Free Cod by Mark Kurlansky

hundreds of women for witchcraft, and hanging nineteen of them, a codfish was on its seal.
    In 1640, barely a generation after dreaming that Smith’s 47,000 fish were a fantastic 60,000 fish, the Massachusetts Bay Colony brought 300,000 cod to the world market.

    Cod drying on fish flakes, Marblehead, Massachusetts, detail from “View of Skinner’s Head” from Gleason’s Pictorial, vol. 6, 1854. (Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts)
    Â 
    The distinct destinies that would make the northern lands Canada’s eastern provinces and the southern ones the United States’ New England states were established. The fundamental difference was climate. Newfoundland, the Grand Banks, the Gulf of St. Lawrence were all fished in the summertime. The ships would leave Europe in April, when there was a good easterly wind. Trans-Atlantic mariners wanted the wind dead on the stern, so they could run with it, sticking to the same latitude—a method called easting and westing. Columbus, Cabot, and many others had done this. Until the eighteenth century, there was no reliable way to measure longitude, which helps explain why so many could make landfalls from the Bahamas to Newfoundland and believe they were near Asia. Latitude could be fixed by the relationship to the North Star or the sun, one of the few things known in the sixteenth century about celestial navigation. Westing ships out of Bristol reached the Labrador coast and dropped down to Newfoundland. Bretons went straight to the Grand Bank and St. John’s. If a ship left the harbor at La Rochelle, dropping below the two islands that protect that harbor, and then stuck to its latitude, it would make landfall at Cape Breton, where the French station of Louisbourg was established so that La Rochelle ships could easily find it.
    Every spring, Europeans would arrive to fish the northern Banks and scramble for the best shore spaces for drying the catch, which were called fishing rooms. The tradition was first come, first served. The fish were dried on spruce branches, and because the scrubby northern pine forest was slow growing, the island became badly deforested from building new rooms every spring. The Europeans fished through the summer and then, before the ice hardened, tried to catch a good fall westerly to return to the European markets. Ships began leaving a caretaker behind to maintain a fishing room through the winter. This must have been one of the loneliest jobs ever created, because Newfoundland was not attracting settlers.
    The single most telling fact about the island’s history is that the capital, St. John’s, like Petty Harbour on the other side of Cape Spear, is located on the point of land farthest from Canada and the rest of North America and closest to Europe. The entire Newfoundland economy was based on Europeans arriving, catching fish for a few months, and taking their fish back to Europe.
    New England has a milder winter: ice-free harbors, a longer growing season, and arable land. Even more important in those early years, the cod moved closer to shore for winter spawning. Cod ideally spawn in a water temperature ranging from forty to forty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Experiments show that at forty-seven degrees, eggs will hatch in ten to eleven days; at forty-three degrees in fourteen to fifteen days; at thirty-eight to thirty-nine degrees in twenty to twenty-three days. Seeking this forty-seven-degree water, cod will spawn on the coast of southern New England in the height of winter, somewhat closer to spring off of Maine, and in the summer in Newfoundland.
    In the North Atlantic, farming and fishing were traditionally combined. In Iceland, which, like Newfoundland, has little arable land and a very short growing season, Icelanders were still able to combine fishing and farming, or at least shepherding. The cod run off Iceland’s southern coast in the dark winter when there is little for a farmer to do. Well into this