Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

“Even limiting the cod to ten pounds a person, there is not enough. A few people are turned away, and one of them asks one of the fishermen, ‘where are they taking the rest of the fish?’

The problem with the people in Petty Harbour, out here on the headlands of North America, is that they are at the wrong end of a 1,000-year fishing spree.”

The Prologue primarily sets the scene of the problem that the rest of the book will explain, that problem being the depletion of the cod stock. The final sentence of the Prologue states that this problem was brought about by the 1000 years of a cod craze and general overfishing, which the rest of the book goes on to elaborate and contextualize.

“A medieval fisherman is said to have hauled up a three-foot-long cod, which was common enough at the time. And the fact that the cod could talk was not especially surprising. But what was astonishing was that it spoke an unknown language. It spoke Basque.

This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters.”

This passage invokes the theme of The Interconnectedness of Trade, Colonialism, and Nationalism by demonstrating how the cod trade became tied up with Basque national identity, even though cod is not native to Spanish waters. The tale of the Basque-talking fish presents the cod as belonging intrinsically to the Basque people, speaking to its key role in their economic prosperity in the early modern period.

“It is built to survive. Fecund, impervious to disease and cold, feeding on most any food source, traveling to shallow waters and close to shore, it was the perfect commercial fish, and the Basques had found its richest grounds. Cod should have lasted forever, and for a very long time it was assumed that it would.”

In Chapter 2, the book provides useful scientific and cultural details about the cod fish. Of particular importance is the cod’s hardiness, growth, and abundance, with contributed heavily to its popularity on the European markets and reinforces the connections between natural abundance of a resource and its impact on economic success.

“But in spite of the occasional local preference, on the world market, cod is the prize. This was true in the past centuries when it was in demand as an inexpensive, long-lasting source of nutrition, and it is true today as an increasingly expensive delicacy.”

Crucially, as made clear in this statement, abundance is not the only marker of economic demand and success. A large abundance of cod leads to high demand for a cheap and easily sold product. However, scarcity does not then lead to less demand, but more, allowing markets to treat the once-cheap cod as an expensive delicacy instead. Thus profits can increase even as the resource is depleted, reflecting Abundance, Scarcity, and the Economy.

“This grim early record did not discourage fishermen. Fishing had opened up in Newfoundland with the enthusiasm of a gold rush. By 1508, 10 percent of the fish sold in the Portuguese ports of Douro and Minho was Newfoundland cod. […] By midcentury, 60 percent of all fish eaten in Europe was cod, and this percentage would remain stable for the next two centuries.”

Chapter 3 highlights the soaring popularity and demand for cod, including its impact on international trade and local economies. This passage argues that European settlers traveled to North America specifically for cod fishing, which have the same mystique and value as the gold rush, thus drawing a connection between the cod trade and The Interconnectedness of Trade, Colonialism, and Nationalism.

“British law greatly encumbered its own attempts at trade. Since Newfoundland cod was strategic, its commerce had to be tightly controlled, as though cod were a weapon of war.”

Furthering his exploration of The Interconnectedness of Trade, Colonialism, and Nationalism, Kurlansky argues that cod became not merely an issue of commercial success, but an issue of national identity and security. This is why cod was regarded as and controlled like a weapon of war. Cod held the power to fund merchants, feed navies, and drive international negotiations.

“With the world so greatly expanded and seemingly so empty and unknown, searching had become a European passion. Provisioned with nourishing cured cod, some headed to South America looking for gold. Others went to North America looking for cod.”

As with the comparison to the gold rush, the book here reiterates the significance of cod fishing in driving European colonialist projects, particularly among the English, France, and Spanish. While some explorers searched for gold, others went in search of cod. This drive greatly expanded the European image of the world, and their power over it, in a relatively short amount of time.

“Meanwhile, New Englanders were becoming a commercial people, independent and prosperous and resentful of monopolies. While the West Indies sugar planters were thriving on protected markets, New Englanders were growing rich on free-trade capitalism. Theirs was a cult of the individual, with commerce becoming almost the New England religion.”

With the increased power and wealth of the cod trade, New Englanders gained increasing power and wealth within the colonies. For the first time, individuals not aligned with the British government could control their own prosperity. Thus, the book argues, cod was responsible for creating a new wealthy merchant middle-class and a new vision of free-trade capitalism.

“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 book bluntly discusses the reciprocal influence between the cod trade and the slave trade, underscoring the hypocrisy of New Englanders who professed to believe in personal liberty, and yet had no qualms about supporting the enslavement of entire populations. Though few then or now wish to acknowledge these connections, the book does not shy away from this painful truth.

“[T]he 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.”

The deliberation between cod or sugar here once again underscores the value of the cod trade among both colonial and European powers. It also reveals that the British fully understood the power of the cod trade, and economic success in general, to drive a wedge between England and its colonies. It understood that economic power could inspire the North American colonies to demand other kinds of power as well.

“All revolutions are to some degree about money. […] 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.”

Kurlansky argues that all revolutions, not only the American revolution, are about money at their foundation. However, where many other revolutions are motivated by an extreme unequal distribution of money between the ruling and working classes, the American revolution was a fight for the middle-class. The New Englander merchants did not care about the working poor—they wanted to defend their rights to make a profit.

“As the nineteenth-century debate over longlining grew, nationalism, more than conservation, seems to have been the issue. Unfair competition from the French subsidy system angered British North America, later Canada, more than the possibility of overfishing from the technique it financed.”

Despite the fact that some regions were already seeing signs of overfishing, Kurlansky notes that early efforts to control fishing practices was not a matter of conservation. Fishermen did not yet see or want to admit to the human impact on nature, with Kurlansky’s narrative pointing to the importance of Human Responsibilities and Impacts on Nature.

“Steam ships with otter trawls were reporting catches more than six times greater than those of sail ships. By the 1890s, fish stocks were already showing signs of depletion in the North Sea, but the primary reaction was not conservation. Instead North Sea fleets traveled farther to richer grounds off of Iceland.”

Despite the wealth of evidence, the fishermen of the 1890s either did not realize, or could not acknowledge, the fact that the depleted stock in the North Sea was a direct consequence of their aggressive overfishing practices. Instead, they simply moved on to other regions, such as Iceland, without thought to the impact it would have on the local ecological system.

“In 1902, the British consul in Genoa wrote words that have proven to be prophetic: ‘It would be far better to return to the old system of sailor cargoes.’

But technology never reverses itself. It creates new technology to confront new sets of problems.”

Technology, as an expression of human will and ingenuity, contributes to the theme of the Human Responsibilities and Impacts on Nature. Humans rely on technological advancements each time they encounter limitations in either nature or their own capability. These technological advancements then create new problems and increase the damaging consequences of human interaction with natural systems, creating a vicious cycle.

“Only a decade after reassuring the Canadians and the world that the waters around Great Britain ‘show no signs of exhaustion,’ such a thing being scientifically impossible, the British discovered that the cod stocks in the North Sea had been depleted. Finally, in 1902, seven years after the death of Huxley, the British government began to concede that there was such a thing as overfishing.”

This passage is just one of several examples of a pattern in which governments ignore the warnings of local fishermen about the impact aggressive, usually large corporate, fishing practices have on fish stocks. Governments only finally acknowledge this impact when the resource is so severely depleted that it begins to visibly hurt the economy.

“The Icelanders had two opinions about this. Some wanted all foreigners to be banned. But others thought that Iceland should get some of these monster ships itself, so it could reap the profits of its own ocean. The second argument won. It generally does.”

The book underscores a common choice in capitalist societies. In the face of any kind of natural abundance, capitalist societies invariably view it only as a path to larger profits and usually choose profit over all other concerns, even at the expense of the very abundance they are profiting from.

“By the time the war ended, Iceland was a changed country. Not least among these changes, in 1944 it had negotiated full independence from Denmark. Now it was free to negotiate its own relations with the rest of the world. Because of cod, it had moved in one generation from a fifteenth-century colonial society to a modern postwar nation.”

Just as the American revolution demonstrated the connection between the cod trade and nationhood, so too does the example of Iceland. Iceland’s profit from the cod trade gave them the economic and political power to gain full independence, helping launch them from a poor colony to a modern nation in a matter of decades. Kurlansky thus uses Iceland as another case study for The Interconnectedness of Trade, Colonialism, and Nationalism.

“Once again, the British had underestimated the zeal of a people first embracing nationhood. And so began what the British press labeled ‘the Cod Wars.’”

The new sense of national identity that Iceland had gained drove them to aggressively protect their waters. This again illustrates the deep connection between trade, particularly in the case of cod, and building a sense of nationhood, usually after years of colonial control. It is therefore not surprising that the majority of those who supported Iceland’s claims to an exclusion zone came from other former European colonies.

“Canadian cod was not yet biologically extinct, but it was commercially extinct—so rare that it could no longer be considered commercially viable. Just three years short of the 500-year anniversary of the reports of Cabot’s men scooping up cod in baskets, it was over. Fishermen had caught them all.”

The death knell of the cod crave arrives just in time for the anniversary of John Cabot’s arrival in Newfoundland. This passage also neatly summarizes the large swath of history that the book covers, from the beginning of the fishing spree first mentioned in the Prologue to the present-day crisis in Newfoundland and New England.

“Newfoundlanders debated over when ‘the cod was coming back.’ Few dared ask if. Or what happens to the ocean if they don’t come back? Or whether commercial fishing was going to continue at all. The position that the cod would return was most candidly argued by Sam Lee: ‘They’re coming back because they have to.’”

The fishermen of Newfoundland represent a general attitude among many fishermen, and humans in general, when faced with the consequences of their own actions and the subsequent depletion of a natural resource. They embody an attitude of willful denial and optimism that things will improve simply because humanity needs them to. However, as Kurlanksy notes, nature does not rebound simply on humanity’s say-so.

“Whatever steps are taken, one of the greatest obstacles to restoring cod stocks off of Newfoundland is an almost pathological collective denial of what has happened. Newfoundlanders seem prepared to believe anything other than that they have killed off nature’s bounty. One Canadian journalist published an article pointing out that the cod disappeared from Newfoundland at about the same time that stocks started rebuilding in Norway. Clearly the northern stock had packed up and migrated to Norway.”

The book turns to the idea that humans have a responsibility to care for nature in the form of conservation efforts, invoking Human Responsibilities and Impacts on Nature. However, as noted here, the biggest obstacle to human efforts at conservation are humans themselves, who do not want to acknowledge what has happened because it requires them to admit to their own culpability.

“Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is the natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is a part of evolution.”

Kurlanksy argues that humans are an integral, and often damaging, part of the complex intertwined ecological systems of nature. As such, humans have a duty of care to nature. If humans continue to be the “ferocious predator” (204) of nature, then they must also work to counteract those negative effects, for their own survival as well as that of nature in general.

“If there is anything as basic and universal to the British working class as fried fish, it is xenophobia. So the proposition that foreigners may be depriving British workers of their cod is politically potent.”

Kurlansky uses the British love of fish and chips to highlight The Interconnectedness of Trade, Colonialism, and Nationalism. Once again, cod becomes a primary example of how economic concerns sometimes intertwine with ideas of nation and identity. As a resource disappears, it impacts trade, leading to nationalistic competition and increasing paranoia against foreign powers. However, it should be noted that Kurlansky’s assertion that “xenophobia” is “basic and universal to the British working class” is a classist generalization, which overlooks the xenophobia and greed displayed by far wealthier players in his narrative.