Cod

Have you ever considered that a single species of fish might have helped shape world history, economies, and even nations? In Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky invites you to see the humble Atlantic cod as far more than seafood—it’s a protagonist in the grand human story of exploration, conquest, industrialization, and ecological collapse. Kurlansky’s vivid storytelling transforms what could have been a dry chronicle of fisheries into a sweeping narrative about humanity’s hunger for profit, discovery, and dominance over nature. His central claim: cod was not just a commodity, but a force that built empires, sustained revolutions, and ultimately exposed the consequences of human excess.

To understand cod’s impact, Kurlansky spans a millennium—from Viking fishermen drying their catch on Icelandic cliffs, to Basques salting cod to feed the Catholic world’s Fridays and Lenten fasts, to New Englanders launching a new economy on its back. Cod, he argues, gave birth to globalization long before the term existed. The desire for this long-lasting protein fed exploration, naval expansion, and colonial settlement. Yet, it also created the conditions for modern environmental catastrophe—centuries of unchecked exploitation that would end in the near extinction of the northern cod by the late twentieth century.

From Abundance to Collapse

In medieval Europe, fish was sacred. Catholic fast days required abstention from meat, making cod essential to spiritual and daily life. Basque and Portuguese fishermen ventured farther into the Atlantic searching for it, their preserved catch fueling entire economies. When centuries later North America’s coasts teemed with cod so thick that “a man could walk across their backs,” European rivals raced to stake claims. The fish fed forest economies, trading empires, and coastal towns. But abundance bred complacency. By the 20th century, industrial trawls, steam engines, and factory ships turned previous wisdom—fish as infinite—into a dangerous myth.

Kurlansky uses this narrative arc—a fall from plenty to collapse—to underscore a universal lesson: every human system built on infinite growth eventually meets natural limits. The cod’s story becomes a fable of human shortsightedness, our refusal to see that nature’s productivity is not boundless. The book thus links medieval Catholic restraint and modern overconsumption in a single, cautionary continuum.

A Web of Connections

Through cod, you glimpse how food connects everything—religion, technology, globalization, and ecology. The fish’s long preservation life made it the first truly global foodstuff, traveling from Newfoundland to Spain, from Portugal to Africa, carried aboard ships that also trafficked in salt, sugar, and slaves. As Kurlansky writes, cod’s popularity in the Caribbean tied it to slavery: saltfish fed enslaved Africans because it was cheap protein, the by-product no European market wanted. Suddenly, dinner becomes geopolitically charged.

Cod, then, is a symbol of the paradox of progress. Each new innovation—from salted preservation to factory trawlers, from drying racks to frozen fillets—expanded human reach while degrading the ecosystem that sustained it. What Europeans saw as genius was also overreach. The cod’s fate mirrors our own industrial arrogance.

Why This Story Matters Today

Why spend an entire book on a fish? Because, as Kurlansky argues, cod’s story is our story—a cycle of expansion and collapse that repeats through human history. Whether gold, oil, or fish, every resource we’ve glorified eventually becomes an epitaph. Kurlansky joins thinkers like Jared Diamond (Collapse) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) in revealing how ecological exploitation is also moral failure. The saga of cod represents not just an environmental caution but a cultural one: how easily abundance blinds us to fragility, and how the drive to exploit nature can unknowingly endanger civilization itself.

Across fourteen chapters, Kurlansky interweaves science, economics, and human drama—a tapestry of explorers like Cabot and Basque merchants; wars over access to fishing grounds; and the rise and fall of fishing towns from Gloucester to Reykjavik. You’ll see cod’s ghost swim through everything from New England chowder to Jamaican saltfish and ackee, from Iceland’s independence to the Boston Tea Party. Ultimately, Cod challenges you to rethink progress itself—to ask how a creature that once symbolized boundless prosperity became nature’s warning of limits reached.

Cod’s surprising dominance began as a culinary necessity. In medieval Europe, the Catholic Church’s strict fasting rules prohibited meat on nearly half the calendar’s days. Fish, however, was permitted—and cod, once cured in salt, could travel across continents without spoiling. This simple fact transformed cod into a pillar of global commerce. The Basques were early masters. They combined their whaling expertise with cod preservation using sea salt from Biscay, building fleets that reached as far as Newfoundland’s uncharted coasts centuries before Columbus. Because they sold secrecy as well as fish, the Basques kept their new grounds hidden for generations.

The Religious Appetite That Fueled Expansion

By the late Middle Ages, Catholic Europe’s appetite for lean-day fish was insatiable. Cod fed Lent, Fridays, and holy observances. Markets in Paris and Lisbon teemed with salted slabs of bacalao or morue. Without realizing it, church rules on abstinence spurred one of the first globalized fisheries. Salt became as strategic as grain or gold; ports in France, Spain, and Portugal thrived as thousands labored salting and drying fish for northern markets. The cod’s durability made it the ideal form of maritime currency—compact, long-lasting, and high in protein.

From Basques to Bristol Merchants

Kurlansky unearths fascinating historical threads: in 1497 John Cabot, sailing for England, landed off Newfoundland and marveled at seas so thick with cod “that they could be caught with baskets.” This revelation turned the North Atlantic into the Middle Ages’ equivalent of an oil field. Bristol merchants, Portuguese fleets, and Basque ships swarmed the Grand Banks. Salted cod soon rivaled herring and whale oil in value. By the 1500s, cod had become Europe’s dominant source of preserved protein—now a political prize as well as a dietary staple.

Feeding armies and colonies required reliable food that wouldn’t spoil in humid holds. Dried salt cod made imperial conquest possible. It fed explorers in tropical seas, Spanish garrisons in the New World, and enslaved field laborers on Caribbean sugar plantations. Here, Kurlansky shows history’s dark symmetry: the same salted cod that sustained European Catholics on fast days also sustained the trans-Atlantic slave economy.

A Global Network Born of Salt

By the seventeenth century, cod connected continents. Basque fleets brought fish to Spain. Dutch ships supplied Italian markets. English traders sent barrels to the Caribbean, returning with molasses and rum—the infamous triangle trade of fish, sugar, and human lives. As Kurlansky notes, “The staying power of cod was not culinary, it was geopolitical.” Food became imperial power. Feeding distant subjects required mastering preservation—and preservation relied on labor, salt, and control of the seas.

When you eat a simple fillet today, you’re tasting centuries of intertwined history: faith shaping diet, appetite shaping exploration, and commerce shaping conquest. Cod’s empire was built not on guns, but on brine.

The story of cod is also the story of America’s founding. By the seventeenth century, British settlers understood that the New World’s true wealth lay not in gold, but in fish. The first Plymouth colonists nearly starved in their first winters, until they learned to fish New England’s teeming shores. Salt cod became not just survival food—it became the seed of a colonial economy. Coastlines from Marblehead to Gloucester pulsed with activity. Kurlansky calls this the first American “industry.”

The New England Cod Economy

Fishing shaped every aspect of colonial life. Towns like Salem, Gloucester, and Marblehead were built around curing yards where fish dried in the sun on wooden flakes. The “ sacred cod,” a carved wooden emblem hanging in Boston’s State House, commemorated the industry’s importance. Profits from cod funded shipbuilding, trade, and even revolution. John Adams himself defended the industry as “a nursery of seamen and a source of naval power.” When Parliament restricted colonial trade through the Navigation Acts, the blow was personal—an attack on the livelihoods of fishermen and traders who embodied American independence.

Salt cod also linked New England to the Atlantic economy. Merchants exported their “West India cure”—the cheapest grade of dried fish—to Caribbean plantations to feed enslaved workers. The triangular exchange—fish, molasses, rum—produced both wealth and hypocrisy. Massachusetts merchants, while decrying British tyranny, quietly profited from slavery abroad. Alexis de Tocqueville later noted this contradiction: New Englanders fought for liberty while enriching themselves off bondage.

Cod, Commerce, and Independence

When Britain imposed taxes on colonial goods, including molasses—the byproduct of the fish-for-rum trade—it united merchants and fishermen in outrage. The Molasses Act (1733) and the Sugar Act (1764) cut to the heart of New England’s independence. When the British later shut down Boston Harbor in 1774, they underestimated how self-sufficient fisherman had become. Trade bans starved British coffers but not New England homes. The colonies’ economic survival, thanks to cod, meant they could afford rebellion.

In this sense, the American Revolution was also a cod war. Fish funded revolutionaries, fed soldiers, and symbolized a self-reliant America. When John Adams insisted that fishing rights on the Grand Banks be enshrined in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, he was protecting more than a livelihood—he was defending the nation’s original freedom industry.

By the nineteenth century, the age of sail gave way to the age of steam, and fishing became warfare by other means. Steam engines, trawlers, and freezing technologies revolutionized cod fishing—but also spelled its downfall. Kurlansky guides you through this transformation like a witness to industrial hubris: engines turned fishermen into machine operators; enormous drag nets ripped up ocean floors; and the belief that cod stocks were inexhaustible became maritime gospel.

The Rise of the Trawlers

Steam trawlers, first tested in England’s North Sea in the 1800s, made fishermen faster and deadlier. Once limited by sail and weather, they could now drag enormous weighted nets across the seabed nonstop. These new “factory” vessels could process fish immediately on deck, eliminating waste but maximizing catch. The North Sea, once abundant, was barren by 1900, and fleets pushed west—to Iceland, then Newfoundland. The sea itself had become an industrial frontier.

Huxley’s 1883 declaration to Britain’s Fisheries Exhibition—that overfishing was “scientifically impossible”—epitomized Victorian faith in progress. His influence lingered for a century, shaping government policy that favored industry over conservation. But as Kurlansky notes ironically, the era’s obsession with growth blinded even scientists to depletion. The more efficient ships became, the more invisible nature’s limits grew.

From Ice to Freezer

The next revolution came in the early twentieth century, led by an unlikely figure: American inventor Clarence Birdseye. Living in subarctic Labrador, Birdseye observed that flash-freezing preserved fish far better than ice. His invention—quick-frozen fillets—modernized not just diet, but perception. Fish became a convenience product. Filleting machines, factory freezing, and products like Gorton’s fish sticks made cod anonymous: “fish” rather than species. What had once connected Newfoundland to Spain or Jamaica now connected supermarket to freezer aisle.

Industrial innovation, Kurlansky argues, divorced us from ecology. When the fishery became faceless, consumption skyrocketed. The memory of working seas faded—until collapse forced it to the surface again.

Few wars were fought so fiercely, or so absurdly, over fish. Between the 1950s and 1970s, Iceland—newly independent from Denmark—faced Britain in three “Cod Wars” over territorial fishing rights. Though no lives were lost, the conflicts pitted trawlers and warships in tense, often comic maritime showdowns. At stake was more than seafood: it was the right of small nations to defend their resources against industrial powers.

The Birth of a Modern Nation

After WWII, Iceland sought to protect its livelihood. The island’s economy depended almost entirely on cod. When British fleets continued plundering offshore waters, Iceland extended its fishing limits—first to four miles, then twelve, then fifty. Britain responded by sending naval escorts for its trawlers. Icelandic coast guard ships fought back with a secret weapon: “trawl wire cutters” that sliced nets off foreign vessels. The sight of Icelandic patrols tangling with Royal Navy warships made clear that ecological sovereignty had become political sovereignty.

Internationally, these skirmishes changed the law of the sea. In 1976, Iceland’s 200-mile exclusion zone became global precedent. Within a decade, most nations claimed similar zones. Kurlansky argues that Iceland’s David-versus-Goliath stand redefined maritime ownership: resources once considered international became national property. Yet this victory carried its own trap—by claiming full control, nations became wholly responsible for conservation, a task few were prepared to manage wisely.

Cod as National Identity

The Cod Wars forged Iceland’s sense of self as fiercely independent and ecologically conscious. Even writers like Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness celebrated cod as a metaphor for nationhood—hardy, necessary, unpretentious. But as Kurlansky shows, pride doesn’t equal prudence. Iceland later faced its own overfishing crisis, proof that nationalism can inspire protection but not always restraint. The wars that declared victory over foreign fleets could not defend against human nature itself.

By the 1990s, one of Earth’s richest ecosystems went silent. The Grand Banks of Newfoundland—where Cabot’s men once scooped fish by hand—became a graveyard. Decades of industrial trawling, political denial, and bureaucratic mismanagement had annihilated a 500-year-old fishery. Kurlansky’s depiction of the 1992 Canadian moratorium is haunting: 30,000 fishermen suddenly jobless, coastal towns hollowed, and an economy built on abundance collapsing overnight.

How Collapse Happened

The warning signs were everywhere—declining catches, smaller fish, empty spawning runs—but government science preferred optimism. As technology enabled trawlers to locate and vacuum the last dense schools, officials mistook efficient catches for healthy populations. When Fisheries Minister John Crosbie finally declared the cod “commercially extinct,” it was too late. For the first time since medieval times, Atlantic cod had vanished from vast habitats.

The Human Cost

Kurlansky’s human portraits bring the tragedy home. Fishermen like Sam Lee of Petty Harbour—who once could “walk on fish”—became sentinels of absence, hired only to tag the few survivors for scientific data. Towns that had banned destructive practices decades earlier suffered alongside those that hadn’t. The moratorium, meant as a temporary measure, stretched into decades. Nature, it turned out, did not rebound on command.

The Grand Banks collapse wasn’t just ecological. It was cultural. Centuries of knowledge—boat-building, curing, handlining—vanished with the fish. As one Gloucester fisherman put it, “Buy out a man whose father and grandfather were fishermen, and you wipe out a hundred years of knowledge.” The extinction was social as much as biological.

In the end, Cod is both obituary and warning. Kurlansky calls the fish’s history “a biography of abundance turned to scarcity.” But he also offers lessons—about resilience, adaptation, and humility. Nature, he reminds you, reacts to human behavior but does not forgive it easily. Whether the cod returns depends not only on biology, but on culture: our willingness to learn from failure.

The Myth of Infinite Growth

The cod saga unmasks a deeper human delusion—the belief that progress and consumption can grow forever. Every empire built on a resource assumes it will never run out: salt, gold, coal, oil, or fish. But nature operates on feedback loops, not markets. When resources collapse, economies follow. Iceland’s triumph and Newfoundland’s tragedy show opposite ends of the same truth: control without moderation is ruinous.

Resilience and Change

Some hope remains. Norwegian cod stocks rebounded after strict quotas; Iceland learned to align science with policy. But recovery requires time scales alien to politics—the fifteen years it takes a cod to rebuild a breeding class, the generations it takes a culture to develop ecological maturity. In Gloucester, ex-fishermen now run whale-watching boats for tourists fascinated by the same sea their ancestors exploited. It’s a paradox of progress: even as we mourn lost abundance, we reinvent it as spectacle.

Cod’s Final Message

For Kurlansky, the cod’s life story is the biography of humanity’s relationship with nature. We are the ultimate predator—ingenious, determined, forgetful. The cod reminds us that no civilization, however advanced, can live on borrowed resources forever. Its ghost swims beneath every act of consumption, whispering the same truth: when we forget the limits of nature’s generosity, we end up consuming ourselves.