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A Great English Ship Moored Near the Grand Banks
“The cod were so thick we hardly have been able to row a boat through them.”
—John Cabot
Head northeast in Newfoundland along the Bonavista Peninsula, until the rough road ends and the cold ocean begins, and you’ll find a bronze statue of a man clothed in puffy Renaissance garb overlooking tumultuous seas. The landscape has a distinctly untamed feel to it as icebergs float offshore like errant mountaintops, humpback whales feed and breach, and puffins dart along the ocean surface to and from their island colony just around the point.
That improbably dapper man is John Cabot who, in 1497, reached the New World—the New Founde Land, as it was dubbed. Like Columbus five years before him, Cabot was an Italian sailor seeking a shortcut to the Orient. He figured that by heading north to where the longitudinal lines were closer, he’d shave off some sailing days on his westward voyage to Asia. He figured wrong, of course. Cabot and his crew of eighteen ran into the invincible coast of eastern Canada and, instead of spices and porcelain, they found spruce, the oldest granite on Earth, and ice floes. Undaunted, Cabot claimed the region for the English throne, which had financed his expedition, then headed home.
So enduring are the tales of Cabot’s arrival hereabouts—the peninsula’s name is derived from the first words he was said to have uttered—that it seems unfair to mention that Cabot’s landing spot is wholly a matter of conjecture. Historians say Cabot may very well have made landfall around the Bonavista Peninsula, or perhaps in Nova Scotia on Cape Breton Island, where a similar statue also marks the event. Then again, maybe Cabot landed in Labrador (now part of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador), or much farther south in Maine. No one knows for sure.
While Cabot’s landfall may be in dispute, what he discovered is not: cod—and lots of them.
Every school child knows the story. Five hundred years ago the explorer John Cabot returned from the waters around present-day Newfoundland to report that the codfish ran so thick they were easily caught by dangling a wicker basket over the side of the vessel. The log of Cabot’s ship, the Matthew, reported there were six- and seven-foot-long codfish weighing as much as 200 pounds. Cabot discovered a resource that would shape world politics for hundreds of years, launch a fiercely competitive Maritime trade, and create safe harbours along the shores of the new colony of Newfoundland: the limitless bounty of the Grand Banks cod.
Cabot led two explorations from Bristol, in 1497 and 1498. King Henry VII, who had agreed to his voyage and helped to pay for it, rewarded Cabot with the sum of £10. On his return to England, Cabot related amazing tales of this new world. Like witnesses in the New Testament, Cabot told tales of men who could walk across the Grand Banks waters on the backs of cod. Fictional, perhaps, and more likely sales patter for his clients, this fishy narrative was spun into a tale of mythic proportion, painting a false reality of this foreboding, rock-ribbed place moored in the North Atlantic.
Historic accounts say that Cabot lowered a basket weighted with stones into the North Atlantic, then hauled it back up brimming with cod. The discovery of these fertile fishing grounds set off a centuries-long struggle among Basque, Portuguese, French and English fishermen, and established a pattern of far-flung coastal settlements, called outports by Newfoundlanders, that ring the island.
And so the legend fits today: the Grand Banks became Valhalla, a miraculous, self-sustaining Eighth Wonder of the world, feeding the known world for 500 years.
The catastrophic collapse of the fisheries, circa 1992, was unprecedented. An ecological disaster to rival any other—the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest notwithstanding—in modern history. This made-in-Canada plunder was part human greed, part stupidity, and part rapacity. Tarnishing Canada’s standing within the international community, it holds the reputation of Canada’s once-vaunted fisheries scientists up to ridicule. Sixteen years later, no one has taken accountability or apologized for the ruination of a centuries-old way of life and, more shocking, a stock recovery plan has yet to be produced.
The plunder was born of a mindset that has much to do with survival. And that mindset still has currency today in a saying often heard in the coffee shops and bars of this rock-ribbed island: “If it runs, walks, or swims, kill it.” The Grand Banks cod was the raison d’être for the economic lifeblood and culture of Newfoundland. Little wonder that governments in St. John’s and Ottawa were ever-devising and fine-tuning policies that worked overtime to build an economy from this one resource. Today, many Newfoundlanders, resorting to the blame game, no longer want to talk about the destruction of the ecosystem. A naturally talkative community has been reduced to a stony silence.
Visitors wonder if Newfoundlanders share a sense of collective shame as they resort to pat and automatic answers about what happened to the cod. Fingers are pointed at foreign fishing, seals, changes to water temperature, botched science, bad management by federal fisheries, and, as always, the politicians in Ottawa. Today, the bereft citizens just want to move on, determined to allocate the Grand Banks cod collapse to memory.
There can be no forgetting—or forgiving—such catastrophic pillaging. Sparked by a second wave of environmentalism focusing on the state of the world’s oceans, the Grand Banks cod collapse became a talking point, a sujet noir, now studied at universities and fisheries research centres, wherein students from around the world routinely repeat: we must never allow our fisheries to go the way of the Grand Banks cod—once the largest and most productive fishery in the world.
Fished by European nations since the 1400s—and joined by the Russians, Japanese and Koreans in modern times—the vastness of the cod supply led many to believe that it was an inexhaustible resource. Indeed, Professor Jeffrey Hutchings of Dalhousie University once estimated the theoretical catch since the 1400s might weigh in the billions of tonnes. The unprecedented richness of the cod stocks galvanized repeated military conflicts between nations for the control of access to these fishing grounds, the Canadian federal government to establish off-shore limits, and European colonization of an otherwise barren and inhospitable land.
It is difficult to over-emphasize the importance of the fishery to the people of Newfoundland, which became a province of Canada in 1949. Since Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada, the cod fishery remains the single most powerful source of collective cultural identity for the people born and raised there.
The story begins with England’s 300-year exploitation of Newfoundland, and provides insight into widely held resentments that play out today: mistrust and suspicion of all things Ottawa, a legacy of the cruel colonial master England once was. Resentments that are grudgingly accommodated as long as federal dollars keep flowing.
England’s presence in the Newfoundland fishery increased steadily from the mid-16th century, while the Portuguese and Spanish fisheries waned towards the century’s end. The French and English wrestled for control over the fishery throughout the 17th century. After the exclusion of the Spanish and Portuguese, the English laid claim to the shore from Cape Bonavista to Cape Race. Between 1610 and 1623, land grants issued by the English-owned Newfoundland Company resulted in the establishment of permanent and semi-permanent residences. By the 1670s, there were as many as seventeen English communities along the coast from Trepassey to Bonavista.
Through the 16th and most of the 17 th centuries, fishing remained mostly a transient industry, despite some attempts to promote settlement. In 1610, John Guy of Bristol led a party of settlers to Conception Bay, and in the next decade Lord Baltimore began a short-lived settlement of English Catholics at Ferryland on the Avalon Peninsula. The French established stations on the south coast along the shores of Placentia and Fortune Bays, land that was en route to their settlements along the St. Lawrence River in New France. French Basques were the primary fishermen on the south coast, from Cape Race to Lamaline. While the Normands and Rochelais were engaged largely in the bank fishery, fishermen based in and around St. Malo continued to fish along the Petit Nord and along a few locations on the Strait of Belle Isle south to Cape Ray.
The English fishery expanded rapidly during the late 16th and early 17th century, but declined after 1624, partly because of wars with France and Spain and partly because of increased activity of pirates. An important consequence of these events was the slow, but steady rise of year-round resident fishermen known as boat-keepers or planters. As a result, catches by planters rose from zero to 37 per cent more than the English fishing ships between 1610 and 1675. By the late 1600s, English Newfoundland comprised the eastern shore of the island, from Trinity Bay and Conception Bay to Ferryland and Renews, south of St. John’s.
Here, on what is today’s Avalon Peninsula, barely a thousand men, with a few women and children, might winter every year. They were joined every summer by thousands of fishermen from England. St. John’s, a rendezvous for fishermen since the 1500s, was...
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