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The Sea Was Covered with Fish

SPICES WERE AMONG THE MOST COVETED OF trade goods to the fifteenth-century merchants of Europe. At that point in the world’s history, spices such as pepper, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and cinnamon were often as valuable as gold. They were brought overland by camel caravans from the spice-rich areas of India and the Orient to the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. This kind of enterprise was always dangerous and expensive, and merchants were both eager to expand the trade and willing to finance increasingly ambitious ventures to reach the spices by alternative routes. Why not sail west to the lands where they grew rather than take the long and treacherous overland route to the east? So began a series of voyages of discovery during which those early explorers who risked their lives and fortunes by sailing west found instead a vast new land mass that stood in their way — or was it perhaps an unknown and unexpected segment of a shoreline of either India or China? Hence, they gave the name “Indians” to those members of the First Nations whom they met when they landed.

One of those explorers was Giovanni Caboto, a Genoese native and Venetian citizen with long experience in the eastern spice trade. Sailing under an English banner, he is credited with “discovering” the Grand Banks in 1497. Like so many other explorers, he was attempting to find the riches of the Orient, but instead returned to England to report to the Bristol merchants who had hired him and to King Henry VII “that the sea was covered with fish which could be caught not merely by nets, but with weighted baskets lowered into the water.”[1]

With this information, the merchants and traders of Bristol and Devon realized they no longer needed to rely on importing vast quantities of fish from Iceland to satisfy their customers. They turned their attention to this new and unexpected source of cod, which was so plentiful that it became known as the “Beef of the Sea” and was soon synonymous with the word fish. The soft gelatinous flesh of the cod dried quickly and could be stored for long periods without refrigeration, filling an economic need at the time in the markets of Europe. When those first fishing vessels arrived, the crews would fish for cod from the rail of their ships with hand-held lines and then take the catch ashore to Cabot’s New Founde Lande, where it was cleaned, salted, and spread to dry. After that it was loaded in the ship’s hold and transported home to England to be sold at the markets there.

Seeing Britain’s success, other countries quickly followed suit, and fishing fleets from Portugal, Spain, and France struggled with England — both physically and politically — for supremacy in the area and control of this resource. It was the French fishermen who introduced a different method of fishing and preserving the catch called “greenfishing.” Instead of drying the fish on shore, the fishermen gutted and salted the catch before stowing it in the ship’s hold. Months later, when the vessel returned home, the fish were still moist or “green.” The crews that used this method also fished from the deck with hand-held lines weighted with lead and protected from the spray and wind with small screens attached to the sides of the ship. When the hold was full, the greenfish (salted and wet) were taken back to France to be dried and sold.

Early European explorers described the codfish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as so plentiful that they could be caught in weighted baskets lowered into the water.

Early European explorers described the codfish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as so plentiful that they could be caught in weighted baskets lowered into the water.

Exploitation of this rich resource was one of the great economic activities of Europe during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a venture that every year lured hundreds of vessels across the ocean, drew upon and fostered seafaring support systems along much of the Atlantic fringe, and marketed its catch through a network that reached far into the European realm. Thus it trained generations of mariners, employed thousands of craftsmen and suppliers, and involved families and friends, syndicates, and whole communities in North American activities.[2]

In 1622, Captain Richard Whitbourne of Exmouth, Devon, one of the captains who by then had spent forty years trading to the Grand Banks and Newfoundland, gives us a vivid but often questioned description of the land and its fruits, vegetables, and potential for crops:

The land of Newfoundland is large, temperate and fruitful…. Then have you there fair strawberries red and white, and as fair raspberries and gooseberries as there be in England, as also multitudes of bilberries, which are called by some whortes, and many other delicate berries in great abundance.

Here also are many other fruits, as small pears, cherries, filbirds, etc. And of these berries and fruits, the store is there so great that the mariners of my ship have often gathered at once more than half an hogshead would hold…. There are also herbs for salads and broth, as parsley, alexander, sorrel, etc…. Our men that have wintered there divers years, did for a trial and experiment thereof sow some small quantity of corn, which I saw growing very fair; and they found the increase to be great, and the grain very good; and it is well known to me, and divers that trade there yearly, how that cabbage, carrots, turnips, lettuce, parsley and such like prove well there.[3]

Captain Whitbourne goes on to tell us that “The natural inhabitants of the country are willing to assist the fishermen in curing fish for a small hire … they were able to sew the rinds of spruce-trees, round and deep in proportion, like a brass kettle, to boil their meat in.” On one occasion, three of his men surprised a party of First Nations enjoying themselves in a sumptuous manner:

They were feasting, having the canoes by them, and they had three pots made of the rinds of trees, standing each of them on three stems, boiling, with fowls in each of them, every fowl as big as a pigeon and some as big as a duck. They had also many such pots so fowled, and fashioned like the leather buckets that are used for quenching fires, and were full of the yolks of eggs that they had taken and boiled hard, and so dried small, which the savages used in their broth … also a great store of flesh dried.[4]

The Grand Banks continued for close to five hundred years, serving the First Nations, the newcomers, and the world’s hungry abroad. Surrounding it on the Atlantic Coast and in the waterways of what were to become the Atlantic Provinces was a wealth of marine life of all kinds and descriptions that sea captains, travellers, entrepreneurs, and settlers continued to marvel at. Here is just one account of the bounty in and near Prince Edward Island in the early nineteenth century:

The rivers abound with trout, eels, mackerel, flounders, oysters and lobsters, and some salmon; and the coast with codfish and herrings in great abundance. The latter, soon after the ice breaks away in the spring rush into the harbours on the north side of the island in immense shoals, are taken by the inhabitants in small nets with very little trouble, and as salt is cheap (not being subject to duty) most families barrel up a quantity for occasional use. The lobsters are in great abundance and very large and fine. In Europe this kind of shell-fish is only taken on the sea-coast amongst rocks; at Prince Edward Island they are taken in the rivers and on shallows, where they feed on a kind of sea-weed, called by the islanders eel-grass, and a person by wading into the water half-leg deep, might fill a bushel basket in half an hour. Many schooners are annually laden with oysters from Quebec and Newfoundland.

The plenty of fish, and the ease with which it is procured, is of great assistance to the inhabitants, and in particular to new settlers, before they have time to raise food from the produce of the land.[5]

As the explorers, trappers, traders, missionaries, entrepreneurs, and settlers moved inland, they realized that not only the oceans and the rivers flowing into it teemed with fish, but that the supply of fish in the inland rivers and lakes surpassed their wildest expectations. An interpreter and trader at the Falls of St. Mary (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario) said in 1777: “At this place there is an abundance of fine fish, particularly pickerell [sic], and white fish of uncommon size.”[6] And a few weeks later he noted: “We prepared our nets for fishing. The ice was three feet thick, and the snow very deep; this we were obliged to clear away, before we could cut holes in which to put our nets. For the space of two months we had uncommon success, having caught about eighteen hundred weight of fish, which we hung up by the tails across sticks to freeze, and then laid them up for store.”[7]

In 1784, Robert Pagan, a United Empire Loyalist forced to flee from the new United States of America to today’s Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, wrote to his wife (in Falmouth, now Portland) describing the food he was shipping to her: “By the schooner Seafoam, Capn. Bell, I intend to send you a kegg of pickled lobsters, & some smoked salmon, some potatoes, & turnips, some cranberries, some mackerel also a quarter of beef and a side of good mutton, which I shall procure in two or three days.”[8]

From the accounts of both the First Nations and the newcomers, salmon abounded, and it was often smoked to ensure that it would keep. Here is a nineteenth-century traveller’s account of the basic technique of smoking salmon, which the newcomers would have learned from the First Nations:

During our stay on the river [Nepisiguit River, New Brunswick] which lasted a month, we smoked over 120 salmon, which we packed in boxes and sent off to our friends in Saint John. The following is the receipt for that process:

Split the fish down the back and clean them, cutting out the gills at the same time; this should be done as soon as possible after they are caught, or the fish will become soft; immerse for two days in a strong pickle of salt and water, a trough for this purpose is easily hewn out of a fallen spruce or pine, or, in lieu use a dish of birch or spruce bark. After taking the fish out of the pickle, wash them in running water, then hang them in a smoke house for six days. A smoke house is built in the shape of a wigwam, and covered with birch or spruce bark; great care must be taken to keep up the fire, which is placed in the smoke house, always burning very slowly, if it gets too hot the fish becomes cooked and spoilt; it is a good plan to place the entrails of the fish on the fire to keep it cool.[9]

When John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario), arrived in 1791, he was accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, who was an artist and also kept a diary rich in the details of everyday life. There were dozens of diary entries describing the fish to be found in Upper Canada, such as this one on April 6, 1793: “St. Denis of the 5th caught yesterday at Niagara, 500 whitefish and 40 sturgeon; this is common sturgeon, one nearly 6 foot long.”[10]

Settlers often chose to build their homes beside water, both for ease of travel and for the number of fish that could be speared, netted, trapped, or caught with a baited line. Newcomers continued to be amazed at what they found:

I think I may assert, without fear of contradiction, that the angling in Canada is the finest in the world. Many thousands of trout streams and hundreds of salmon rivers discharge their waters into the gulf and river St. Lawrence. From Lake Ontario down to the straits of Belle-Isle, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles; on each shore of the river there is hardly a mile of coast-line without a river or stream. Thousands and thousands of lakes, all of which hold trout, lie hidden in the forest; in the majority of them perhaps a fly has never been cast. Trout fishing is open to everyone … and such salmon fishing![11]

By the middle of the nineteenth century, settlers spread across the country and the fishing industry on the East Coast steadily expanded as demand for cod grew not only in Canada but in the West Indies and South America. The fishing schooners, both from Canada and abroad, now carried dories, small seaworthy craft equipped with a sail and two sets of oars for the crew of two men. The dories left the schooners at daybreak to set long lines of hooks baited with herring, squid, capelin, or salted clams. They made four trips out to the trawl, or longline, each day to check the gear. This endless round of baiting, setting, and hauling trawl ended in the evening when the “dressing” of the cod began. Each fish was gutted, beheaded, split (backbone removed), washed, and placed in the hold, where it was packed in salt. This chore ended about midnight. Then the men slept until 3:30 a.m. when they began the next day’s fishing. The schooners were often out on the Grand Banks for three months, and when they returned, the catch was given to “fish makers,” who washed the coarse salt from the cod and spread it to dry in the sun on racks covered with spruce boughs, known as “flakes.” For three weeks the fish was watched so that it would not get wet in the rain or sunburned. When it was hard-dried, it was ready to be packaged in barrels or boxes for shipment to markets at home or abroad.

As we follow the cod from the water to the kitchen to the dinner table, we find the ingenious recipes developed by enterprising cooks over the centuries that used virtually every part of the fish: Fried Cod Roe, Fried or Baked Cod Tongues, Stewed or Fried Cods’ Heads, Fish Hash (made from fresh or salt codfish), Codfish Balls, Cod Sounds (membrane lying along the backbone, first simmered in water, then baked in a casserole with onions, grated cheese, and thin strips of salt pork), Toast and Fish, Roasted Scrawd (small cod culled from the catch), Fish and Brewis, Salt Fish and Potatoes, Boiled Rounders (small codfish with soundbone intact), and many more![12] Codfish was, and is, traditionally served with potatoes, turnips, parsnips, onions, carrots, cabbage, rashers of salt pork or pork scruncheons, and drawn butter.

Drying codfish in the traditional manner at Village Historique Acadien at Caraquet in New Brunswick.

An old Newfoundland custom continues to recognize the importance of cod and other seafood. In many Newfoundland homes, even into the twenty-first century, the celebration of Christmas begins on Christmas Eve with a thanksgiving meal of Salt Fish or Cod Sounds followed by sweet raisin bread called Christmas Fruit Loaf. In this way, fishing is recognized as the main means of livelihood and, as a result, fish has its place in thanksgiving before the day of feasting.

In the 1828–1830 season, the government of Nova Scotia offered bounties on the tonnage and “Merchantable”quality (i.e., that suitable for European and South American markets) of dried cod. These bounties were designed to encourage the outfitting of vessels in Nova Scotia for employment in the cod industry and to capitalize locally on the resources.

This rich resource eventually became the major industry in Atlantic Canada, encompassing not only fishing but everything needed to support it. The latter included the building of fishing schooners like the famous Bluenose, launched in Lunenburg in 1921. After a season of fishing in the Grand Banks, the Bluenose won the International Fisherman’s Trophy and kept winning it for twenty-one years as the fastest sailing vessel in the world. The Bluenose is still honoured on Canada’s dime. The Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, pays tribute to this rich harvest from Canada’s eastern seaboard.

Giovanni Caboto did not find the rich spices he sought, but instead discovered a far more valuable resource that over hundreds (and probably thousands) of years has sustained the First Nations, newcomers to Canada, and the tables of the hungry around the world.