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For centuries, one seemingly ordinary fish helped feed armies, sustain empires, launch fishing fleets across the Atlantic, and shape the economies of entire nations.
It could be preserved for months, transported enormous distances, and traded almost like a form of currency.
Its abundance helped drive exploration, while its collapse became one of the greatest disasters in the history of commercial fishing.
Learn more about the remarkable history of cod on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The humble codfish might not sound like an exciting topic, but it has played an extremely important role in history. Before we get into the role cod played in human affairs, we should understand the fish itself.
There are three species of cod: Atlantic, Pacific, and Greenland. They are very common in the northernmost regions of the oceans, as they thrive in cold waters.
Cod are demersal feeders, meaning they prefer to feed on the ocean floor where they opportunistically eat shrimp, smaller fish, or clams.
Cod are normally in the 20-lb range, but older cod can grow to more than 50 lbs. The largest cod on record weighed more than 200 lbs!
Living in cold water and needing bursts of energy to catch prey, along with constant swimming, give cod a muscular, white-muscle frame. Cod is a unique fish because most of its body mass is muscle protein; it contains almost no oil.
A cod concentrates the body’s oils in its liver. This is relevant, as the absence of oil in the flesh of cod allows for easy drying. When the sun and wind dry the cod, the fish hardens, and the lack of oil allows for long-term preservation without risk of spoiling.
This unique feature of cod inspired early North Sea and Baltic fishermen to pursue the fish. The farther the fishermen went, the more cod they caught and dried, providing food for their long voyages.
Because cod were abundant in the North Atlantic and could be easily preserved, the voyages of 9th-century Viking fishermen gradually grew longer, as their cod catch sustained them. The pursuit of cod began to inspire early exploration from the northernmost reaches of Europe and later from the south.
The region between Spain and France along the Pyrenees Mountains was home to the Basque people. The Basques who lived on the Spanish side near the port of Biscay soon found themselves in hot pursuit of cod.
Basque mariners from the region had long been prolific whalers in the North Atlantic and Baltic seas in pursuit of right whales. Dense forests and abundant iron ore deposits in the Basque Country made their shipbuilders the best in pre-Columbian Europe.
As they pursued right whales to the North, the Basque discovered the currents of the North Atlantic and the cod that inhabited the region in great abundance.
In the 10th century, Basque fishermen realized they could not only dry the fish, as the Vikings did, but also use their connection to the Mediterranean trade, which provided abundant rock salt.
Drying and salting the fish enabled Basque fishermen to bring their catch back to southern Europe and integrate it into trade networks across the Iberian and Mediterranean regions.
These fishermen pursued the cod all the way to the Grand Banks, one of the most lucrative fisheries in the world off the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland. The waters of the Grand Banks are shallower than the surrounding ocean, which allowed the Basques to reach bottom-feeding cod easier.
The Basques realized they had found a vital fishery and intended to maintain a cod monopoly. They kept the location of their Grand Bank fishery a carefully guarded secret.
Journalist Mark Kurlansky, in his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, proposes that Basque fishermen may have landed in Labrador or Newfoundland years before Columbus arrived in the Americas. They returned to Europe with dried cod, but you can’t dry cod on the deck of a ship, so they had to have dried it on land somewhere, but they never revealed their secret.
The establishment of the Basque Red Bay whaling station in Labrador in 1530 lends credibility to this theory.
Fishing became one of Europe’s largest industries in the 11th century as authorities widely enforced strict Catholic Lenten dietary practices. During Lent and on Fridays, the Church forbade European Christians from eating the flesh of birds and mammals, including beef, pork, lamb, venison, and chicken.
Fresh seafood cost a great deal, and only elites could afford it, but dried fish became the Lenten food available to all classes. To meet dietary obligations, maintaining a supply of dried fish became necessary.
In response to demand, formal organizations such as the Hanseatic League arose during the High Middle Ages to control the flow of fish across borders. The Hanseatic League developed new ship types, including the kogge, that could carry more cod back to markets in mainland Europe. A kogge had a massive cargo hull enabling a fishing crew to bring back thousands of pounds of dried cod for sale in European markets.
In exchange for the supplies necessary for a cod expedition on a large Hanseatic ship, the league demanded the entire summer catch of fish for their Norwegian and Baltic Sea markets. These markets also fell under the control of the Hanseatic League.
One of the great cod ports was Bergen, Norway. The Hanseatic League used its strength to compel the port to comply with its trade demands.
The league also graded the cod harvests on quality. Inspectors ranked the highest quality cod and sold it to more affluent markets, while the lowest grade cod found its way onto impoverished tables.
The Hanseatic League acted as a cod cartel. It enforced its edicts by violence, using its naval fleet as a weapon against those who refused to accept its trade demands.
In 1428, the Danes tried to assert their independence from Hanseatic control over the cod trade; in response, the League attacked and occupied Copenhagen.
During the 15th century, the rise of nation-states in Northern Europe eventually broke the Hanseatic monopoly. However, the commercial blueprint the League created, treating dried Atlantic cod as a functional global currency, set the stage for others seeking access to the Grand Banks.
Unlike the Spanish, who sought wealth from gold and silver in the Americas, the British colonies to the north had to chart a different course. The Pilgrims had landed in the wrong spot, but in the grand scheme, their access to the world’s greatest fishery, just 750 nautical miles from the western edge of the Grand Banks, would more than make up for their mistake.
To support the emerging industry, New England, much like the medieval Hanseatic League, built an extensive infrastructure that included timber and rope making.
The cod fisheries became the first major industry in North America, producing a wealthy merchant class in New England cities such as Boston and Salem. The cod boom and the need to protect the wealth it created from British interference, helped facilitate the discontent that would explode into the American Revolution.
The New England Historical Society notes the importance that British Acts, like the Sugar Act, had on the New England cod industry:
By 1764, the British planters convinced Parliament to pass the Sugar Act, which put a tariff on sugar and banned the import of non-British rum.
Parliament did something else to harm New England fishing interests: It banned trade with the French in North America.
British fish merchants did not like the colonists trading with fishermen in Newfoundland –they wanted to do it themselves.
The British Parliament was interfering in the most lucrative business in New England, denying them the opportunity to trade with France.
Like Hanseatic League merchants, New England merchants graded their cod catch, keeping the prized cuts for sale to colonial elites and for European markets. The lowest grade cuts, those that had spoiled or carried heavy salt, were sold to the Caribbean as a cheap food source for the enslaved people on sugar plantations.
Cod had become a vital cog in one of the most famous trade networks in history, the Triangle of Trade.
The New England Historical Society notes that the British Parliament had designs on disrupting that leg of the cod trade: as tensions mounted between Britain and the colonies, some members of Parliament proposed a moratorium on the New England fishing industry. On March 30, 1775…Parliament passed a law that limited New England’s trade to Britain and the British West Indies. It also banned New England ships from the fisheries off Canada. Under the law, ships couldn’t even carry fishing tackle unless granted special permission.
This final attempt to choke off the colonies’ financial lifeblood backfired catastrophically for the British Crown. Instead of starving the fiercely independent New Englanders into submission, it left thousands of colonial fishermen out of work.
With their fishing fleets idle, these mariners took up arms, converted their vessels into rebel privateers, and provided the critical seafaring muscle that the Patriots needed to fight the British Royal Navy.
Technological development during the Industrial Revolution proved disastrous to cod. Steam, and later diesel, engines and trawlers that dragged the bottom replaced wooden ships and fishing nets. Fishermen could catch in a few hours what previously took days.
Cod habitats faced a crisis. By the middle of the twentieth century, industrial fleets targeted the great cod fisheries in the North Atlantic with methods that nobody could characterize as mere fishing.
The British were among the worst culprits; to support their need for fish and chips, they began trawling off the coast of Iceland and taking enormous quantities of Icelandic cod. Iceland resisted during a period known as the Cod Wars from 1958 to 1976. Thankfully, it remained almost entirely bloodless.
After failed efforts to convince the British to stop overfishing, Iceland extended its territorial control by moving the limit from 3 miles offshore to 200 miles. However, the British refused to comply.
The Icelandic coast guard began ramming ships to drive them away and even cut their fishing nets, but the British continued to refuse to recognize Iceland’s extended territory in the waters around Iceland.
Knowing that it had no recourse against British military might without a formal military or navy, Iceland issued a clever diplomatic threat: it would leave NATO. Iceland provided a crucial strategic position for NATO, as it could monitor potential Soviet naval and submarine movements.
Realizing the severity of the situation, the British acquiesced and granted Iceland an exclusive economic zone of 200 miles.
The cod crisis didn’t abate, and overfishing remains a persistent problem, one that came to a head in 1992. Canadian researchers announced that the cod population off its coasts, near the Grand Banks, had plummeted to 1% of its historic levels.
Canada acted with incredible speed and decisiveness. The Canadian government issued an absolute moratorium on cod fishing, instantly wiping out an industry that had sustained Newfoundland for 500 years and putting over 30,000 people out of work overnight.
The cod population off Newfoundland and Labrador has rebounded substantially since the 1992 collapse, but it is still nowhere near its historic levels. However, it improved enough for Canada to end the commercial moratorium in 2024, reopening a commercial cod fishery with an 18,000-tonne annual quota.
This is a far cry from the 780,000 tonnes taken in 1991.
Cod is a reminder that something ordinary can have an extraordinary impact on history. For centuries, it fed populations, sustained economies, encouraged exploration, and helped connect both sides of the Atlantic.
Yet the collapse of major cod fisheries also showed how quickly abundance can disappear when technology and demand outpace nature’s ability to recover.
The history of cod is not just the story of a fish, but of commerce, technology, and the consequences of assuming that a seemingly endless resource really is endless.