knew some details of his voyage. By the time the Pilgrims were making their decision, Captain John Smith was already a well-known figure, in part for establishing a colony in the lower part of Virginia, but even more for his 1614 voyage to over-cold North Virginia, where he became rich from cod. Smith had actually hoped to get rich from whales, gold, and copper. He no more found any of these than Raleigh had found gold or Gosnold China. So Smith busied his crew filling the ship’s hold with salt cod. He openly disliked fishing and left his men to it while he went off with a small crew in a little open boat to explore the coast. He had previously done this over 3,000 miles of inlets in the Chesapeake Bay. He now charted the coastline from Penobscot Bay in Maine to Cape Cod, making a map that included twenty-five “excellent good harbors” that he had sounded. For some reason, Gloucester’s harbor was not among them.
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World Page 5