Jack Bouchard—
On a September day in the year 1542, a French Basque captain named Robert Lefant sat in a portside room in the little Spanish town of Fuenterrabía, answering questions. Lefant was doing his best to explain to a group of curious Spanish officials just what he had been up to all summer. The officials knew Lefant had spent several months catching fish somewhere far to the west, and they wondered what he had seen. Had he found cities and settlements, riches and new Indigenous groups to trade with, or even interloping French raider and settlers? No, Lefant replied, nothing so exciting. Rather, he and thirteen other men had “gone to Terra Nova to fish for *bacalaos,” *and all they did was spend the summer at “a harbour and beach alongside the sea.”1
A fishing harbour and beach alongside the sea: Caprouge, Newfoundland. Photo courtesy of Bryn Tapper.
The quotidian language used by Lefant obscured the reality of what he had done and experienced. His answers seem to have bored the Spanish officials, who eventually stopped their interrogation. Modern historians have often followed their lead, paying little attention to fishworkers who went to this nebulous “Terra Nova.” But Lefant and his crew were part of one of the earliest and largest colonial ventures in the sixteenth-century Americas.
Lefant’s harbour and beach were on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from Fuenterrabía, on the northern shore of Newfoundland island in what is today Canada. Thousands of other mariners in hundreds of ships had done the same thing as Lefant that summer, sailing to their own harbour sand beaches to catch a fish they variously called bacalao, morue,or cod. Some, Basques from Spain, would even go hunting for whales along the coast of Labrador. Lefant ran into ships from Brittany, Basque Country, Asturias, and Normandy on his voyage; by the end of the century, upwards of three hundred ships departing ports from Portugal to Holland would make the same trip each year.
All of these mariners would have said, like Lefant, that they had spent their summers in Terra Nova. A French ship practically shouts it (in Italian) on a famous map: “I go to Terra Nova!” In one sense, Terra Nova was a place-name. It was a term used to signify the coasts and waters of the northwest Atlantic, roughly what is today eastern Canada, centered on the island on Newfoundland.
In another sense, it was an idea, a fusion of water and labour, a place defined by people following fish to make food. European crews made Terra Nova through fishwork—the work of turning live fish into processed food—producing commodities in the northwest Atlantic that could be sold in Europe. Insiders like Lefant knew that you could experience Terra Nova only during the brief window of warm, subarctic summer—some mariners reported being locked by sea ice as late as May or June. This floating, seasonal world of fishwork functioned as a colony, a permanent European occupation of the northwest Atlantic that put its natural resources at the disposal of hungry European cities.
“I go to Terra Nova!” Detail, 1606 edition of 1556 map of Terra Nova by Giacomo Gastaldi. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
The legacy of Terra Nova is all around us. You can go to the store to buy bacalao,dry-salted cod,that is nearly identical to what was being made and eaten in 1542. To this day, salt cod is a beloved food in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian, and Caribbean cookery. Fishing is still big business in Canada and New England, heirs to the colonial legacy that began at Terra Nova five centuries ago.
But the wreckage of Terra Nova lives with us as well. You cannot visit Terra Nova because it no longer exists. Early European visitors described the waters of the northwest Atlantic as possessing an “inexhaustible supply of fish,” and they sought to extract as much of it as possible. In the 1990s we learned that cod were not, in fact, inexhaustible, and the world’s largest fishery collapsed catastrophically (it has still not recovered).
In the sixteenth century, fishworkers like Lefant developed a means of alienated extraction, spending only the warm months at Terra Nova and pulling as much marine biomass out of the water as possible. Their approach was eventually applied to aquatic environments all over the world. Likewise, the whaling techniques developed by Basques in Terra Nova would eventually go global, driving many species to near-extinction. At Terra Nova, hungry fishing crews encountered and consumed the great auk—a flightless seabird most knew as the penguin—which would be one of the first animals that Europeans wiped out in real time. The history of Terra Nova is the start of a longer story of how we have reached our present, ecologically impoverished world.
For all that, you rarely find the story of sixteenth-century Terra Nova in histories of the early Americas or the Atlantic world. Most of us see the northwest Atlantic as marginal to our lives and our common history. If there is a standard narrative of European overseas expansion, it is one that emphasizes settlement and empire, as well as the rise of permanent colonies and a plantation complex in the tropics, and that focuses on the better-documented seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. European expansion and colonization in the Americas was a transformative moment in world history, one which reverberates today, and we ought to consider where those like Lefant fit into the picture.
From the harbours and beaches of Terra Nova, early European expansion into the Atlantic basin looks quite different. The story begins much earlier, for one thing. There was a vibrant commercial fishery in the northwest Atlantic as early as 1505, one that was already drawing on nearly a century of European navigation, colonization, and extraction in Africa, the mid-Atlantic Islands, and the Caribbean. This wider context is crucial: ships that sailed to Terra Nova often also plied the routes to the Caribbean, Brazil, and West Africa. Rather than an isolated northern fringe, Terra Nova was a site of contact and exchange, with fishing crews regularly exchanging goods with Indigenous communities such as the Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Beothuk. Lefant even believed, he told his interrogators in 1542, that some Indigenous people were already fluent in “English, French, and Gascon” through their contact with European fishing crews. Terra Nova was a place of violence as well, marked by abductions, raids, and piracy.
“The new fonde londe quhar [where] men goeth a fisching.” Detail, *The Boke of Idrography. *Jean Rotz, 1542. Courtesy of the British Library.
Most remarkably, in the sixteenth-century northwest Atlantic, we find neither the permanent settlements nor the empire we expect in the early Americas. Despite the size and importance of the fishery at Terra Nova, no European empire pursued attempts to claim or control it. Nor did Europeans plant settlements in the area. Instead, fishing crews adopted a system of cyclical migration. Each spring, hundreds of European ships sailed to the shores of Terra Nova; each autumn, they returned home carrying hundreds of thousands of dried, processed codfish and tubs of whale oil. Here in the northwest Atlantic, European expansion worked within local climate and ecologies, taking the form of itinerant fishwork rather than settlement and empire.
At its core, the story of Terra Nova is not about gold, god, and glory, but about calories. What drew European mariners to the northwest Atlantic was a desperate need for energy. To hungry Europeans, the seemingly unlimited biomass of Terra Nova offered a chance to extract energy—in the form of calories—from across the ocean and bring it home.
To do so, mariners targeted the Atlantic cod, a cold-water predatory fish that is highly nutritious (and, they often complained, very bland). Unlike many sea fish, cod can be dried out, pickled, or dry-salted to produce a long-lasting kind of processed food. Along the shores of southern Labrador, Basque whalers produced whale oil, which could be used as fuel back home. Mariners and settlers dispatched across the Atlantic basin often carried bacalaowith them, while English armies fighting in Ireland were sustained by government-purchased salt cod. Settlements around the Atlantic basin, including the plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil, eventually came to rely on the energy produced at Terra Nova.
“Den kabbeljau” (Codfish) in Adriaen Coenen’s Visboek (Fish book), written in the 1570s. Courtesy of the World Digital Library.
The story of Terra Nova, and with it a different way of viewing early European expansion, needs to be told. If we wish to understand the origins of European colonization in the Americas, then the Terra Nova must be part of that effort. In an age of ocean collapse and fisheries depletion, the early history of Terra Nova is crucial. Lives may be saved or lost, fortunes made, ecosystems shattered, tastes subtly altered, histories made and forgotten, and global foodways forever changed by what happens on some beaches and harbours alongside the sea.
1. H.P. Biggar. A Collection of Documents Relating to Jacques cartier and the Sieur du Roberval. Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1930. Doc CCXII. 447-467.
Jack Bouchard is assistant professor of environmental history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He has published widely on the histories of fishing, islands, and foodways. He lives in Highland Park, NJ.