Newfoundland: the cod fishery and its harbours

What was “Newfoundland” in 1715?

In Silver & Sails, Newfoundland is a single port. In real life it was a large, rocky island off the coast of today’s Canada, dotted with fishing harbours. The main English harbour was St. John’s: deep, sheltered, close to Europe and close to the fishing grounds. People had lived there all year round since the 1620s.

Other harbours mattered too. Placentia, on the south coast, had been Plaisance, France’s fortified base on the island, until 1714. Trepassey and the harbours of the Southern Shore, south of St. John’s, were busy fishing stations. Most of the island’s people lived along the coast, because the sea, not the land, paid their way.

How did the Newfoundland cod fishery work?

Each spring, ships from West Country ports such as Dartmouth, Poole and Topsham sailed for Newfoundland by the end of March. The first to arrive got the best “rooms”, the stretches of shore where a crew could land and dry its fish. The men repaired their stages, wooden landing platforms built out over the water, and their flakes, the long drying racks.

From June to August, crews of three to five men rowed small open boats out close to shore and fished with baited hand lines. On land, shore workers cut off the heads, gutted and split the fish, washed it, salted it lightly and laid it out on the flakes to dry in the sun and wind. A rainy summer could ruin a whole season’s work.

Not everyone came on the big fishing ships. By-boat keepers travelled out as passengers, fished from their own boats and sold their catch. A small number of families, called planters, lived on the island all year, buying supplies on credit and paying with next summer’s fish. After 1715 the West Country fleets began picking up large numbers of Irish workers at Cork and Waterford on their way across. The French, meanwhile, often fished out on the Grand Banks, salting the catch heavily on board.

Where did Newfoundland’s fish go?

Newfoundland’s salt cod fed southern Europe. Cargo ships called sack ships carried the well-dried fish to Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean. They came home with wine, fruit, olive oil and the salt needed for next year’s catch. During the war of 1702 to 1713, when Spain was closed to English traders, only Portugal kept buying.

The worst-cured fish went another way. It was sold cheaply to the Caribbean sugar islands as food for enslaved Africans on the plantations.

Those New England ships also came to Newfoundland to sell grain, livestock, molasses and rum; twenty were counted there in 1721. West Country merchants complained that the New Englanders sold too much drink and tobacco and carried fishermen off to New England. Cod-liver oil, called train oil, was the fishery’s other export.

Who ruled Newfoundland around 1715?

Britain claimed the whole island after 1713 but sent no civil governor. Instead, an old custom ruled each harbour: the captain of the first fishing ship to arrive each season became the “fishing admiral” and settled quarrels for the summer. An act of 1699 let the commander of the navy ships guarding the fishing fleet hear appeals. Fishing admirals often cared more about their catch than about justice, and once the ships left in autumn there was little law at all.

Placentia was different: it had a British army garrison and a military deputy governor after the French left. Magistrates were at work in St. John’s from the winter of 1723–24. In 1729 London finally named a governor, the naval captain Henry Osborn. He was governor only for the summer and appointed magistrates and constables to keep order through the winter.

What did the wars and the Treaty of Utrecht change?

For years England and France fought over the island. French forces sacked St. John’s in 1696, destroyed much of the town in 1705 while the fort held out, and captured and wrecked its forts in the winter of 1708–09. With markets closed and ships kept at home, the English fishery collapsed: catches fell to under a third of their pre-war size.

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 gave Britain the whole island. France kept the right to fish and dry fish along the northern coasts, from Cape Bonavista round to Pointe Riche, later called the French Shore, and in 1714 moved the people of Plaisance to Cape Breton Island.

Peace did not bring good fishing. A report sent to London in April 1715 said that in 1714 about 85 fishing ships and roughly 1,000 boats caught about 115,000 quintals of fish (a quintal was about 112 pounds), “not half” the usual amount. Catches stayed poor for about ten years, many planters went bankrupt, and the fishery recovered only in the late 1720s.

Did pirates raid Newfoundland?

Yes. Harbours full of ships, food and sailors were tempting. On 21 June 1720 Bartholomew Roberts sailed his sloop Fortune into Trepassey with drums, trumpets and a black flag. The crews of about 22 ships fled ashore without a fight. Roberts took the supplies he wanted and a large merchant ship, which he made his new flagship, and his men burned fishing stages before he left about two weeks later. The 1724 General History of the Pyrates says he burned or sank every ship there except the one he kept, but official fishery reports for 1720 record no losses, so the true damage is uncertain.

In the summer of 1722 Edward Low came north from Nova Scotia. Near St. John’s, in fog, he mistook a navy warship for a merchant ship and only just got away. He then left the fishing banks and crossed the Atlantic to the Azores.

Who lived on Newfoundland before the fishery?

The island was home to the Beothuk, who lived by hunting caribou, fishing for salmon and taking food from the sea. They mostly avoided the European fishing stations, though they sometimes took iron tools and other items from them once the crews had gone home for the winter. As English settlement spread along the coast through the 1700s, the Beothuk were cut off from the shore and its food and pushed inland. Their numbers fell sharply, and Shanawdithit, the last known Beothuk, died in St. John’s in 1829.