Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

  • Mark Kurlansky
Walker: 1997. Pp.294 $21
The catch at Scarborough in 1932, when North Sea fish stocks were healthier. Credit: HULTON GETTY IMAGES

If you want to know how a flush toilet may help in the cooking of dried or salted cod, what W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice thought of the product, how it contributed to the causes of the American War of Independence, or why fishing for cod has been banned in Canadian waters for the past five years, you should read this book.

The belief that the oceans and their resources are limitless and invulnerable to harm from human activities persisted for a very long time. In about 400 BC, Clytemnestra asked: “There is the sea — who shall exhaust the sea?”, in Aeschylus’s drama, the Oresteia. In 1883, T. H. Huxley stated: “I believe, then, that the cod fishery… and probably all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible: that is to say that nothing we do seriously affects the number of fish. And any attempt to regulate these fisheries seems… to be useless.” In the twentieth century, we have successfully disproved these hypotheses. The great whales were reduced almost to extinction. In two world wars, when fishing ceased in the North Sea for several years, the stocks recovered dramatically, demonstrating both that fishing did affect the number of fish and that regulation could be effective. Moreover, excessive fishing since then has caused the collapse of stocks of herring off Norway, and of herring and mackerel in the North Sea, all previously measured in millions of tons. The most dramatic and notorious collapse has however been that of the cod stocks on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.

The history of this once great fishery, and the fish that supported it, is the central theme of this fascinating book by Mark Kurlansky, once a fisherman himself. He follows the story from the ‘discovery’ of great shoals of fish, previously the secret of canny Basques, by Giovanni Caboto (alias John Cabot) in 1497, to the present day. In so doing, he ranges widely. The importance of dried and salted cod as a staple food, sustaining international trade from the Vikings, through the American Civil War, until Clarence Birdseye invented frozen fish, is vividly described. He relates its link to the slave trade, and the rise of the codfish aristocracy of Boston, and much else besides. The story is brought to life with amusing anecdotes, keen observations and telling quotations from conversations with fishermen, scientists and politicians from countries all around the North Atlantic. Rightly, he identifies no single culprit: most disasters occur when several things go wrong at once, and this seems to be no exception.

This is, however, much more than just a history of the cod fisheries. Nicely produced in a fashionably small format, the book contains many aptly chosen quotations, excellent illustrations and numerous recipes for preparing cod, especially the dried and salted varieties. Even if your opinion of the product, like mine, coincides with that of Auden and MacNeice, there is much to savour here.

With the latest research (Nature 385, 521; 521 1997Nature) suggesting that the cod stock of the North Sea is teetering on the edge of collapse, this is, above all, a cautionary tale we would do well to heed. The oceans may be vast, and their resources great, but so is our capacity to harm them.