Cod_ A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World - Mark Kurlansky [29]
Instead of settling for battlefield victories, the British deliberated for three years over what to take from France. Some wanted to let the French keep their cod colony in North America and instead take a sugar colony as the price for peace. Guadeloupe produced more sugar than all the British West Indies combined. But the issue was never whether sugar or cod and furs was the more valuable. It was a debate about how to best hold on to North America. Given the attitudes, the economic independence, and the growing population of New England and the other lower North American colonies, Britain feared losing North America. Some argued that the French presence, an enemy at their backs, would keep the North Americans loyal to the British. But in the end, the British thought that they had better secure as much of North America as they could. In 1763, they decided to deny France all of its North American possessions except two tiny islands off the south coast of Newfoundland, St. Pierre and Miquelon.
Ironically, when France retained Guadeloupe but lost Canada—held its slave colonies but lost its fisheries—the demand this created for West India cure in the French Caribbean led New Englanders on a direct collision course with the British Crown. The conflict went back to the Acts of Trade and Navigation, one of the foundations of the British Empire, according to which colonists were to sell their goods to England and buy their goods from England. Legally, New Englanders should not have traded directly with Spain and the Caribbean but were supposed to have sold their cod to England and then to have purchased Spanish wine and iron from England.
The British had good reasons to worry about North America. In 1677, ninety-eight years before the cause of American independence became a shooting war, the British Crown received a polite note from New Englanders accompanied by ten barrels of cranberries, two of corn mush, and 1,000 codfish. Perhaps not as bitter as ten barrels of cranberries, the enclosed note stated, “We humbly conceive that the laws of England are bounded within four seas, and do not reach America. The subjects of his majesty here being not represented in Parliament, so we have not looked at ourselves to be impeded in trade by them.”
What Charles did with 1,000 codfish and all those cranberries is not known, but he did absolutely nothing about the Trade and Navigation Acts. Instead, the law was bent by the force of the marketplace. New England produced too much cod for the British market. It could not all be sold in Britain, and the British merchant fleet did not have the capacity to reexport that much cod. In spite of the Trade and Navigation Acts, the British had to allow the New Englanders to trade it.
Freed from restraint, as Adam Smith pointed out, the trade grew. By 1700, the British West Indies could not absorb all of New England’s cod. Nor could it fully supply New England’s rum industry, which was a byproduct of the cod trade. Typical of the difference between New England and Newfoundland, Newfoundland imported Jamaican rum for local bottling, and still does, whereas New England imported molasses and built its own rum industry to sell in foreign markets. There were now three ways to buy slaves in West Africa: cash, salt cod, or Boston rum.
Massachusetts and Rhode Island rum producers were getting directly involved in the slave trade. Felton & Company, a Boston rum maker founded in the early nineteenth century, described the trade with remarkable candor in its 1936 drink guide. “Ship owners developed a cycle of trade involving cargoes of slaves to the West Indies—a cargo of Blackstrap Molasses from those islands to Boston and other New England ports—and finally the shipment of rum to Africa.”
Soon the British Empire was not only too small a market for New England’s cod catch but too small a molasses producer for New England’s distilleries. Total