The Atlantic cod is a fish of the North Atlantic Ocean that congregated in vast schools along the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland and became an essential part of the economy and culture of Canada’s most recent province, that is, until its depletion as a commercial stock in the 1990s. Of the 55 species of cod swimming the world’s oceans, 25 are found off Canada’s coasts. The most important cod in the Canadian fishery is the Atlantic cod, a heavy-bodied fish (capable of weighing up to 90 kg) with a large head, three dorsal fins, two anal fins, and a square tail. This bottom-living fish occurs on both sides of the North Atlantic: schools of the North American variety range on the continental shelf all the way from the Hudson Strait and West Greenland south to Cape Cod. Along the Grand Banks, Labrador, and the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, the cod were once in such abundance that they were, for centuries, one of the world’s leading food fishes. Ironically, the cod is now an endangered species, its depletion the result of abundant overfishing.
 

A young lad from Percé, Quebec, circa 1920, holds the biggest codfish catch of the day (weighing half his weight). In the 1920s it was not uncommon to catch monster codfish and export them to an eager European market. [Photo, courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection]

The shallow waters of the continental shelf, in particular the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, were an ideal habitat for Atlantic cod. Swirling currents that mixed warm waters from the Gulf Stream with the icy waters from the Labrador current and the freshwaters from the St. Lawrence encouraged a rich growth of plankton, smaller fish, and their predators. The great advantage of cod as a food fish was that it could be easily caught, dried, or salted, transported long distances, and preserved for several months.

The European exploitation of the cod fishery centuries ago set in motion the acquisition of North America, the development of mercantile networks and possessive imperial regimes that had affected areas far beyond the Grand Banks. British, French, and Dutch seafaring traditions were built in part on the “nursery for seamen” that the fishing industry created. Canadian historian, Harold Adam Innis, in his famous Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (1940), maintained that maritime fishing had a complex impact on the rest of North America, the West Indies, Western Europe, South America, and the Mediterranean. Fishing was a core activity that reinforced shipping, shipbuilding, and trade.

In 1497 John Cabot described the Grand Banks as so “swarming with fish [that they] could be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down with a stone.” In describing Newfoundland in 1497, Cabot used the Portuguese name baccalaos, which meant “Land of Cod.” Normans, Bretons, Basques, and Portuguese pioneered the trans-Atlantic fishery early in the sixteenth century, with the English from the west country dominating the Avalon peninsula after 1570. By 1575, the more than 300 French, Portuguese, and English vessels fishing on the banks created local competition among 100 European ports. By the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, the cod fleet exceeded 1,000 vessels and the fishery slowly shiftedfrom one that was migratory in nature to one that involved planters and overwinterers. As Spanish and Portuguese fleets declined, the English, French, and, later, New Englanders, competed along the continental shelf. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 which acknowledged England’s claim to Hudson Bay and ceded Acadia and Newfoundland to England, the cod fishery was one of the great industries of the western Europe economy. At the end of the American Revolution in 1783, as many as 1,500 vessels were fishing for cod, not to mention other vessels seeking various other fish species as well as whales. So abundant was the yearly catch that no talk of stock depletion or species extinction would take place for another 200 years!

Patterns of eighteenth century fishery included the dominance of crews and vessels from Waterford, Ireland; from Poole, Exeter, and Dartmouth in England; and from Norman communities in France, especially St. Malo. In France, codfish was the “beef of the sea” and the French continued to fish from bases around the Gulf of St. Lawrence and St. Pierre and Miquelon inspite of growing English dominance. In Europe, northern regions preferred wet or salted cod; Mediterranean countries acquired the more thoroughly processed and preserved dry cod. In 1772 the largest distributor of cod in Europe was the port city of Marseille which then redistributed it throughout the region to Spain, Italy, and other Mediterranean locations.

As late as 1900, three-quarters of the fish caught by Newfoundlanders was cod. One of the offshoots that sustained the cod fishery was the popularity of cod liver oil as a primary source of vitamin A. Before the 1920s, most cod liver oil was supplied by Norwegian sources until research in Newfoundland by Ayerst, McKenna, and Harrison Ltd. proved the potency and value of oil extracted from cod off the Grand Banks. Cod liver oil thereafter became a worldwide phenomenon, especially in the provision of vitamins to children.

The cod fishery, now nearly gone the way of the dodo, also contributed to a major economic theory developed by Canadian economists and historians relating to empire, communications, staples, and metropolitanism. The study of the cod fishery, in addition to other Canadian staple products such as fur, lumber, and wheat, has provided economic models applied to other parts of the world where resources, transport, mercantilism, and power controlled the system and pace of development. In thewords of Graeme Patterson, both Harold Adam Innis and Marshall McLuhan “believed the world was and continues to beshaped by communications systems ... the causes and effects of changes such as these are worldwide and not merely national or continental in extent.” Innis revealed that the study of the exploitation of cod and beaver within the framework of an intellectual concept was merely elementary to McLuhan’s understanding of the global village.
 

Canada’s codfish industry extended into Labrador where curing and drying of cod on raised platforms covered all the open spaces of little fishing villages. This view, circa 1910, captures a satisfying moment for Labrador fishermen having just completed the task of preparing cod for market. [Photo, courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection]

Larry Turner