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The Bank trawl-line cod fishery.
© NOAA |
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The Cod Trade Grows
“Fishing opened up in Newfoundland with the enthusiasm of a gold rush,” writes Mark Kurlansky in Cod,, his book about a fish that changed the world. By the mid-16th century, sixty per cent of all the fish eaten in Europe was cod, and that remained the case for over two hundred years. It was the European hunger for cod that built Boston and turned New England into an international commercial center by the 18th century. Catches of cod and other fish off Georges Bank were so large that the British market became saturated, so Americans expanded to other areas. One was the West Indies, where there was a demand for low-grade salted fish to feed slave laborers. This trade grew when the Gloucester schooner, a fast, two-masted vessel, shortened the sailing time between Georges Bank and the Caribbean in the early 1700s.
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