Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

Content Warning: This section discusses the European slave trade.

“Newfoundland’s inshore fishermen fish only the waters of their own cove. […] That was back in the days of civility, before the moratorium, when there were supposed to be enough fish for everyone, and religion was the only bone to fight over. Since the moratorium was declared, civility has been scarcer than cod.”

The Prologue introduces Sam Lee, the Sentinel Fishery, and other fishermen in the Petty Harbour/Newfoundland area, as well as setting up the initial context of the 1992 Canadian moratorium. The Prologue highlights some of the difference from before and after the moratorium, such as the collapse of previous camaraderie between fishermen. It also introduces the key theme of Abundance, Scarcity, and the Economy in highlighting the local economic impacts of overfishing.

“Even limiting the cod to ten pounds a person, there is not enough. A few people are turned away, and one of them asks one of the fishermen, ‘where are they taking the rest of the fish?’

The problem with the people in Petty Harbour, out here on the headlands of North America, is that they are at the wrong end of a 1,000-year fishing spree.”

The Prologue primarily sets the scene of the problem that the rest of the book will explain, that problem being the depletion of the cod stock. The final sentence of the Prologue states that this problem was brought about by the 1000 years of a cod craze and general overfishing, which the rest of the book goes on to elaborate and contextualize.

“A medieval fisherman is said to have hauled up a three-foot-long cod, which was common enough at the time. And the fact that the cod could talk was not especially surprising. But what was astonishing was that it spoke an unknown language. It spoke Basque.

This Basque folktale shows not only the Basque attachment to their orphan language, indecipherable to the rest of the world, but also their tie to the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua, a fish that has never been found in Basque or even Spanish waters.”

This passage invokes the theme of The Interconnectedness of Trade, Colonialism, and Nationalism by demonstrating how the