Encountering the shoreline: ecology and infrastructure on the early modern Newfoundland coast

Abstract

This article looks at the colonial fishing villages and maritime infrastructure along the early modern Newfoundland shoreline. It argues that, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the establishment of settlements and the construction of seagoing vessels, preservation stations, and other logistical sites at and across the littoral line supported the commercialization of the global cod market while fundamentally altering the coastal ecologies of the North Atlantic waters. The Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the underwater plateaus that provided shallow feeding conditions for underwater life, made the sea shelf one of the richest fishing regions in the world. On a global scale, the commercial extraction and preservation of cod supported the expanding diet and political economy of the early modern imperial state. On a local scale, the construction of buildings along the shoreline intruded on the littoral ecosystem and impelled the relocation of the native Beothuk inhabitants to the island’s interior, thereby highlighting the genocidal ramifications of European coastal development. How, this article asks, might one conceptualize the logistical architecture of the Newfoundland fisheries as both a spatial node within a global network of trade as well as a material intrusion into the ecology of the North Atlantic coastline?

Keywords:

• Architecture
• colonization
• fishing
• infrastructure
• maritime

Acknowledgements

I thank Kathleen John-Adler and Stephen Whiteman for their feedback and advice during the writing of this essay. Christy Anderson remains my most spirited interlocutor on all topics related to the architecture of the sea. Indu Bose and Laurel Wilson assisted with many aspects of this research-in-process. I also thank friends and colleagues at Bryn Mawr College, Northwestern University, and Rutgers University for the opportunity to workshop some of the material in this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Matthäus Merian, Dreyzehender Theil Americae (Frankfurt: Caspar Rötel, 1628), pp. 1–16.

2. Richard Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land (London: Felix Kyngston for William Barrett, 1620), Conclusion.

3. Michael Gaudio writes how ethnographic prints of the Americas presented an image of the ‘savage other’ in the construction of early modern Western civilization in Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. 1–43. On sea monsters, see Chet van Duzer, Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps (London: The British Library, 2013), esp. 80–119.

4. On the ‘monstrous’ in early modern European prints, see Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 148–182; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001), pp. 173–214; and Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 225–256.

5. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land, p. B1.

6. Tiffany Lethabo King theorizes the shoal as a space that structures the encounter between Black and Native studies in The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), pp. 1–35.

7. A foundational eco-feminist study of early modern European natural philosophy remains Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), esp. 164–191.

8. Van der Straet’s plate reads, ‘Americanus rediscovers America, he called her but once and thenceforth she was awake’. The literature on the print is vast; one analysis on the visualization of natural history in colonial Latin America is Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 1–43, esp. 12–17. As a hybrid creature, the figure of the mermaid brings to the fore contemporary discourses on queer post-humanist theory as outlined in José Estaban Muñoz et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21/2–3, 2015, pp. 209–247.

9. Donald H. Holly Jr., Christopher Wolff, and John Erwin, ‘The Ties that Bind and Divide: Encounters with the Beothuk in Southeastern Newfoundland’, Journal of the North Atlantic, 3, 2010, pp. 31–44.

10. The details of the encounter (as well as its historiography) are outlined in William Gilbert, ‘Guy not Gosnold: A Correction’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 41/2, 2007, pp. 264–269.

11. Unlike many tribes on the mainland, the Beothuk had little history of trade with European explorers and settlers. Ingeborg Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), pp. 25–41.

12. Merian, Dreyzehender Theil Americae, p. 11.

13. Donald H. Holly considers how the Beothuk’s isolation prompted many modern anthropologists to consider them incorrectly as an archaic people in ‘A Historiography of an Ahistoricity: On the Beothuk Indians’, History and Anthropology, 14/2, 2003, pp. 127–140.

14. The histories and maps of Shanawdithit, the so-called last of the Beothuk people, are analyzed in Matthew Sparke, ‘Mapped Bodies and Disembodied Maps: (Dis)Placing Cartographic Struggle in Colonial Canada’, in Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile (ed.), Places Through the Body (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 305–336. Jean M. O’Brien writes on the erasure of Indigenous history as a part of the settler colonial project in Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), esp. 145–199.

15. Brian Larkin, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 42/1, (October 2013), pp. 327–343. A recent essay that examines the so-called ‘gray architecture’ of global trade is Alex Bremner, ‘Tides that Bind: Waterborne Trade and the Infrastructure Networks of Jardine, Matheson & Co.’, Perspecta, 52, 2019, pp. 31–47.

16. Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1954).

17. Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

18. Christy Anderson, ‘Left on Shore: Iron and Fish in the North Atlantic’, forthcoming. I thank Anderson for sharing research and collaborating on scholarly ventures linked to maritime architecture, specifically the international symposium, ‘Sea Machines’, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, 4 February 2022: http://www.seamachines.org

19. On the larger project on this topic, see Jason Nguyen, ‘Handheld Cartography: Herman Moll’s Pocket Globes and Speculative Capital in the 1710s’, Journal 18/10, (Fall 2020), 1720. https://www.journal18.org/5331, and ‘Sites of Exchange: Architecture, Trade, and Racial Capitalism in the Early Modern Atlantic World’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 27/4, (December 2021), pp. 399–402. A recent theorization of maritime technology and global capitalism is Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea (Verso: Brooklyn, 2021).

20. Merian provided lush images and detailed passages on the flora and fauna to advertise the riches to be gained through settlement and trade. On Newfoundland, he wrote, ‘One can sufficiently conclude how useful this land would be, if and when it is built. We assume as much to be true, noting that the English started to colonize the land just a few years ago, and they are already enjoying a rich harvest with great profit’. Merian, Dreyzehender Theil Americae, p. 6/7.

21. Whitbourne went so far as to publish an addendum to the book, titled A Discourse Containing a Loving Invitation, Both Honourable and Profitable, to All Such Shall be Adventurers (London: Felix Kyngston, 1622), which positioned the island within a sisterhood of profitable domains, including ‘Britannia, Ireland, Virginia, New England, and Nova Scotia’. On the immigration from the West Country to Newfoundland, see Gordon Handcock, ‘The West Country’, Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, 2000. https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/society/west-country.php

22. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land, pp. 2 and 67.

23. Jake Rice, ‘Changes to the Large Marine Ecosystem of the Newfoundland-Labrador Shelf’, in K. Herman and H.R. Skjoldal (eds.), Large Marine Ecosystems of the North Atlantic (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2002), pp. 51–103.

24. Callum Roberts outlines the unique history and ecosystem of the North Atlantic Ocean in The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2007), pp. 32–43.

25. H.P. Biggar, ed., The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497–1534: A Collection of Documents Relating to the Early History of the Dominion of Canada (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911), pp. 15–21.

26. Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1997), pp. 32–45, and Innis, The Cod Fisheries, pp. 1–10.

27. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land, p. 12.

28. Paol Holm, et al., ‘The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500)’, Quaternary Research, 2019, pp. 1–15.

29. R.T. Naylor, Canada in the European Age, 1453–1919 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), pp. 51–64.

30. Lauren Working analyzes the patronage structures of joint-stock corporations in early seventeenth-century England in The Making of an Imperial Polity: Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), esp. 30–63.

31. Pope, Fish into Wine, pp. 45–78.

32. The difficulties that adjoined the colonizing efforts resulted in an order of eviction in 1675. Joshua Tavenor, ‘Weighing the Evidence: Restoration Policymaking and the 1675 Order to Evict Newfoundland’s English Residents’, Acadiensis, 47/1, (Winter/Spring 2018), pp. 41–61.

33. John R. Gillis terms this an ‘Alongshore Empire’ in The Human Shore: Seacoasts in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 68–98.

34. The English purchased salt from the French and Spanish (they lacked direct access to it at home), which explains why they returned to shore to preserve the catch. On the range of pre-industrial approaches to fishing and salting in Newfoundland, see Heather Pringle, ‘Cabot, Cod, and the Colonists’, Canadian Geographic, (July/August 1997), pp. 30–39.

35. Duhamel de Monceau, Traité générale des pesches, vol. 2, pp. 48–51.

36. K.J. Rankin and Paol Holm analyze the cartographic representations of the Newfoundland fisheries in ‘Cartographical Perspectives on the Evolution of Fisheries in Newfoundland’s Grand Banks Area and Adjacent North Atlantic Waters in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Terra Incognito, (December 2019), pp. 1–29.

37. Archaeological evidence suggests that iron was unknown to the island before European contact. Ralph T. Pastore, ‘The Collapse of the Beothuk World’, Acadiensis, 19/1, (Autumn 1989), pp. 52–71. See also Marshall, A History and Ethnography of the Beothuk, pp. 25–41.

38. Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen, ‘Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 119/2, (April 2020), 243–268 and Cowen, ‘Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance’, Verso (blog) (25 January 2017): https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance

39. Whitbourne, Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land, p. 51. Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. 1–25.

40. Jason Moore writes how this condition presumed that, ‘capital is value-in-motion is value-in-nature’ in ‘Anthropocene or Capitalocene: On the Nature and Origins of Our Economic Crisis’, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015), pp. 453–500.

41. The colonialist trope of ‘improvement’ contributed to what Richard H. Grove favorably termed ‘green imperialism’ in Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Timothy Sweet critically analyzes colonial American visual culture to interrogate the ideologies underwriting the claims of environmental ‘improvement’ in ‘Filling the Field: The Roanoke Images of John White and Theodor de Bry’, in Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher (ed.), A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), pp. 23–42.

42. Stones coming from the West Country are found in the waters along the North American Atlantic coast. Scott Tucker, ‘Seventeenth-Century English Ship Remains Found in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, USA’, Centre for Maritime Archaeology, University of Southampton (25 July 2013): https://cma.soton.ac.uk/2013/07/25/17th-century-english-ship-remains-found-in-st-marys-city-maryland-usa/. See also Matthew Julian Gifford, ‘Everything is Ballast: An Examination of Ballast Related Practices and Ballast Stones from the Emanuel Point Shipwrecks’, B.A. Thesis, Western Washington University, 2008; K.O. Emery et al., ‘European Cretaceous Flints on the Coast of North America’, Science, 160/3833, (14 June 1968), pp. 1125–1228; and Carl H. Lindroth, The Faunal Connections between Europe and North America (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), pp. 145–168, esp. 157–160.

43. Max Laboiron outlines how pollution enacts violence on Indigenous lands as part of the capitalist and settler colonial project in Pollution is Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), pp. 31–79.

44. Dennis Reinhartz, The Cartographer and the Literati: Herman Moll and his Intellectual Circle (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1997), pp. 113–156.

45. The town of Conche in northern Newfoundland has an archeological site and other records from an early seventeenth-century fishery. Graham Chandler, ‘When Cod Ruled the Rock’, Legion: Canada’s Military History Magazine (1 November 2007): https://legionmagazine.com/en/when-cod-ruled-the-rock/

46. P. Pope, ‘Transformation of the Maritime Cultural Landscape of Atlantic Canada by Migratory European Fishermen, 1500–1800’, in Louis Sicking and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (ed.), Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 134.

47. The drying process is studied in Mark Ferguson, ‘“Hard Racket for a Living”—Making Light-Salted Fish on the East Coast of Newfoundland’, Material Culture Review, 45/1, 1997, pp. 24–37.

48. P. Pope, ‘Transformation of The Maritime Cultural Landscape’, p. 135. See also, Nicolas Denys, Histoire naturelle des peuples, des animaux, des arbres & plantes de l’Amérique septentrionale, & de ses divers climats (Paris: Chez Claude Barbin, 1672), 2, pp. 111–114.

49. Charles de Volpi, Newfoundland: A Pictorial Record; Historical Prints and Illustrations of the Province of Newfoundland Canada, 1497–1887 (Sherbrooke, QC: Longman Canada Limited, 1972), p. 178.

50. Period sources list the cost of one barrel of dried cod in barrels of rye. In 1500, one barrel of dried cod exchanged for four barrels of rye. In 1600, one barrel of dried cod exchanged for only two barrels of rye. Holm et al., ‘The North Atlantic Fish Revolution’, p. 8.