Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

The cod, scientific name Gadus morhua, is “built to survive” (32). It is resistant to cold and disease, travels in shallow waters, and is omnivorous. It swims with its mouth open wide, eating anything in its path, including other smaller cod. It is prized for its white flaky flesh and high protein content—over 18%, with only 0.3% fat. When dried, the water evaporates and the protein concentrates to almost 80%, making it a perfect food source for travel. Additionally, nearly every part of the cod is edible.

The origins of the word cod are unknown. Many of its names and slang terms have sexual connotations. In Middle English, cod meant “a bag or sack” (35) and was a slang term for the scrotum, leading to the name for the decorative purse men wore at the crotch, the “codpiece.” In the West Indies the common name for salted cod, saltfish, became a slang term for “a woman’s genitals” (35). The French word for cod, morue, eventually came to be a term for a sex worker. The names for cod also change depending on whether it is fresh or salted. In modern French, fresh cod is cabillaud and only salted cod is called morue. For the Spanish, Italians, and Portuguese, who do not eat cod fresh but only salted, salt cod is baccala, and there is no word for fresh cod.

The codfish, or gadiforms, includes 10 families and more than 200 species, almost all of which live in cold saltwater in the Northern Hemisphere. However, for commercial fishermen, only five kinds have real value: The Atlantic cod; the haddock; the pollock; the whiting; and the hake. The Atlantic cod is the largest and most popular. British and Icelandic fishermen will only reluctantly catch haddock when they have filled their cod quotas. Nova Scotians prefer haddock, and hake is preferred among South Americans and South Africans. For most, cod remains the prize.

Cod is also easy to catch. It prefers areas where warm and cold currents meet, lives in shallow waters that make it easy to find, and its omnivorous nature means that it will latch onto almost any fishing lure used. Moreover, female cod can spawn between three and nine million eggs at a time meaning, even with low survival rates, a plentiful stock. Fishermen believed this stock could never run out. Unfortunately, its greatest predator is humanity, “an openmouthed species greedier than cod” (45).

When Cabot returned to England in 1497, his men reported fish so plentiful they could catch them by dipping baskets into the water. Though this was likely an exaggeration, the Europeans found a “wealth of game and fish unparalleled in Europe” (48) in North America. Flocks of the now-extinct passenger pigeon were so large they blackened the sky for hours, and English fishermen in Maine described five-foot cod even a century after Cabot’s arrival.

After Cabot found Newfoundland, he returned to the ocean still looking for a passage to Asia. Of the five ships he sailed with, only one returned and the other four vanished, Cabot with them. Meanwhile, the Portuguese charted parts of North America, claiming large parts of Newfoundland for themselves in 1502 and exporting cod. French explorers likewise brought back cod. By 1510, salt cod made up approximately 60% of all the fish eaten in Europe. Several European port towns became enormous economic centers on the strength of their access to Newfoundland cod. The Basque city of Bilbao grew in power as a shipbuilding center, particularly with its ironworks providing the anchors and other metal parts used on all European ships.

The feuding between English and Hanseatic merchants intensified through the 1500s, until the English gained greater access to the Newfoundland cod supply. In Newfoundland, the British experimented with new methods of summer-cured rock-dried cod from the fishing grounds called the Grand Banks. However, winter cures were far superior. In all cases, a fisherman’s access to salt was paramount. Debates about the best kinds and supplies of salt arose. The best salt came from Portugal. England maintained a favorable trade agreement with Portugal for salt, in exchange for protection from French naval interference, until Portugal merged temporarily with Spain in 1581.

Control of Newfoundland cod markets became strategically important. Most of Europe relied on dried cod to feed their Navies. Moreover, the Mediterranean market, where most of the best salt cod was sold, held enormous economic power. In 1588, the British defeated the Spanish effort to invade England, destroying their military and fishing fleets, and removing economic competition. By 1595, the British were catching enormous quantities of fish. Previously, British ships were only permitted to sell to British ports, who then sold the fish on to European markets. With an excess of stock, the British were forced to open commerce, permitting ships to trade directly with foreign markets.

In the 16th century, the known world doubled for Europeans. Sailing for new territory became an obsession as Europeans headed for South America in search of gold or North America in search of cod fish. In both cases, however, they were still hoping for a route to Asia, still not understanding the size of the North American continent in their way. French-backed explorers in search of China came upon Cape Fear in North Carolina in 1524 and followed the coast north to discover parts of New York and Maine. In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold also hit the North American coast in search of China and named the peninsula he found Cape Cod.

Later Bristol merchants followed Gosnold’s map to find what is now Maine and named the entire region New Virginia. In 1614, Captain John Smith, having already established a colony in lower Virginia, traveled north to chart the coast, renaming the area New England. He returned to England with 7,000 cod, which he sold in the English markets. He also lured and trapped 27 Indigenous people onto his ship and sold them as enslaved persons in Spain. The Puritans in England heard rumors that Smith had sold around 60,000 cod and ignored reports of the enslaved persons. Spurred by the promise of abundant fishing, the Puritans requested a land grant for the area around Cape Cod called Plymouth, and set sail to North America.

Equipped with religious zealotry and no experience with fishing, hunting, or farming, the Puritan pilgrims were inept at feeding themselves. This was made worse by their resistance to eating the native foods that the Indigenous Naumkeag tribe taught them to fish or hunt for. Out of desperation they eventually agreed to eat lobster. The only local resource they were willing to consume in abundance was cod. By 1640, the Massachusetts Bay Colony could reliably bring 300,000 cod to the world markets.

Before long, the two fishing powers in Newfoundland and New England were in competition. New England won on the world market because it had a milder climate. Newfoundland’s winters were too harsh for long-term settlements. Instead, Europeans arrived for the spring and summer fishing and then left in the fall, leaving solitary caretakers to protect their fishing grounds over the winter. Moreover, the rocky ground made it difficult to farm and sustain large populations. By contrast, New Englanders could fish during the milder winters and farm during the summer. The fishing colonies eventually attracted other kinds of workers: Blacksmiths, shipbuilders, and other tradesmen who brought their families.

Soon, New England was a commercial and economic power. The fishermen were a new kind of independent entrepreneur with the unprecedented freedom to sell their fish directly to foreign markets, rather than through the British crown. This would become a problem for the British empire.

Cod turned New Englanders from starving settlers to leaders of international commerce. In turn, they turned cod from “commodity to fetish” and named its commercial leaders the “codfish aristocracy” (78). The cod became a symbol of wealth and power. A life-sized wood-carved cod even hung in a place of honor in the Old State House after the American Revolution. What few wished to acknowledge was the inherent connection between the cod trade and the slave trade.

In the 1600s, sugar plantations in the Caribbean were worked entirely by enslaved labor. However, the Caribbean produced little food. To feed and maintain its enslaved labor force, colonists relied on salt cod as a cheap source of nutrition. This was particularly beneficial to merchants who sold high-quality cod products to Europe but often had an excess of low-quality cod. New Englanders quickly took over the Caribbean market. They could sell their best cod to Spain and other parts of Europe, then travel to the Caribbean, where they sold lower-quality cod as well as Spanish trade goods in exchange for sugar, molasses, and tobacco, which they brought back to sell in New England. Before long, they added the next logical step in the process: Returning to Boston with enslaved persons from the Caribbean along with sugar and molasses.

French politician Alexis de Tocqueville remarked in his 1835 study, De la democratie en Amerique, that among New Englanders there was a shocking disconnect between their belief in freedom and the injustice of the slave trade. Even for those ships that did not directly participate in the slave trade, the impact cannot be denied. The commercial success of the cod trade was dependent upon it. For instance, some of New England’s best customers were from the French Caribbean colonies—profitable plantation economies that brought thousands of enslaved persons from Africa to the Caribbean.

The French reliance on New England cod increased after the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indigenous War) in the late 1750s, when the British took French fishing grounds in North America but allowed them to keep the sugar plantations. This proved fatal to British control of its American colonies. Too late, England seemed to realize their danger and attempted to take back control of colonial commerce. However, many of these efforts were simply ignored and others stoked the American colonists’ ire.

While there is much romanticism around revolution, they are all “to some degree about money” (93). This was particularly true for the American Revolution, which was led by middle-class Massachusetts merchants who fought for the right to make more money. The British empire had assumed that American colonists would never rally against them because they were too busy fighting each other. However, what the British government did not understand was that the Revolutionaries “were pragmatists focused on primary goals and that molasses, cod, and tea were not mere troubling disagreements; they were the issue” (94).

Following the British Molasses Act of 1733, the trade of cod and molasses between New England and the French Caribbean grew, rather than slowed. The British tried again with a sugar tax in 1760. Then came the Stamp Tax in 1765. Each attempt was met with harassment, boycotts, or simple refusal to comply. The tax on tea was meant to lessen hostility, as tea was considered less significant than sugar or molasses. However, the Boston Tea Party of 1773 proved the British government wrong on this score. Finally, the British added insult to injury by forbidding New England fishermen from fishing the Grand Banks off the coast of Massachusetts in 1775, as if they were “trying to rally Massachusetts around its radicals” (97).

When the fighting of the Revolutionary War ended and the two sides entered negotiations in 1778, three topics became sticking points: The border, the repayment of debts to England, and control of the fisheries. Of these, fishing proved the most difficult to resolve. Massachusetts wanted to keep its fishing rights to the Grand Banks off the coasts of loyal British colonies in Canada. International law of the time was not clear on this issue, but even the French did not wish to fight the British on this topic. However, arguing for the New Englanders was John Adams. He successfully negotiated a provision that the fishing rights of the Grand Banks could not be taken away without approval from Massachusetts.



This led to one of the first major splits between the American North and South. To secure this agreement, Adams relinquished rights to the Mississippi River, angering the Southern states. When the British and Americans warred again in 1812, John Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, negotiated that peace agreement, reversing the situation: The Americans regained control of the Mississippi River but never again gained access to the Grand Banks. This remains a source of tension between America and Canada to this day.

The New England cod fisheries were significantly injured when the British, French, and Dutch all abolished enslavement between 1834 and 1849. Over time, the cod merchants shifted their wealth into other industries and the codfish aristocracy died out.