Salt cod: the fish that fed the Atlantic

What was salt cod?

Salt cod is cod that has been split open, salted and dried until it is stiff and pale. Before refrigerators, this was one of the few ways to keep fish for months. Cooks soaked it in water to soften it before cooking.

It was cheap, filling and travelled well. In Catholic Spain, Portugal and Italy, people went without meat on Fridays and during Lent, so fish was always wanted there. Merchants weighed it in quintals, a unit of about 112 pounds.

Where was cod caught around 1715?

Two great fisheries fed the Atlantic world.

In New England, fishing towns on the Massachusetts coast such as Marblehead and Gloucester sent small vessels to the fishing grounds off New England and Nova Scotia. As early as 1660, royal officials called Marblehead the greatest fishing town in New England. Merchants in Boston and Salem shipped much of the catch abroad.

In Newfoundland, crews sailed out each spring from England’s West Country ports, such as Dartmouth and Poole, and fished from June to August. Most English crews fished close to shore from small open boats, three to five men to a boat, using baited hand lines. The Grand Banks, wide shallow fishing grounds out at sea south-east of the island, were worked mainly by the French.

In 1715 Newfoundland was recovering from a war, fought from 1702 to 1713, that had wrecked the English fishery. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Britain gained the whole island, but France kept the right to fish part of its coast and moved its own base to Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. The English catch stayed poor for about ten years after 1715 and recovered only in the late 1720s.

How was cod split, salted and dried?

Cod was landed and dealt with quickly, usually on the day it was caught. On shore, a crew worked through the catch in a set order:

• Heading and gutting. The head and guts came off first.
• Splitting. The fish was cut open and laid out flat.
• Salting. It was washed and salted. In Newfoundland and New England the salting was fairly light, because the fish would be dried afterwards.
• Drying. Finally it was spread out in the sun and wind on flakes, wooden racks built along the shore.

Strong sun could scorch the fish, rain could spoil it, and too much salt left it harsh, so a bad summer meant poor fish. In 1744 a visitor to Marblehead counted more than 200 acres of flakes around the town.

The French on the Grand Banks often did things differently. They salted their fish heavily on board and took it home wet, without drying it, as “green” cod. Every method needed large amounts of salt.

What were the grades of salt cod?

Merchants sorted salt cod into grades by how well it had been cured.

The best was called merchantable fish. A researcher writing for the Massachusetts Historical Society estimates that about two-fifths of New England’s cured cod reached this grade. It went to Spain, Portugal and Italy, where it earned good prices.

The rest, about three-fifths, was called refuse fish. It had been badly cured, oversalted or burned by the sun. It fetched much lower prices, and merchants sent most of it to the Caribbean.

Why was refuse fish sent to the Caribbean?

It was sold as cheap food for enslaved people. On islands such as Barbados and Jamaica, planters gave as much land as they could to sugar cane and bought food from outside to feed the enslaved Africans who did the work. Salt fish from New England and Newfoundland became one of their basic rations.

As early as 1674 the English writer John Josselyn described the fish sent to the islands as “salt burnt, spotted, rotten”, and noted that planters fed it to the people they enslaved. The historian Wendy Warren argues that this was a deliberate choice: planters saved money by feeding enslaved people fish that free buyers refused, and New England merchants profited by selling it.

Salt fish is still part of Caribbean cooking today, where it is called saltfish. Ackee and saltfish is Jamaica’s national dish.

How did cod tie New England to the sugar islands and to Spain?

Cod was New England’s most valuable export in the 1700s, and it linked the colony to two very different markets. The poorest fish sailed south to the sugar islands, and ships came home with sugar and molasses, which New England distillers turned into rum. The best fish sailed east to Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean. Spain had closed its ports to English fish during the war, but Portugal kept buying throughout.

Marblehead shows how a fishing town could learn to trade for itself. When the minister John Barnard arrived around 1715, the town did not own a single vessel trading overseas, and merchants in Boston and Salem took most of the profit from its fish. Barnard later wrote that a young man named Joseph Swett sent a small cargo of fish to Barbados, then began trading to Europe, and that others followed his lead. By 1766, he said, the town had thirty to forty vessels in overseas trade. He wrote this memoir fifty years later, and gave himself a large part in the story.

New England ships also sold grain, livestock, molasses and rum in Newfoundland’s harbours: twenty were counted there in 1721.

Did pirates attack the fishing fleets?

Yes. Fishing harbours were full of ships, food and sailors, all things pirates needed. On 21 June 1720 Bartholomew Roberts sailed into Trepassey harbour in Newfoundland, where 22 fishing ships lay at anchor. Their crews fled ashore. Roberts took what supplies he wanted and stayed about two weeks, raiding the harbour before he sailed on.

Two years later, on 15 June 1722, the pirate Edward Low seized 12 or 13 New England fishing vessels in Port Roseway harbour, Nova Scotia. One of his captives was Philip Ashton, a young fisherman from Marblehead, whom Low tried to force into his crew. In March 1723 Ashton escaped on the island of Roatán, off Honduras, and survived there for more than a year, much of it alone. His story was printed in Boston in 1725.