Canadians at Table. Dorothy Duncan

European explorers described the codfish on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as so plentiful that they could be caught in weighted baskets lowered into the water.

      Exploitation of this rich resource was one of the great economic activities of Europe during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a venture that every year lured hundreds of vessels across the ocean, drew upon and fostered seafaring support systems along much of the Atlantic fringe, and marketed its catch through a network that reached far into the European realm. Thus it trained generations of mariners, employed thousands of craftsmen and suppliers, and involved families and friends, syndicates, and whole communities in North American activities.[2]

      In 1622, Captain Richard Whitbourne of Exmouth, Devon, one of the captains who by then had spent forty years trading to the Grand Banks and Newfoundland, gives us a vivid but often questioned description of the land and its fruits, vegetables, and potential for crops:

      The land of Newfoundland is large, temperate and fruitful…. Then have you there fair strawberries red and white, and as fair raspberries and gooseberries as there be in England, as also multitudes of bilberries, which are called by some whortes, and many other delicate berries in great abundance.

      Here also are many other fruits, as small pears, cherries, filbirds, etc. And of these berries and fruits, the store is there so great that the mariners of my ship have often gathered at once more than half an hogshead would hold…. There are also herbs for salads and broth, as parsley, alexander, sorrel, etc…. Our men that have wintered there divers years, did for a trial and experiment thereof sow some small quantity of corn, which I saw growing very fair; and they found the increase to be great, and the grain very good; and it is well known to me, and divers that trade there yearly, how that cabbage, carrots, turnips, lettuce, parsley and such like prove well there.[3]

      Captain Whitbourne goes on to tell us that “The natural inhabitants of the country are willing to assist the fishermen in curing fish for a small hire … they were able to sew the rinds of spruce-trees, round and deep in proportion, like a brass kettle, to boil their meat in.” On one occasion, three of his men surprised a party of First Nations enjoying themselves in a sumptuous manner:

      They were feasting, having the canoes by them, and they had three pots made of the rinds of trees, standing each of them on three stems, boiling, with fowls in each of them, every fowl as big as a pigeon and some as big as a duck. They had also many such pots so fowled, and fashioned like the leather buckets that are used for quenching fires, and were full of the yolks of eggs that they had taken and boiled hard, and so dried small, which the savages used in their broth … also a great store of flesh dried.[4]

      The Grand Banks continued for close to five hundred years, serving the First Nations, the newcomers, and the world’s hungry abroad. Surrounding it on the Atlantic Coast and in the waterways of what were to become the Atlantic Provinces was a wealth of marine life of all kinds and descriptions that sea captains, travellers, entrepreneurs, and settlers continued to marvel at. Here is just one account of the bounty in and near Prince Edward Island in the early nineteenth century:

      The rivers abound with trout, eels, mackerel, flounders, oysters and lobsters, and some salmon; and the coast with codfish and herrings in great abundance. The latter, soon after the ice breaks away in the spring rush into the harbours on the north side of the island in immense shoals, are taken by the inhabitants in small nets with very little trouble, and as salt is cheap (not being subject to duty) most families barrel up a quantity for occasional use. The lobsters are in great abundance and very large and fine. In Europe this kind of shell-fish is only taken on the sea-coast amongst rocks; at Prince Edward Island they are taken in the rivers and on shallows, where they feed on a kind of sea-weed, called by the islanders eel-grass, and a person by wading into the water half-leg deep, might fill a bushel basket in half an hour. Many schooners are annually laden with oysters from Quebec and Newfoundland.

      The plenty of fish, and the ease with which it is procured, is of great assistance to the inhabitants, and in particular to new settlers, before they have time to raise food from the produce of the land.[5]

      As the explorers, trappers, traders, missionaries, entrepreneurs, and settlers moved inland, they realized that not only the oceans and the rivers flowing into it teemed with fish, but that the supply of fish in the inland rivers and lakes surpassed their wildest expectations. An interpreter and trader at the Falls of St. Mary (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario) said in 1777: “At this place there is an abundance of fine fish, particularly pickerell [sic], and white fish of uncommon size.”[6] And a few weeks later he noted: “We prepared our nets for fishing. The ice was three feet thick, and the snow very deep; this we were obliged to clear away, before we could cut holes in which to put our nets. For the space of two months we had uncommon success, having caught about eighteen hundred weight of fish, which we hung up by the tails across sticks to freeze, and then laid them up for store.”[7]

      In 1784, Robert Pagan, a United Empire Loyalist forced to flee from the new United States of America to today’s Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, wrote to his wife (in Falmouth, now Portland) describing the food he was shipping to her: “By the schooner Seafoam, Capn. Bell, I intend to send you a kegg of pickled lobsters, & some smoked salmon, some potatoes, & turnips, some cranberries, some mackerel also a quarter of beef and a side of good mutton, which I shall procure in two or three days.”[8]

      From the accounts of both the First Nations and the newcomers, salmon abounded, and it was often smoked to ensure that it would keep. Here is a nineteenth-century traveller’s account of the basic technique of smoking salmon, which the newcomers would have learned from the First Nations:

      During our stay on the river [Nepisiguit River, New Brunswick] which lasted a month, we smoked over 120 salmon, which we packed in boxes and sent off to our friends in Saint John. The following is the receipt for that process:

      Split the fish down the back and clean them, cutting out the gills at the same time; this should be done as soon as possible after they are caught, or the fish will become soft; immerse for two days in a strong pickle of salt and water, a trough for this purpose is easily hewn out of a fallen spruce or pine, or, in lieu use a dish of birch or spruce bark. After taking the fish out of the pickle, wash them in running water, then hang them in a smoke house for six days. A smoke house is built in the shape of a wigwam, and covered with birch or spruce bark; great care must be taken to keep up the fire, which is placed in the smoke house, always burning very slowly, if it gets too hot the fish becomes cooked and spoilt; it is a good plan to place the entrails of the fish on the fire to keep it cool.[9]

      When John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada (present-day Ontario), arrived in 1791, he was accompanied by his wife, Elizabeth Graves Simcoe, who was an artist and also kept a diary rich in the details of everyday life. There were dozens of diary entries describing the fish to be found in Upper Canada, such as this one on April 6, 1793: “St. Denis of the 5th caught yesterday at Niagara, 500 whitefish and 40 sturgeon; this is common sturgeon, one nearly 6 foot long.”[10]

      Settlers often chose to build their homes beside water, both for ease of travel and for the number of fish that could be speared, netted, trapped, or caught with a baited line. Newcomers continued to be amazed at what they found:

      I think I may assert, without fear of contradiction, that the angling in Canada is the finest in the world. Many thousands of trout streams and hundreds of salmon rivers discharge their waters into the gulf and river St. Lawrence. From Lake Ontario down to the straits of Belle-Isle, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles; on each shore of the river there is hardly a mile of coast-line without a river or stream. Thousands and thousands of lakes, all of which hold trout, lie hidden in the forest; in the majority of them perhaps a fly has never been cast. Trout fishing is open to everyone … and such salmon fishing![11]

      By the middle of the nineteenth century, settlers spread across the country and the fishing industry on the East Coast steadily expanded as demand for cod grew not only in Canada but in the West Indies and South America. The fishing schooners, both from Canada and abroad, now carried dories, small seaworthy craft equipped with a sail and two sets of oars for the crew of two men. The dories left the schooners at daybreak to set long lines of hooks baited with herring,