Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force. At first it offers an opportunity to sell off the mistakes that would otherwise have represented a loss. But producers increasingly turned to this fast, cheap, profitable product because it was easy. West India cure represented a steadily increasing percentage of the output of New England, Nova Scotia, and to a lesser degree, Newfoundland. Nova Scotia in particular specialized in a small, poor-quality, salted-and-dried product for the West Indies.

  The first draw of the Caribbean for New Englanders was the salt from the Tortugas. But soon ships were coming back with not only salt but indigo, cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Only twenty-five years after the Pilgrims first landed, New Englanders were doing a triangulated trade. The best fish was always sold in Spain. Bilbao, with its wine, fruit, iron, and coal, became a major trading partner with Boston. The New Englanders then sailed to the West Indies, where some Spanish goods along with the cheapest cod were sold, and sugar, molasses, tobacco, cotton, and salt were bought. The ship would return to Boston with Mediterranean and Caribbean goods. They had made money at every stop.

  Very quickly the next commercially logical step was taken. In 1645, a New England ship took pipe to the Canaries, then bought African slaves in the Cape Verde Islands and sold them in Barbados, returning to Boston with wine, sugar, salt, and tobacco. Shipments of salt cod followed, and soon salt cod, slaves, and molasses became commercially linked.

  In preparing a museum devoted to the seventeenth-century commercial port of Salem, National Park Service officials carefully checked shipping documents, bracing themselves for an attack, and were relieved to have been unable to uncover any record of slaving on any Salem ship. But they should not take too much comfort in this. Aside from the fact that much slave trading was done clandestinely, the search for these records misses the important point. Regardless of how many ships actually did or did not carry slaves, or how many New England merchants did or did not buy or sell Africans, the New England merchants of the cod trade were deeply involved in slavery, not only because they supplied the plantation system but also because they facilitated the trade in Africans. In West Africa, slaves could be purchased with cured cod, and to this day there is still a West African market for salt cod and stockfish.

  The French politician Alexis de Tocqueville, in his reflective 1835 study, De la démocratie en Amérique, wrote about an inherent contradiction in the New England character. “Nowhere was this principle of liberty more totally applied than in New England,” he wrote. But then he went on to describe what he termed “the great social enigma of the United States.” Freedom-loving New Englanders accepted a great deal of repression and social injustice. He described the Connecticut legal code, in which blasphemy and adultery were capital crimes, and the Boston society that crusaded against long hair. The slave trade was another example of the moral contradiction Tocqueville had observed. New England society was the great champion of individual liberty and even openly denounced slavery, all the while growing ever more affluent by providing Caribbean planters with barrels of cheap food to keep enslaved people working sixteen hours a day. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, more than 300 ships left Boston in a good year for the West Indies.

  The development of a faster fishing boat, the schooner, increased production capacity of this quick cure. In 1713, the first schooner was built and launched from Eastern Point, Gloucester, by Andrew Robinson, and though there were earlier European experiments with this type of rigging, the Gloucester schooner revolutionized sailing and fishing. It was a small, sleek, two-masted vessel with fore-and-aft rigging and the ability to put a tremendous amount of canvas in topsails. The name comes from an eighteenth-century New England word, scoon, meaning “to skim lightly along the water.” In full sail with a good breeze and a flat sea, heeling at a slight angle, the vessels did seem to scoon, and this remains one of the most elegant sights in the history of sailing. But often they were out on the Banks climbing up and tobogganing down swells as high as their masts. By reducing sailing time between Georges Bank and the coastline drying flakes, they increased production of West India cure.

  Woodcut of eighteenth-century Gloucester harbor. (Corbis-Bettmann)

  Some of New England’s best customers were the French colonies of St. Domingue (Haiti), Martinique, and Guadeloupe and the Dutch colony of Suriname (Dutch Guiana). These colonies were huge plantation economies, and the French ones were extremely profitable. After 1680, the French brought an average of 1,000 Africans to Martinique every year. Eighteenth-century St. Domingue averaged 8,000 a year. While many of the slaves were replacing others who had been worked to death, an African slave population nourished on cheap salt cod was rapidly growing.

  The French fisheries were not able to satisfy this demand. The one requirement of the Caribbean market was that the saltfish be dried hard so that it could survive a tropical climate. The French lacked shore space for drying. During the eighteenth century, the limited French space in Newfoundland was whittled down to almost none. The British made their base on the eastern coast, the headlands, close to the Banks. The French fished from the south coast, Placentia Bay, where there were good ice-free harbors, the herring ran, providing bait, and New France’s Gaspé Peninsula was nearby. Then, in 1713, after a fight with the British, the French agreed to leave this area and settle for access to the north coast of Newfoundland, which has been known ever since as the French shore. The area was not adjacent to other French territories, nor is it close to good fishing grounds, so it did not offer convenient drying space. After the next war, the French position became even worse.

  The Seven Years War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War, was the first global conflict. In the late 1750s, France and Britain fought each other, not only in Europe but in India, the Caribbean, and North America. On September 13, 1759, New France was lost in twenty minutes when British general James Wolfe scaled the cliffs leading to the fortress at Quebec City and surprised the French garrison under General Louis de Montcalm. Montcalm, who had known previous victories against the British, made the error of leaving the fortress and meeting the surprise attack on the flat field behind the battlements. Within minutes, both generals lay dying and Quebec had fallen.

  Instead of settling for battlefield victories, the British deliberated for three years over what to take from France. Some wanted to let the French keep their cod colony in North America and instead take a sugar colony as the price for peace. Guadeloupe produced more sugar than all the British West Indies combined. But the issue was never whether sugar or cod and furs was the more valuable. It was a debate about how to best hold on to North America. Given the attitudes, the economic independence, and the growing population of New England and the other lower North American colonies, Britain feared losing North America. Some argued that the French presence, an enemy at their backs, would keep the North Americans loyal to the British. But in the end, the British thought that they had better secure as much of North America as they could. In 1763, they decided to deny France all of its North American possessions except two tiny islands off the south coast of Newfoundland, St. Pierre and Miquelon.

  Ironically, when France retained Guadeloupe but lost Canada—held its slave colonies but lost its fisheries—the demand this created for West India cure in the French Caribbean led New Englanders on a direct collision course with the British Crown. The conflict went back to the Acts of Trade and Navigation, one of the foundations of the British Empire, according to which colonists were to sell their goods to England and buy their goods from England. Legally, New Englanders should not have traded directly with Spain and the Caribbean but were supposed to have sold their cod to England and then to have purchased Spanish wine and iron from England.

  The British had good reasons to worry about North America. In 1677, ninety-eight years before the cause of American independence became a shooting war, th
e British Crown received a polite note from New Englanders accompanied by ten barrels of cranberries, two of corn mush, and 1,000 codfish. Perhaps not as bitter as ten barrels of cranberries, the enclosed note stated, “We humbly conceive that the laws of England are bounded within four seas, and do not reach America. The subjects of his majesty here being not represented in Parliament, so we have not looked at ourselves to be impeded in trade by them.”

  What Charles did with 1,000 codfish and all those cranberries is not known, but he did absolutely nothing about the Trade and Navigation Acts. Instead, the law was bent by the force of the marketplace. New England produced too much cod for the British market. It could not all be sold in Britain, and the British merchant fleet did not have the capacity to reexport that much cod. In spite of the Trade and Navigation Acts, the British had to allow the New Englanders to trade it.

  Freed from restraint, as Adam Smith pointed out, the trade grew. By 1700, the British West Indies could not absorb all of New England’s cod. Nor could it fully supply New England’s rum industry, which was a byproduct of the cod trade. Typical of the difference between New England and Newfoundland, Newfoundland imported Jamaican rum for local bottling, and still does, whereas New England imported molasses and built its own rum industry to sell in foreign markets. There were now three ways to buy slaves in West Africa: cash, salt cod, or Boston rum.

  Massachusetts and Rhode Island rum producers were getting directly involved in the slave trade. Felton & Company, a Boston rum maker founded in the early nineteenth century, described the trade with remarkable candor in its 1936 drink guide. “Ship owners developed a cycle of trade involving cargoes of slaves to the West Indies—a cargo of Blackstrap Molasses from those islands to Boston and other New England ports—and finally the shipment of rum to Africa.”

  Soon the British Empire was not only too small a market for New England’s cod catch but too small a molasses producer for New England’s distilleries. Total British West Indies molasses production was less than two-thirds of what Rhode Island alone imported. The French colonies needed New England cod, and New England needed French molasses.

  Then the British Crown, after letting New Englanders taste free trade for more than a century, decided in 1733 to regulate molasses as a key step toward reasserting its control over commerce. Instead the measure turned out to be one of the first inadvertent steps toward dismantling the British Empire.

  WEST INDIA IN THE WEST INDIES

  TIME SO HARD YOU CANNOT DENY

  THAT EVEN SALTFISH AND RICE WE CAN HARDLY BUY.

  —1940s calypso by “the Tiger” (Neville Marcano)

  In Puerto Rico there was a piropia, a catcall to attractive women, that went Tanto carne, y yo comiendo bacalao (so much meat, and I’m just eating salt cod). Today meat is cheaper than salt cod, but the expression, like piropias themselves, persists.

  Salt cod was a cheap food, mixed with other cheap foods, to make popular dishes. While it is no longer cheap, the recipes remain unchanged. Along with salt cod and roots, the most universal Caribbean salt cod dish is Salt Cod and Rice. Originally, it was a way of stretching the salt cod supply and was often made with the tail or other scraps. Sometimes a stock was prepared from the bones and the rice cooked in that, a dish known in Puerto Rico as Mira Bacalao (Look for the Salt Cod).

  SALT COD AND RICE

  This is a favourite native dish. The saltfish and rice, about a half a pound of saltfish to a pint of rice, are boiled together with the usual bit of salt pork and a little butter.

  —Caroline Sullivan,

  The Jamaica Cookery Book, Kingston, 1893

  Also see pages 257-61.

  6: A Cod War Heard‘Round the World

  SALT FISH WERE STACKED ON THE WHARVES, LOOKING

  LIKE CORDED WOOD, MAPLE AND YELLOW BIRCH WITH

  THE BARK LEFT ON. I MISTOOK THEM FOR THIS AT FIRST,

  AND SUCH IN ONE SENSE THEY WERE,—FUEL TO MAIN-

  TAIN OUR VITAL FIRES—AN EASTERN WOOD WHICH

  GREW ON THE GRAND BANKS.

  —Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod, 1851

  THE ART OF TAXATION CONSISTS OF PLUCKING THE

  GOOSE SO AS TO OBTAIN THE MOST FEATHERS WITH

  THE LEAST HISSING.

  —Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83)

  There is romance to revolution. There was to those of France, Russia, Mexico, China, Cuba. But the most romantic of revolutions, such as 1848, seem the greatest failures. The American Revolution was a remarkably successful revolution. It did not fall into chaos and violence, nor did it slide toward dictatorship. It produced no Napoleon and no institutionalized ruling party. It achieved its goals. It was also, as revolutions go, extremely unromantic. The radicals, the real revolutionaries, were middle-class Massachusetts merchants with commercial interests, and their revolution was about the right to make money.

  John Adams, the most forceful of this radical Massachusetts element, did not believe in colonialism as an economic system and therefore did not believe that Americans should accept living in colonies. The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy.

  All revolutions are to some degree about money. During France’s revolution, the comte de Mirabeau said, “In the last analysis the people will judge the Revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?” But he was not a radical in that Revolution.

  Massachusetts radicals sought an economic, not a social, revolution. They were not thinking of the hungry masses and their salaries. They were thinking of the right of every man to be middle-class, to be an entrepreneur, to conduct commerce and make money. Men of no particular skill, with very little capital, had made fortunes in the cod fishery. That was the system they believed in.

  These were not shallow men. Many of them, most of the important leaders—even Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner—understood that it was hypocrisy to talk about the rights of man and ignore the agony of millions of slaves. But they were not going to let the Revolution break down over this issue, as they feared it might. Throughout the century, Englishmen had predicted that the booming American colonies would try to break free from the Crown, but that, in the end, they would remain in the British Empire because of their inability to get along with each other. What the British Crown failed to understand was that the Revolutionary leaders were pragmatists focused on primary goals and that molasses, cod, and tea were not mere troubling disagreements; they were the issue. Virginians even called the Revolution “the Tobacco War.”

  England had shown some flexibility. Gloucester, though a legally recognized trade port, did not even have a customs official. The British also allowed South Carolina to trade rice for fruit, salt, and wine directly with the Mediterranean. The greatest latitude was in trade with British West Indies colonies. For Massachusetts, this trade was cod for molasses, but Connecticut traded vegetables, Maryland wheat, and Pennsylvania corn. By the 1740s, New England had as much trade with the Caribbean as it did with England. Before the English started worrying about an armed war of independence, they were worrying about a de facto independence. The colonies did not need the mother country, and both parties knew it.

  Britain’s first major attempt to reassert its colonial monopoly was the Molasses Act of 1733, which imposed such heavy import duties on molasses from the non-British Caribbean that it should have virtually eliminated the trade. By making the purchase of French West Indies molasses unprofitable, the measure should have not only reduced New Englanders’ markets for cod but also reduced their rum industry. It did neither, because the French were eager to work with the New Englanders in a lucrative contraband arrangement. Cod-molasses trade between New England and the French Caribbean actually grew after the Molasses Act.

  T
he act might have been a forgotten failure had the British not tried again a generation later, with the Sugar Act of 1760, which put a six-cents-per-gallon tax on molasses. Again, New Englanders persevered through contraband. In 1764, the British tried a new tactic, actually lowering the tax on molasses, but levying new ones on sugar and on Madeira. This was intended to make colonists switch from Madeira to Port, the latter being available only through British merchants. Instead, the colonists boycotted both. Though Madeira was also traded for a middle-grade cure of cod known as the Madeira cure, rum was their drink. It was so commonplace that the word rum was sometimes used as a generic term for alcoholic beverages. The year of the Molasses Act, it was calculated that the consumption of rum in the American colonies averaged 3.75 U.S. gallons per person annually. In 1757, George Washington ran for the Fairfax County seat in the House of Burgesses. His campaign expenses included twenty-eight gallons of rum and fifty gallons of rum punch. There was also wine, beer, and cider. This may seem modest compared to today’s campaign spending, but in 1757 Fairfax County, Virginia, had only 391 voters.

  In 1764, Boston merchant John Hancock, already a known active rebel, was arrested on a charge of Madeira smuggling on his sloop, the Liberty. An angry Boston mob freed him. The following year, the Stamp Act for the first time charged colonists with a direct tax rather than a customs duty. As the British stepped up enforcement of trade laws, relations deteriorated. For the first time, customs agents were assigned to Gloucester, though these unfortunate officials were harassed, brutalized, and sometimes driven into hiding. In 1769, Massachusetts claimed that restraints on trade had resulted in losses for 400 vessels involved in the cod fishery.