Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [27]
In the seventeenth century, the strategy for sugar production, a labor-intensive agro-industry, was to keep the manpower cost down through slavery. At harvest-time, a sugar plantation was a factory with slaves working sixteen hours or more a day—chopping cane by hand as close to the soil as possible, burning fields, hauling cane to a mill, crushing, boiling. To keep working under the tropical sun, the slaves needed salt and protein. But plantation owners did not want to waste any valuable sugar planting space on growing food for the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were being brought to each small Caribbean island. The Caribbean produced almost no food. At first slaves were fed salted beef from England, but New England colonies soon saw the opportunity for salt cod as cheap, salted nutrition.
For salt cod merchants, the great advantage of this new trade was that it was a low-end market. Cured cod can be a very demanding product. Badly split fish, the wrong weather conditions during drying, too much salt, too little salt, bad handling—a long list of factors resulted in fish that was not acceptable to the discerning Mediterranean market. The West Indies presented a growing market for the rejects, for anything that was cheap. In fact, West India was the commercial name for the lowest-quality salt cod.
In trade, it is an almost infallible natural law that a hungry low-end market, an eager dumping ground for the shoddiest work, is an irresistible market force. At first it offers an opportunity to sell off the mistakes that would otherwise have represented a loss. But producers increasingly turned to this fast, cheap, profitable product because it was easy. West India cure represented a steadily increasing percentage of the output of New England, Nova Scotia, and to a lesser degree, Newfoundland. Nova Scotia in particular specialized in a small, poor-quality, salted-and-dried product for the West Indies.
The first draw of the Caribbean for New Englanders was the salt from the Tortugas. But soon ships were coming back with not only salt but indigo, cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Only twenty-five years after the Pilgrims first landed, New Englanders were doing a triangulated trade. The best fish was always sold in Spain. Bilbao, with its wine, fruit, iron, and coal, became a major trading partner with Boston. The New Englanders then sailed to the West Indies, where some Spanish goods along with the cheapest cod were sold, and sugar, molasses, tobacco, cotton, and salt were bought. The ship would return to Boston with Mediterranean and Caribbean goods. They had made money at every stop.
Very quickly the next commercially logical step was taken. In 1645, a New England ship took pipe to the Canaries, then bought African slaves in the Cape Verde Islands and sold them in Barbados, returning to Boston with wine, sugar, salt, and tobacco. Shipments of salt cod followed, and soon salt cod, slaves, and molasses became commercially linked.
In preparing a museum devoted to the seventeenth-century commercial port of Salem, National Park Service officials carefully checked shipping documents, bracing themselves for an attack, and were relieved to have been unable to uncover any record of slaving on any Salem ship. But they should not take too much comfort in this. Aside from the fact that much slave trading was done clandestinely, the search for these records misses the important point. Regardless of how many ships actually did or did not carry slaves, or how many New England merchants did or did not buy or sell Africans, the New England merchants of the cod trade were deeply involved in slavery, not only because they supplied the plantation system but also because they facilitated the trade in Africans. In West Africa, slaves could be purchased with cured cod, and to this day there is still a West African market for salt cod and stockfish.
The French politician Alexis de Tocqueville, in his reflective 1835 study, De la démocratie