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en Amérique, wrote about an inherent contradiction in the New England character. “Nowhere was this principle of liberty more totally applied than in New England,” he wrote. But then he went on to describe what he termed “the great social enigma of the United States.” Freedom-loving New Englanders accepted a great deal of repression and social injustice. He described the Connecticut legal code, in which blasphemy and adultery were capital crimes, and the Boston society that crusaded against long hair. The slave trade was another example of the moral contradiction Tocqueville had observed. New England society was the great champion of individual liberty and even openly denounced slavery, all the while growing ever more affluent by providing Caribbean planters with barrels of cheap food to keep enslaved people working sixteen hours a day. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, more than 300 ships left Boston in a good year for the West Indies.

The development of a faster fishing boat, the schooner, increased production capacity of this quick cure. In 1713, the first schooner was built and launched from Eastern Point, Gloucester, by Andrew Robinson, and though there were earlier European experiments with this type of rigging, the Gloucester schooner revolutionized sailing and fishing. It was a small, sleek, two-masted vessel with fore-and-aft rigging and the ability to put a tremendous amount of canvas in topsails. The name comes from an eighteenth-century New England word, scoon, meaning “to skim lightly along the water.” In full sail with a good breeze and a flat sea, heeling at a slight angle, the vessels did seem to scoon, and this remains one of the most elegant sights in the history of sailing. But often they were out on the Banks climbing up and tobogganing down swells as high as their masts. By reducing sailing time between Georges Bank and the coastline drying flakes, they increased production of West India cure.

Woodcut of eighteenth-century Gloucester harbor. (Corbis-Bettmann)

Some of New England’s best customers were the French colonies of St. Domingue (Haiti), Martinique, and Guadeloupe and the Dutch colony of Suriname (Dutch Guiana). These colonies were huge plantation economies, and the French ones were extremely profitable. After 1680, the French brought an average of 1,000 Africans to Martinique every year. Eighteenth-century St. Domingue averaged 8,000 a year. While many of the slaves were replacing others who had been worked to death, an African slave population nourished on cheap salt cod was rapidly growing.

The French fisheries were not able to satisfy this demand. The one requirement of the Caribbean market was that the saltfish be dried hard so that it could survive a tropical climate. The French lacked shore space for drying. During the eighteenth century, the limited French space in Newfoundland was whittled down to almost none. The British made their base on the eastern coast, the headlands, close to the Banks. The French fished from the south coast, Placentia Bay, where there were good ice-free harbors, the herring ran, providing bait, and New France’s Gaspé Peninsula was nearby. Then, in 1713, after a fight with the British, the French agreed to leave this area and settle for access to the north coast of Newfoundland, which has been known ever since as the French shore. The area was not adjacent to other French territories, nor is it close to good fishing grounds, so it did not offer convenient drying space. After the next war, the French position became even worse.

The Seven Years War, known in the United States as the French and Indian War, was the first global conflict. In the late 1750s, France and Britain fought each other, not only in Europe but in India, the Caribbean, and North America. On September 13, 1759, New France was lost in twenty minutes when British general James Wolfe scaled the cliffs leading to the fortress at Quebec City and surprised the French garrison under General Louis de Montcalm. Montcalm, who had known previous victories against the British, made