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Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

First published in the United States of America by

Walker Publishing Company, Inc. 1997

Published in Penguin Books 1998

Copyright © Mark Kurlansky, 1997

All rights reserved

The author has made every effort to locate and contact

all the holders of copyright to material produced in this book.

Codfish engraving used as ornament throughout is from the author’s collection; “Codfish jig” on page 45 and “Gilded cod from Pickman house stairway” on page 90 from Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.; excerpt on page 177 from “The Cod Head,” by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems: 1909-1939, Volume I. Copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. .; recipes for Bacalao a lo Comunista on page 218 and Kokotchas de Bacalao Verde on page 247 from the book El Bacalao: The Recipes of PYSBE, .l, Donostia, Spain; recipe for Salted Cod Croquettes on page 264 reprinted from the book Talismano Della Felicita, by Ada Boni. Copyright © 1950 by Crown Publishers, Inc. .; recipe for Sonhos de Bacalhau on page 265 from the book Foods of the Azores . Avila, Palo Alto, Calif.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67287-3

1. Codfish—Literary collections. 2. Cod fisheries. 3. Cookery (Codfish).

I. Title.

PN607I.C66K87 1997

333.95’6633—dc21 97-12165

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THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONS FOR MANKIND—THE PROBLEM WHICH UNDERLIES ALL OTHERS, AND IS MORE DEEPLY INTERESTING THAN ANY OTHER—IS THE ASCER- TAINMENT OF THE PLACE WHICH MAN OCCUPIES IN NATURE AND OF HIS RELATIONS TO THE UNIVERSE OF THINGS.

—H. Thomas Henry Huxley,

Man’s Place in Nature

SO THE FIRST BIOLOGICAL LESSON OF HISTORY IS THAT LIFE IS COMPETITION. COMPETITION IS NOT ONLY THE LIFE OF TRADE, IT IS THE TRADE OF LIFE—PEACEFUL WHEN FOOD ABOUNDS, VIOLENT WHEN THE MOUTHS OUTRUN THE FOOD. ANIMALS EAT ONE ANOTHER WITHOUT QUALM; CIVILIZED MEN CONSUME ONE ANOTHER BY DUE PROCESS OF LAW.“

—Will and Ariel Durant,

The Lessons of History

Prologue: Sentry on the Headlands (So Close to Ireland)

THE HERRING ARE NOT IN THE TIDES AS THEY WERE OF OLD;

MY SORROW FOR MANY A CREAK GAVE THE CREEL IN THE CART

THAT CARRIED THE TAKE TO SLIGO TOWN TO BE SOLD, WHEN I WAS A BOY WITH NEVER A CRACK IN MY HEART.

—William Butler Yeats, “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman”

These are the fishermen who stand sentry over the cod stocks off the headlands of North America, the fishermen who went to sea but forgot their pencil.

Sam Lee, dressed in black rubber boots and a red flotation jacket made even brighter by its newness, drives his late-model pickup truck through the last murk of night, down to the wharves that stretch out to where the water is deep enough for a shallow fishing skiff. The warehouses, meeting halls, and tackle shops are all built out above the shallow water on stilts. This has freed up the narrow strip of flat land where the steep little mountains stop just before the water’s edge. The level area had once been needed to spread out thousands of splayed and salted cod for drying in the open air.

The salting had stopped almost thirty years before, but Petty Harbour still looks like a crowded little port, its few commercial buildings crunched in along the water, while houses scatter up onto the beginnings of the slopes.

At the wharves, Sam meets up with Leonard Stack and Bernard Chafe carrying flashlights and joking about Sam’s new jacket, shielding their eyes from its shocking brilliance. Grumbling about fishery politics, about last night’s television talk of reopening groundfishing to the public on a limited basis, they climb down into Leonard’s thirty-two-foot,