Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [19]
Collins warned against French salt, which he said was unhealthy. He probably had several reasons for saying this, aside from a general dislike of the French. There was a great tradition of French contraband, and salt was a favorite item because the French had a near obsession with evading the salt tax and, in fact, most taxes. “Oh, the rain washed it away” or “Someone must have stolen it” was the familiar litany recited to salt tax collectors. The British also had a hated salt tax and had their homes searched for off-the-books salt. But the French salt tax, the gabelle, was particularly hated and was one of the grievances leading to the French Revolution. Like many reforms of the Revolution, the abolition of the salt tax lasted only fifteen years and then was reinstated until 1945. One way of getting around the salt tax was to make your own, by boiling brackish water, and probably much of this illicit salt smuggled to England was indeed, as Collins said, unhealthy.
But the French Terreneuve merchants filled their holds with legal, high-quality French salt, which made good ballast, and sailed to Newfoundland. They returned with salt cod in the holds where the salt had been.
Salt was a great advantage of the Bretons. Under the agreement by which the duchy of Brittany became part of France, Bretons were exempt from the gabelle. And since sixteenth-century salt was made from evaporation, it was a southern product and southern Brittany was the most northerly point in western Europe where salt making was commercially viable.
Nearby Brittany could have supplied the British salt needs, but the French were the enemy. It was Portugal, with its saltworks in Aveiro—which, not by coincidence, became and still is Portugal’s salt cod center—that had what was considered Europe’s best salt. Bristol merchants went into a number of joint ventures with the Portuguese. In exchange for salt, the British government gave Portuguese ships protection from the French. In 1510, the king of Portugal complained to the king of France that French ships had taken 300 Portuguese vessels in the past ten years.
The mutually advantageous British arrangement with the Portuguese lasted until 1581, when Portugal merged with Spain. It was a bad moment for a seagoing nation to throw in its lot with Spain. In 1585, the British attacked and destroyed the Spanish fishing fleet, and the military fleet was destroyed in its disastrous attempt to invade England. The Spanish fleets took the Portuguese down with them. The Portuguese continued to fish the Grand Banks until expelled by the Canadian government in 1986, but after their short-lived merger with Spain ended their British alliance, they were never again a dominant force in the Newfoundland fishery.
By the time England broke its alliance with Portugal, not quite a century after Cabot’s first voyage, Newfoundland cod was more than commerce to the British; it was strategic. In fact, what finally spurred the British to become the dominant players in the Newfoundland fishery in the second half of the sixteenth century was providing enormous quantities of dried—not salted—cod to the British Navy’s ships-of-the-line fighting France. They fed their Navy with it and sold the surplus. Quick to catch fish, the English were slow to learn the European market and had trouble selling their fish to Mediterranean countries where the population demanded high-quality salted and dried fish. After a century-long free-for-all, the Spanish Basques were reemerging as dominant suppliers to the Mediterranean world—despite losing their secret.
British law greatly encumbered its own attempts at trade. Since Newfoundland cod was strategic, its commerce had to be tightly controlled, as though cod were a weapon of war. The Spanish and Portuguese had also viewed cod as strategic, because it sustained the crews on their increasing number of tropical