Atlantic (32 page)

Cod is also very easily preserved, and its goodness—its protein, essentially—remains intact. This was one of the secrets of the Vikings’ success as long-distance mariners—for they would simply open up the fish, hang it by strings or on frames in the cold Arctic air, and let it dry out until it had lost 80 percent of its weight and became stiff as a board, like a piece of plywood. As needed, the Viking captain simply added water and lo!, the dried fish would swell back to their original size and shape, and the flakiness, rich taste, and nutritiousness were all restored, as if by magic.

If the Vikings had the good sense to air-dry their cod, the Basques of northern Iberia went one better: their knowledge of the ancient ways of the Mediterranean fishermen taught them how to use as a preservative one of the major mineral components of seawater: salt. Northern peoples had little access to crystalline salt, mainly because their climate seldom offered the heat necessary to evaporate it from the sea. Mediterranean peoples, however, were blessed in this regard; and the Basques, being a seafaring people with ready access to an ocean rich with cod, and, thanks to an accident of geography, having ready access to salt, combined the two—and at a stroke invented a preserving technique unknown in the Atlantic Ocean before. They split open the fish, salted it liberally, and only then hung it out to dry: the resulting salt-fish survived for much longer than previously known by those salt-starved others (like the French) who knew only how to “wet-cure” their fish and then watched helplessly as it eventually turned green with age. The new technique allowed the Basques uniquely to make ever-longer sea journeys, even for many months, since they knew they always had supplies.

The fish they caught and preserved also turned out to taste much better—meaning that the Basques could readily conduct an energetic trade in it. Thus they had found the perfect combination: a magnificent, protein-rich, fat-free, highly attractive, abundant cold-water Atlantic fish, and an impeccable means of preserving it for their own use or for selling on to others. Armed with this, the Basques promptly left their ports on the Galician coast and began a period of long-distance sailing across the North Atlantic that has left its commercial imprint to this day.

Their fishermen particularly favored the ocean close to the headlands of America, off Newfoundland. In those hundreds of square miles where the sea shallows dramatically—the Grand Banks and the Flemish Cap—and where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and the cold waters of the Labrador Current sidle past one another and kick up clouds of nitrates upon which feed the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, and the krill, cod thrives in fantastic, churning abundance. Just when they found these breeding grounds is a matter of much argument: some insist that John Cabot first found and named New-found-land on behalf of the British in 1497
⁵⁹
and lured the Basques to sail northwestward; others believe, with little evidence, that the Basques discovered the cod-fishing grounds on their own, before Cabot, but opted to tell no one.

Certainly by the time the Breton explorer Jacques Cartier arrived nearly forty years later and planted his famously huge cross—with
Vive le Roi de France
inscribed—on a cliff on the Gaspé, and named the surroundings
Canada
and claimed it all for France, many hundreds of Basque fishing vessels were already working away with energy and zeal, though making no imperial gestures or claims. Moreover, the name
Gaspé
is widely assumed to derive from the word for shelter,
gerizpe
, in Basque—which admirers of the Basques say further adds to their claim that they were pursing North American cod, and settling in North American harbors, well before any other Europeans, Vikings aside.

The precise timing of the Basque arrival is of less interest, however, than the simple fact that with it—just as with Christopher Columbus’s arrival on San Salvador; or with John Cabot’s discovery of Newfoundland; and most especially Vespucci’s realization that the Americas was a separate and discrete continent and the Atlantic was a separate and discrete ocean—an entirely new phenomenon could finally be allowed to develop: from now on, voyages—whether taken for curiosity or commerce, for God or war or a host of other reasons—could be made
transatlantic
. Sea journeys could at last be undertaken between coasts that provably existed on opposite sides of the sea. Voyages no longer needed to be limited merely to coastwise wanderings and confined and limited to certain quadrants of the sea.

Basque fishing vessels, for example, now no longer needed to venture westward into a fog-shrouded, unknown sea, with their purpose only to catch cod, with their success questionable, their safe return more a matter of chance than certainty. No, they could now and for the first time travel to a destination. The captains of Basque fishing vessels were now aware, as they pushed off from home into the confused waters of the Bay of Biscay, that there was a
far side
to their journey, with harbors and victuals and shelter and repair—and in time, settlements of their fellow countrymen—that were all available to them. But this was true for others as well; in short order Spanish galleons and Portuguese carracks and English ships of the line also understood that there was a far side to their journeying—and by the early decades of the sixteenth century, transoceanic passages were being made, trades were being conducted, and the bounty of the sea was being exploited.

And while the Europeans involved themselves in this voyaging, the new Americans did so as well. Whether they were sailing as settlers or as colonials or whether, as after 1776, they did so as citizens of a newly independent nation, Americans were particularly quick off the mark in exploiting all manner of transatlantic venturings.

They first got their sea legs by chasing whales.

Yet once again it was the Basques who showed the way—since they, for the previous six hundred years, had been hunting for these warm-blooded oceanic mammals with the same determination and ruthlessness they had displayed toward the much smaller and nonmammalian codfish. Instead of the unsophisticated methods used by others in the past, of waiting for the whales to land near the beach, the Basques took their boats out into the deep Atlantic, hunting the whales well offshore just as they might hunt for any other sea creatures.

Their principal target, first in Biscay and then in the waters south of Iceland and beyond, was the great baleen type
⁶⁰
known as the Atlantic right whale—a mammal eventually so named by its American pursuers because it was self-evidently the “right” whale to hunt. The Atlantic right—an all-black creature, weighing about a hundred tons, and with a fatal liking for swimming in leisurely fashion dangerously close to shore—and its rather bigger Arctic cousin the bowhead were animals all too easy to hunt down. The Basque technique for snaring them was so devilishly simple it soon became the world technique: it involved tying floating drogues to a harpoon line, such that a harpooned whale found it nearly impossible to dive and so in time would weary of swimming endlessly on the surface; it would slow and allow his pursuers to kill him.

Right whales generally float when dead, and they could be towed home or to a nearby island base, there to be flensed and the blubber rendered to make a particularly fine kind of waxy oil, for heating or lighting, for lubrication or the manufacture of margarine;
⁶¹
the flesh was cut up and salted for food; and the baleen—the large plates of keratin in the whale’s mouth that help the animal filter food from the seawater—was processed to make corset stays or buggy whips or the rods of parasols, or any of a thousand uses that pre-Edwardian man discovered for it.

Multitudes of these magnificent, languorously moving, and tragically unsuspecting whales died each year at the hand of Europeans in hot pursuit of vast profits. Right whales and bowheads were especially numerous close to the coasts of Spitsbergen, the archipelago in the far northern reaches of the Atlantic—beyond both the remote fastnesses of Jan Mayan Island and Bjornoya, where whalers sought temporary sojourn during storms—and later in the Davis Strait between Canada and Greenland. By the eighteenth century, the Basques’ technological monopoly had been broken, and French, Dutch, Danish, and Scandinavians hunters were also searching for the great mammals.

Later they were joined by Britons of the Muscovy Company, who believed (wrongly, as it happened) that they had discovered Spitsbergen and so laid claim to being the only country allowed to take whales from the coastal waters. For a while English port cities like Hull and Yarmouth were sending scores of vessels north—where they engaged in ugly skirmishes with their Dutch and Danish rivals, who tried to chase them away. The quarreling led the Dutch in particular to refine their hunting techniques—performing the kill from small pinnaces or lug-sailed shallops, hauling the carcasses back on board to be laid across the stern for flensing, and only then bringing the blubber back to land for rendering. Most of the whaling process was being carried out at sea—a more secure means, especially when rivals were circling, hoping to make an intercept as a whaler crept into port with its newly killed victim.

When the Americans entered the business in the early part of the eighteenth century, they were well aware of these new developments; and although the first American whaling ventures established in the late seventeenth century on Nantucket and in New Bedford and in the littler ports ranged along the southern coast of Long Island still saw much of the heavy work performed onshore, within fifty years the New England whale ships were being made large and sturdy enough and so self-sufficient that their owners could dispatch them and their crews on journeys of many thousands of miles. Rather than heading north to mix it up with the Europeans who were so bitterly and busily fighting among themselves, the Americans decided early on that their crews would head into virgin Atlantic territory—they would let the Danes, the Dutchmen, and the English have the rights and bowheads of the north, while they would concentrate on the largely untouched stocks of baleens—the fins, seis, minkes, grays, humpbacks, southern rights, and the gigantic and unforgettably grand blue whales—as well as the sperm whale, renowned for its superior oil, and which lived in what came to be called the Southern Whale Fishery.

The sperm whale,
Physeter macrocephalus
, is a creature well woven into the fabric of American literary life, in no small part due to Herman Melville and
Moby-Dick
. Melville had written in 1851 of the titanic struggle for revenge between the
Pequod
’s Captain Ahab and the ferocious great white sperm whale that in a previous encounter had so cruelly and humiliatingly savaged his leg. At the time he wrote the book, the whale fishery was at its peak, with whaling ships sailing from New Bedford, Mystic, Sag Harbor, and Nantucket bringing in as many as four hundred giant beasts each year.
⁶²

But the animal had been known in New England for at least a century and a half before this: Nantucket historians like to say that a pod of sperm whales had been encountered during a right-whale hunt as early as 1715, piquing the interest of all—for who could fail to be impressed and puzzled by so bizarre and vast a creature, with a great blunt head fully a third as long as its body, with a single blowhole through which it could throw fire-jets of water scores of feet into the air, with a pair of crescent-shaped flukes that created a devastating boom as they crashed down onto the sea, with an ability to dive two miles down into the ocean like a starfighter and stay there, without breathing, for an hour and more—this animal was bigger, heavier, noisier (emitting clicks and clacks that could be heard for miles), and more ferocious than it was possible for most seamen to imagine. Then there were later discoveries of its total utility: that its blubber could be rendered into an exceedingly fine oil for lighting and the easing of delicate metal machines, that its meat was even more nutritious than normal dark red whalesteak, that the head of this gigantic creature held a pair of pods filled with several tons—tons!—of spermaceti, a rose pink, waxy, spermlike substance that could be used to make, among other items, the purest of white candles, and that men dug holes in a whale’s skull and had themselves lowered inside the huge head in barrels, the better to scoop it out; and there was the knowledge that a male sperm whale had a penis six feet long, and that as Melville recounted, a man of discernment or bravery in public or both could have an Inverness cape, with a hole for his head, made simply from the skin that covered one; and there was the discovery, wedged deep in the whale intestine, of great lumps of the famously found, floating gray greasy substance known as ambergris—whose origins had long been a mystery: it was sea bitumen, they said; it came from the roots of a marine gum tree, it was spittle exhaled by sea dragons, it was a fungus, it was man-made, the compressed livers of fishes—all of these delights gave man even more reasons to hunt down the sperm whale above all other cetacean competitors.

And so by the middle of the eighteenth century the whalers, now equipped with bigger ships, thicker sails, more capacious oil barrels, stronger harpoons, more enduring rope, and more lasting ironware, swept out from the American east into what they called
ye deep
.

Until now their voyages lasted only a matter of days, perhaps a week or two. But the more enterprising whaling men, most of them of stout Quaker stock and not given to excitement or fear, began to sail their ships as far as Brazil, or the Guinea coast, or even the Falkland Islands or South Georgia, and were away for months; there was much terror but they also spent many hours drifting idly, good for the crafting of scrimshaw. In time the more adventurous took their vessels to the south of Isla de Los Estados, and doubled Cape Horn against the vast winds and storms of those lethal latitudes known as the Roaring Forties, and with luck and good seamanship they emerged whole and passed into the whale-rich emptiness of the Pacific.