Cod (10 page)

Ironically, when France retained Guadeloupe but lost Canada—held its slave colonies but lost its fisheries—the demand this created for West India cure in the French Caribbean led New Englanders on a direct collision course with the British Crown. The conflict went back to the Acts of Trade and Navigation, one of the foundations of the British Empire, according to which colonists were to sell their goods to England and buy their goods from England. Legally, New Englanders should not have traded directly with Spain and the Caribbean but were supposed to have sold their cod to England and then to have purchased Spanish wine and iron from England.

The British had good reasons to worry about North America. In 1677, ninety-eight years before the cause of American independence became a shooting war, the British Crown received a polite note from New Englanders accompanied by ten barrels of cranberries, two of corn mush, and 1,000 codfish. Perhaps not as bitter as ten barrels of cranberries, the enclosed note stated, “We humbly conceive that the laws of England are bounded within four seas, and do not reach America. The subjects of his majesty here being not represented in Parliament, so we have not looked at ourselves to be impeded in trade by them.”

What Charles did with 1,000 codfish and all those cranberries is not known, but he did absolutely nothing about the Trade and Navigation Acts. Instead, the law was bent by the force of the marketplace. New England produced too much cod for the British market. It could not all be sold in Britain, and the British merchant fleet did not have the capacity to reexport that much cod. In spite of the Trade and Navigation Acts, the British had to allow the New Englanders to trade it.

Freed from restraint, as Adam Smith pointed out, the trade grew. By 1700, the British West Indies could not absorb all of New England's cod. Nor could it fully supply New England's rum industry, which was a byproduct of the cod trade. Typical of the difference between New England and Newfoundland, Newfoundland imported Jamaican rum for local bottling, and still does, whereas New England imported molasses and built its own rum industry to sell in foreign markets. There were now three ways to buy slaves in West Africa: cash, salt cod, or Boston rum.

Massachusetts and Rhode Island rum producers were getting directly involved in the slave trade. Felton & Company, a Boston rum maker founded in the early nineteenth century, described the trade with remarkable candor in its 1936 drink guide. “Ship owners developed a cycle of trade involving cargoes of slaves to the West Indies—a cargo of Blackstrap Molasses from those islands to Boston and other New England ports—and finally the shipment of rum to Africa.”

Soon the British Empire was not only too small a market for New England's cod catch but too small a molasses producer for New England's distilleries. Total British West Indies molasses production was less than two-thirds of what Rhode Island alone imported. The French colonies needed New England cod, and New England needed French molasses.

Then the British Crown, after letting New Englanders taste free trade for more than a century, decided in 1733 to regulate molasses as a key step toward reasserting its control over commerce. Instead the measure turned out to be one of the first inadvertent steps toward dismantling the British Empire.

TIME SO HARD YOU CANNOT DENY
THAT EVEN SALTFISH AND RICE WE CAN HARDLY BUY.

—1940s calypso by “the Tiger” (Neville Marcano)

 

In Puerto Rico there was a piropia, a catcall to attractive women, that went
Tanto carne, y yo comiendo bacalao
(so much meat, and I'm just eating salt cod). Today meat is cheaper than salt cod, but the expression, like
piropias
themselves, persists.

Salt cod was a cheap food, mixed with other cheap foods, to make popular dishes. While it is no longer cheap, the recipes remain unchanged. Along with salt cod and roots, the most universal Caribbean salt cod dish is Salt Cod and Rice. Originally, it was a way of stretching the salt cod supply and was often made with the tail or other scraps. Sometimes a stock was prepared from the bones and the rice cooked in that, a dish known in Puerto Rico as
Mira Bacalao
(Look for the Salt Cod).

 

SALT FISH WERE STACKED ON THE WHARVES, LOOKING
LIKE CORDED WOOD, MAPLE AND YELLOW BIRCH WITH
THE BARK LEFT ON. I MISTOOK THEM FOR THIS AT FIRST,
AND SUCH IN ONE SENSE THEY WERE,—FUEL TO MAIN-
TAIN OUR VITAL FIRES—AN EASTERN WOOD WHICH
GREW ON THE GRAND BANKS.

—Henry David Thoreau,
Cape Cod,
1851

THE ART OF TAXATION CONSISTS OF PLUCKING THE
GOOSE SO AS TO OBTAIN THE MOST FEATHERS WITH
THE LEAST HISSING.

—Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83)

 

T
here is romance to revolution. There was to those of France, Russia, Mexico, China, Cuba. But the most romantic of revolutions, such as 1848, seem the greatest failures. The American Revolution was a remarkably successful revolution. It did not fall into chaos and violence, nor did it slide toward dictatorship. It produced no Napoleon and no institutionalized ruling party. It achieved its goals. It was also, as revolutions go, extremely unromantic. The radicals, the real revolutionaries, were middle-class Massachusetts merchants with commercial interests, and their revolution was about the right to make money.

John Adams, the most forceful of this radical Massachusetts element, did not believe in colonialism as an economic system and therefore did not believe that Americans should accept living in colonies. The American Revolution was the first great anticolonialist movement. It was about political freedom. But in the minds of its most hard-line revolutionaries, the New England radicals, the central expression of that freedom was the ability to make their own decisions about their own economy.

All revolutions are to some degree about money. During France's revolution, the comte de Mirabeau said, “In the last analysis the people will judge the Revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?” But he was not a radical in that Revolution.

Massachusetts radicals sought an economic, not a social, revolution. They were not thinking of the hungry masses and their salaries. They were thinking of the right of every man to be middle-class, to be an entrepreneur, to conduct commerce and make money. Men of no particular skill, with very little capital, had made fortunes in the cod fishery. That was the system they believed in.

These were not shallow men. Many of them, most of the important leaders—even Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner—understood that it was hypocrisy to talk about the rights of man and ignore the agony of millions of slaves. But they were not going to let the Revolution break down over this issue, as they feared it might. Throughout the century, Englishmen had predicted that the booming American colonies would try to break free from the Crown, but that, in the end, they would remain in the British Empire because of their inability to get along with each other. What the British Crown failed to understand was that the Revolutionary leaders were pragmatists focused on primary goals and that molasses, cod, and tea were not mere troubling disagreements; they were the issue. Virginians even called the Revolution “the Tobacco War.”

England had shown some flexibility. Gloucester, though a legally recognized trade port, did not even have a customs official. The British also allowed South Carolina to trade rice for fruit, salt, and wine directly with the Mediterranean. The greatest latitude was in trade with British West Indies colonies. For Massachusetts, this trade was cod for molasses, but Connecticut traded vegetables, Maryland wheat, and Pennsylvania corn. By the 1740s, New England had as much trade with the Caribbean as it did with England. Before the English started worrying about an armed war of independence, they were worrying about a de facto independence. The colonies did not need the mother country, and both parties knew it.

Britain's first major attempt to reassert its colonial monopoly was the Molasses Act of 1733, which imposed such heavy import duties on molasses from the non-British Caribbean that it should have virtually eliminated the trade. By making the purchase of French West Indies molasses unprofitable, the measure should have not only reduced New Englanders' markets for cod but also reduced their rum industry. It did neither, because the French were eager to work with the New Englanders in a lucrative contraband arrangement. Cod-molasses trade between New England and the French Caribbean actually grew after the Molasses Act.

The act might have been a forgotten failure had the British not tried again a generation later, with the Sugar Act of 1760, which put a six-cents-per-gallon tax on molasses. Again, New Englanders persevered through contraband. In 1764, the British tried a new tactic, actually lowering the tax on molasses, but levying new ones on sugar and on Madeira. This was intended to make colonists switch from Madeira to Port, the latter being available only through British merchants. Instead, the colonists boycotted both. Though Madeira was also traded for a middle-grade cure of cod known as the Madeira cure, rum was their drink. It was so commonplace that the word
rum
was sometimes used as a generic term for alcoholic beverages. The year of the Molasses Act, it was calculated that the consumption of rum in the American colonies averaged 3.75 U.S. gallons per person annually. In 1757, George Washington ran for the Fairfax County seat in the House of Burgesses. His campaign expenses included twenty-eight gallons of rum and fifty gallons of rum punch. There was also wine, beer, and cider. This may seem modest compared to today's campaign spending, but in 1757 Fairfax County, Virginia, had only 391 voters.

In 1764, Boston merchant John Hancock, already a known active rebel, was arrested on a charge of Madeira smuggling on his sloop, the
Liberty.
An angry Boston mob freed him. The following year, the Stamp Act for the first time charged colonists with a direct tax rather than a customs duty. As the British stepped up enforcement of trade laws, relations deteriorated. For the first time, customs agents were assigned to Gloucester, though these unfortunate officials were harassed, brutalized, and sometimes driven into hiding. In 1769, Massachusetts claimed that restraints on trade had resulted in losses for 400 vessels involved in the cod fishery.

Repeatedly, the British seemed to make the worst possible moves. Confronted with resistance to the Stamp Act, they replaced it with the Townsend Act, named for a man whose footnote in history was earned by declaring to the House of Commons—reportedly while drunk—“I dare tax America.” Faced with an immediate furor over his proposed list of import taxes, he tried to back down, attempting to settle on a few less onerous items, one of which was tea.

The Boston Tea Party of 1773 illustrates the nature of the American Revolution. Here was an uprising against a tariff on an import, instigated by merchants, including John Hancock and John Rowe, in which the scions of the codfish aristocracy—dressed up as Mohawks—boarded their own ships and dumped the goods into the harbor. Similar “tea parties” followed in other ports. In New York, evidently the Revolution had reached the proletariat, because a zealous mob dumped the goods in the Hudson before the rebels had a chance to show up in their Indian outfits.

The next British move seems even more baffling. In 1774, in response to a crisis originally provoked by the fact that the colonies produced too much surplus food, the British closed down Boston Harbor in an attempt to starve the populace until they reimbursed the Crown for damaged goods. This was not 1620, and no one was going to starve in New England, with or without imports. Marblehead supplied cod, Charleston rice, and Baltimore grain. A flock of sheep was even herded up from Connecticut.

The harshest blow to New England was to come, but communication was so slow that the colonists did not even hear of it until after the shooting had begun. The Restraining Act, effective July 12, 1775, restricted New England trade to the ports in England and barred New England fishermen from the Grand Banks. It was as though the Crown was trying to rally Massachusetts around its radicals.

 

During the Revolution, the American ability to produce food was the one advantage of the Continental Army. The British Army might have been better trained and more experienced, and it was certainly better dressed and equipped. But the Americans were better fed. They were also better paid, and, thanks to Boston rum, they drank better.