Saturday 18 July 1545 was a fish day on the Mary Rose. The crew ate on the cramped gun deck, sitting wherever they could find room. Fish days were not popular; sailors referred to salt cod as ‘poor John’. But on this Saturday, the meal provided a welcome break from frantic activity as all 185 soldiers, 30 gunners and 200 mariners on board were busy readying the ship for war. That morning Nicholas Cooper and a couple of fellow cooks had climbed up to the sterncastle, passing crew members busy festooning the decks with anti-boarding netting. They had come to fetch the salt cod, which had been steeping in large vats of fresh water for the last 24 hours.1 The ship’s crew was divided into messes of six to eight men who ate together. Those men whose turn it was to prepare the food for their mess that day gathered on deck to collect their share of the fish. Each man was entitled to one quarter of a 24-inch salt cod.2 They tied the fish into cloth bags and secured them with a peg bearing the mark of their particular mess. The bags ensured that even though the fish disintegrated into flakes as it cooked, every mess received their fair share. The men piled the bags of cod into wooden buckets and the cooks carried them down the steep companionways to the galley, a pocket of light and warmth in the dank darkness of the hold.3
The depths of the ship soon filled with the smell of cooking fish as the bags were set to simmer in the larger of the galley’s two cauldrons. When it was ready, it was carried back up to the hungry crew on the gun deck. In each mess the fish was doled out in equal portions into the men’s wooden bowls and they set to eating with wooden or horn spoons.4 On fish days, every man was allowed four ounces of cheese and two of butter, and as the ship was in port, every man was also given a loaf of bread. This made a welcome change from the hard and worm-eaten ship’s biscuit that they had to make do with when they were at sea.5 They washed down the salty fish with gulps of beer. Their wooden drinking bowls were filled by a cook boy moving around the gun deck giving each man a portion of his daily allowance of a gallon of beer.
While the crew ate, their superiors discussed their fate. Anchored alongside the Mary Rose in Portsmouth harbour was the flagship, the Henry Grace à Dieu. Here the king, Henry VIII, was in council with the Lord Admiral of the Fleet, Viscount Lisle, and the Mary Rose’s commander, Vice Admiral George Carew. A French fleet had set sail for England 12 days previously and was expected to engage the English in battle the next day. As the three men schemed, Lisle sketched a battle plan on the back of a document that happened to be lying on the table. It placed the Mary Rose, one of the fleet’s bigger warships, at the centre of the coming engagement.6
By the end of the following day, almost all of the crew of the Mary Rose were dead, drowned when she sank only a few minutes after going into battle. The gunners had just fired a round of cannon when a chance gust of wind caused the ship, overloaded with ordnance, to simultaneously turn and heel over. A Flemish survivor described how water flooded in through the open gun ports as the Mary Rose tipped beneath the waves.7 Most of the men were on the upper decks, where they were caught in the web of anti-boarding netting and taken down as she sank. At most 40 survived, perhaps only as many as 25, out of a crew of 415.8
The wreck has bequeathed to us one of the best collections of Tudor artefacts, including shoes and tunics, medicine vials and bandage rolls, carpentry tools, guns, bows and arrows, and the skeletons of 179 men, a rat and a dog. Six of the skeletons were found in the galley.9 Nicholas Cooper and his fellow cooks appear to have been busy preparing a tongue and some fresh beef when the ship went down. They were probably making a meal for the officers. Scattered across the galley floor were ten pewter plates belonging to the ship’s commander, on which the food was meant to be served.10 Divers found wooden bowls on the gun decks. It is from one of these that we know Nicholas Cooper’s name, because he had inscribed it on his bowl. On the orlop deck and in the hold below it, archaeologists recovered the vertebrae of cattle and pigs, as well as thousands of fish spines amid the remains of the casks and wicker baskets that once held them. These were the residue of the ship’s store of beef, pork and cod.11 Salt meat and fish, biscuit, beer, cheese and butter were cheap, durable foodstuffs that could be stored for long periods and transported over great distances without becoming (completely) inedible.
The Tudor military ration drew mainly on local food sources: under Henry VIII, England was self-sufficient in staple foodstuffs. The pork and beef on the Mary Rose would have come from English herds of swine and cattle; the cheese from Gloucester or Cheshire; and the butter would have been made locally from the milk of Hampshire’s dairy herds. But the fish was not a local product. Genetic analysis of some of the thousands of fish bones found in the wreck indicates that the cod had been caught in the northern North Sea and around Iceland. But one of the bones analysed was from a fish that came from much further afield, belonging to a genetic cluster of cod that lived off the north-eastern coast of the American continent.12 By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Tudors were clearly venturing thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean in order to secure a staple foodstuff. This reliance on faraway places to supply England (and later Britain) with food was to become a hallmark of empire.
The importance of the Newfoundland fish trade in laying the foundations of the British Empire is frequently overlooked. The focus is usually on the story of maritime exploration and the quest for spices. But it was cod fishermen from the West Country who were the first Englishmen to acquire knowledge of the Atlantic currents and winds that later helped those explorers who went in search of a sea route to the Spice Islands.13
The medieval Christian practice of abstaining from meat on fast days had given rise to thriving European fisheries. In the fourteenth century, the Dutch mastered the art of pickling their North Sea herring catch in salt, which enabled even those devout northern Europeans living far inland to forgo meat on Fridays.14 In the fifteenth century, pickled herring was eclipsed by Norwegian stockfish, air-dried cod that was distributed throughout northern Europe by the Hanseatic League.15 The League’s attempts to monopolise the North Sea catch drove the English to seek new fishing grounds. They found one on the continental shelf just off Iceland. The Danish authorities soon complained that the English who set up camp there in the summer months treated the island as though it were their own, digging ditches, putting up tents, even building houses, and assaulting competing Icelandic fishermen.16 While the Icelanders wind-dried their catch, the English at first simply salted the cod before piling it in the holds of their boats. But over time, they combined these two preservation methods, lightly salting the fish before allowing it to dry in the air. The end product was both tastier than Norwegian stockfish and could be kept longer.17
A substantial share of the English fishermen’s Icelandic catch was bought by Bristol merchants. Indeed, in the second half of the fifteenth century, Bristol emerged as England’s major fish entrepôt.18 This was because the city dominated England’s wine trade at the time. The Englishman’s tipple of choice was sweet ‘sack’ from the Iberian peninsula.19 The Spanish and Portuguese had little use for England’s staple export of woollen cloth: they preferred to exchange their wine for salt cod, which they regarded as a tasty and affordable alternative to meat.20 Thus Bristol ships would sail to Iceland to buy up salt cod, and then continue to southern Europe and as far afield as the Spanish Canary Islands and the Azores, to exchange the fish for wine.21 The city’s place at the heart of this trade in fish for wine made Bristol a centre of knowledge about Atlantic navigation.
It was therefore no coincidence that the Venetian Zuan Caboto (better known by his anglicised name John Cabot) set sail from Bristol when in 1497 he went in search of a northern sea route to the Spice Islands. A group of Bristol merchants had already funded at least three western voyages to search for the mythical land of Hy-Brasil, said to lie beyond Ireland. They certainly knew that the seas in this part of the ocean were thick with cod. Moreover, some of these expeditions had almost certainly found land: they returned to Bristol laden down with salted and dried cod that it would have been impossible to dry on board ship.22 Cabot would have drawn on this local knowledge, and after only 35 days at sea, his expedition arrived on the north-eastern coast of Canada. He had ‘discovered’ not the hoped-for sea route to the Indies but the land the Vikings had called Helluland and that Henry VII now christened Newfoundland.23
Cabot’s discovery was much celebrated. The parsimonious king granted him a generous pension of £20 a year, to be paid from Bristol’s customs receipts. The Duke of Milan’s envoy in London wrote of sailors’ reports of seas ‘swarming with fish’.24 The cod were supposedly so abundant that they could be caught without fishing nets or lines by simply lowering weighted baskets into the water. The envoy claimed that there was talk that England would ‘have no further need of Iceland’.25 But the king was not particularly interested in the shoals of fish. His imagination was caught by Cabot’s claim that he would be able to follow the Newfoundland coastline until he reached Cipango (Japan), which he claimed was a source of spices and jewels. Henry was entranced by a vision of London as Europe’s new spice entrepôt.26
The king’s and Cabot’s dreams were not to be realised for another century. In the meantime, the Bristol merchants quietly got on with making the most of the riches that had been discovered.27 In 1501, Hugh Elyot sailed into Bristol harbour with the first recorded cargo of cod to arrive in Europe from North America. The 36 tons of salt cod were worth £180, which was equal to the annual income of a prosperous landed estate.28 However, despite the evidence of such bounty, in the early years of the sixteenth century only a handful of West Country fishermen ventured to Newfoundland. The low level of domestic demand – due to the fact that the English lacked the southern Europeans’ ability to transform the board-like fish into tasty dishes – meant that there was little incentive for English fishermen to choose the longer and stormier voyage across the Atlantic rather than the familiar journey to Iceland.29 The seas off Newfoundland were instead dominated by the Bretons and the Basques, whose home markets were greedy for salt cod.30
THE WAY TO DRESS POOR JOHN, TO MAKE IT VERY TENDER AND GOOD MEAT
Put it in a Kettle of cold Water, and so hang it over the Fire, and let it soak and stew without boiling for three hours, but the Water must be very hot; then make it boil two or three walms [rolling boils]: By this time it will be very tender, and swelled up; then take out the Backbone, and put it to fry with Onions, if you put it first into hot water … or being boyled if you let it cool, and heat it again, it will be tough and hard.31
The reasons for English fishermen to participate in the Newfoundland venture became more compelling over the course of the century. When Henry VIII inherited the throne from his father in 1509, he was determined to recover the territory England had once held in France and began enlarging the English navy: the Mary Rose, completed in 1511, was part of his ambitious shipbuilding programme.32 The Anthony Roll, an illustrated inventory of his navy, records that by 1545 the king had used the wealth he had confiscated from the monasteries to build up a fleet of 58 ships from the five that he had inherited from his father. These were the beginnings of the navy that eventually played an important role in creating Britain’s seaborne empire.
The expansion of the Tudor armada substantially increased the demand for salt cod. The Anthony Roll suggests that at full strength, Henry’s navy would have employed about 7,700 men. If each of these was given a quarter of a salt cod on each of the two weekly fish days, then the annual naval demand in the 1540s would have amounted to over 200,000 salt fish.33 At the end of every summer, naval purchasing agents would wait impatiently for the return of the fishing fleets, eager to secure their cargoes for the king’s military forces. Indeed, the demands of naval provisioners expanded the English market to such an extent that by 1529, French fishermen were landing their Newfoundland catch at England’s southern ports.34
A series of cold winters and poor harvests after Henry VIII’s death in 1547 meant that England was beset by food shortages. In the face of rising food prices, naval victuallers on a tight budget struggled to supply the ships of the line with sufficient food.35 In 1558, Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Lord Burghley, calculated that when the cheese and butter that formed part of the sailors’ salt cod ration was factored into the price, a fish day for a mess of four men cost the navy 8d – half the cost of a meat day. As part of an economy drive, he increased the number of fish days to three and replaced one of the remaining beef days with the less expensive pork and pease.36 The suppression of rebellion in Ireland further increased demand for salt cod, in order to feed the 15,200 English soldiers who were stationed there by the end of Elizabeth’s reign.37 The soldiers liked fish days little better than the sailors. In his request for provisions in May 1599, the Earl of Essex pleaded with the Privy Council not to send his garrison any more ‘Newland fish [as] … it neither keepeth well, nor pleaseth the soldier, who by such victuals hath so much to provoke his thirst and no provision to quench it’.38 The fish’s unpopularity notwithstanding, the demand for salt cod outstripped supply, and in 1595, army suppliers were forced to specially commission two fishing vessels to sail to Newfoundland to acquire salt cod provisions for the forces in Ireland.39
With growing demand, and an uncomfortable situation in Iceland, where the Danish authorities were demanding licence fees from the English, West Country fishermen began to sail in greater numbers to Newfoundland. By now the Basques had begun to disappear from the fishing grounds in the New World. Catholic Spain was embroiled in conflict with Protestant northern Europe, and the Spanish Crown had decimated the Basque fishing fleet by requisitioning men and ships to fight the Dutch. By the end of the sixteenth century, only about half a dozen Basque fishermen were still competing with the English, who now dominated Newfoundland’s shores.40
Each spring, a flotilla of about a hundred ships set sail to Newfoundland from the West Country.41 Most sailed via France, Portugal or West Africa to buy salt, and then turned west to cross the Atlantic. The first ships to arrive in Newfoundland had the pick of the best harbours.42 Once the captain had chosen a good spot for a base camp, the ship was unrigged and ‘in the snow and cold all the men go into the woods to cut timber, fir, spruce, and birch’ to build landing stages and racks on which to dry the catch. They constructed makeshift sleeping huts and a cook room out of branches and turf, after which they reassembled the skiffs and longboats they had brought out with them in pieces on the ship.43 Once the camp was established, the fishing could begin.
In the early morning, the boats would row out to sea. Each held five men, three to catch the fish and two to stow it away in the bottom of the skiff. The cod were so ‘thicke by the shoare’ that one visitor to Newfoundland described how he was ‘hardlie … able to row a Boate through them’.44 Towards the afternoon the boats would return, laden down with as many as a thousand cod. As soon as they reached the shore, the foreshipman would hurry off to ‘boil their kettle’ and prepare a meal while the others threw their catch up to the shore men.45
The scale of the fishery was industrial, with hundreds of thousands of fish being caught, salted and dried every year. Newfoundland’s beaches were transformed into open-air factories. Rather than each man preparing one fish from beginning to end, the shore men were organised into efficient production lines that enabled them to process hundreds of fish in an hour. Every man performed a discrete task. James Yonge, a Plymouth-born ship’s surgeon who accompanied a group of fishermen to Newfoundland in 1662, described how as the fish were thrown out of the boat a boy would pick them up and lay them on a table on either side of which stood two men. The first, known as the ‘header’, dextrously opened the belly of each fish and took out the liver, which he dropped into a tub under the table.46 He then twisted off the head, which, along with the guts, fell back into the sea through the slats in the landing stage. The header then thrust the fish across the table to the second man, known as the ‘splitter’, ‘who with a strong knife splits it abroad, and with a back stroke cuts off the bone’. They worked so rapidly that they could process as many as 480 fish in just half an hour.
The split fish were thrown into a barrow and passed on to the ‘salter’, whose job was delicate and required more care. ‘Too much salt burns the fish and makes it break and wet, too little makes it redshanks, that is, look red when dried, and so … not merchantable’, Yonge observed.47 The fish were left in the salt for a few days before being washed in seawater and piled up to dry on the stony beach. A day or so later, they were spread out on racks to dry in the wind – a technique the English had perfected in Iceland. At night, or if the weather was inclement, they had to be gathered into ‘faggots’ of four or five fish, with the skin upward. Once dried, they were piled up and pressed to make the salt sweat out of the flesh, a process known as ‘corning’, during which the cod turned white. Once they were finished, the fish were stored in ‘dry piles’, which by the end of the season were as large as haystacks.48
Since the Middle Ages, England had relied on its cloth industry to fund the purchase of almost all its luxury food imports. In the fifteenth century, English merchants sold woollens in Antwerp and used the profits to buy wine, spices, olive oil, and such large quantities of currants and raisins that the Italians assumed that rather than consuming them, the English must be extracting dye from the dried fruit. The economic depression of the 1550s and 1560s led to the collapse of the European market for English woollens. English demand for luxury foodstuffs did not, however, suffer a similar collapse, and wine, oil and currants became something of a drain on the country’s stocks of bullion.49 The privateer and explorer Sir Richard Hawkins complained that in order to obtain Spanish sack, which he thought caused ‘hot burning Feavers, the Stone, the Dropsie, and infinite other Diseases … there is no yeare, in which [England] wasteth not two millions of Crownes of our substance by conveyance into forraine Countries’.50 In Newfoundland cod the English now discovered a commodity that helped to remedy this trade imbalance.51 From the late sixteenth century, Dutch, French and even a few Spanish-owned vessels would arrive in Newfoundland each year towards the end of the spring, laden with cargoes of wine, which they exchanged for salt fish. As a result, by 1620, only about 10 per cent of the Newfoundland catch was actually brought back to England, with most of it being packed into the holds of the sack ships and taken to southern Europe.52 In September, the West Country fishermen sailed home, their ships loaded with barrels of wine as well as salt fish to sell on to military provisioning officers.
The Newfoundland fishery thus grew into a thriving branch of English commerce. Increasing numbers of investors and merchants (some from as far afield as London) began to participate in the trade, funding and commissioning voyages. The number of ships sailing to Newfoundland each spring more than doubled, until by 1615, 250 ships took part in the enterprise. The economies of the West Country ports were dominated by the Newfoundland fisheries, with at least 6,000 landlubbers employed in supporting trades such as shipbuilding, rope- and sail-making.53 For West Country mariners, long-range travel across the Atlantic Ocean had become a routine activity.54
In the seventeenth century, English merchant ships joined the fishing fleet.55 James Yonge made his third voyage to Newfoundland in 1664 on the Robert Bonadventure, a small ship that acted as both a fishing boat and a merchant trader. She sailed from Plymouth to Newfoundland via Bonavista, an island near Cape Verde, where she picked up a cargo of salt. After a couple of months fishing and trading in Newfoundland, she sailed for the Straits of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean. In Genoa, the captain handed over the cargo of salt cod to the factor acting for the merchant who had commissioned the voyage.56 Yonge did not mention what goods made up the return cargo, but it is likely that the Robert Bonadventure’s hold was packed with wine, olive oil and currants before she sailed back to Plymouth. A 250-ton freighter that made a voyage from Newfoundland to southern Europe in the 1630s could expect to earn something like £465 from its cargo of cod. This was a 14 per cent return on an investment of £3,300. The sale of the return cargo, bought with the proceeds of the sale of the fish in the Mediterranean, could double this profit.57
Newfoundland salt cod injected the English trading economy with cash.58 The southern Europeans’ continuing appetite for salt cod eventually outweighed the English demand for southern European comestibles. This allowed England to gain access to New World specie as the Spanish were forced to pay for some of the fish in silver. The English mercantilist economist Charles Davenant criticised Spain for allowing the riches of the New World to pass through its economy undigested. The Spanish, he pointed out, failed to gain ‘spirits, strength, or nourishment’ from their bullion. Not so the English, who possessed a much healthier economic constitution. English merchants pumped the silver back into the economy by using it to fund further trading exploits.59 Before the economic downturn in the 1550s, England had played a largely passive role in global commerce. Most of its trade had been channelled through Antwerp, and the English had relied on European contacts with commodity markets further afield to access their share of exotic goods from around the world. But when Antwerp failed to recover in the 1570s, English merchants began to seek direct contact with distant markets and they put the Spanish silver acquired from the sale of salt cod to good use funding trading ventures to the Levant, Muscovy and East India.
The British Empire was born on Newfoundland’s stony beaches. The fishermen living in temporary shacks on the edge of a vast continent, their leather aprons covered with fish scales and blood, conquered distance with their innovative food-processing techniques and laid down the foundations of empire. The expanding merchant marine drew on the pool of well-travelled and competent fishermen to man its ships, and in this way the Newfoundland fishery helped to fund, crew and sustain the voyages of both the maritime explorers and the merchant seamen who followed in their wake.60 Between 1570 and 1689, the tonnage of English shipping grew sevenfold and England emerged as a major European sea power.61 The nation’s first venture into food processing on an industrial scale played an important part in enabling it to take an active and independent role in world trade.62 Both as a portable foodstuff and as a trading commodity, ‘poor John’ was one of the building blocks of the British Empire.