Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World

People, Products, and Practices on the Move

Caroline A. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754666813
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317172505
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World brings together ten original essays by an international group of scholars exploring the complex outcomes of the intermingling of people, circulation of goods, exchange of information, and exposure to new ideas that are the hallmark of the early modern Atlantic. Spanning the period from the earliest French crossings to Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the wars of independence in Spanish South America, c. 1830, and encompassing a range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors direct particular attention to regions, communities, and groups whose activities in, and responses to, an ever-more closely bound Atlantic world remain relatively under-represented in the literature. Some of the chapters focus on the experience of Europeans, including French consumers of Newfoundland cod, English merchants forming families in Spanish Seville, and Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil making the Caribbean island of Nevis their home. Others focus on the ways in which the populations with whom Europeans came into contact, enslaved, or among whom they settled - the Tupi peoples of Brazil, the Kriston women of the west African port of Cacheu, among others - adapted to and were changed by their interactions with previously unknown peoples, goods, institutions, and ideas. Together with the substantial Introduction by the editor which reviews the significance of the field as a whole, these essays capture the complexity and variety of experience of the countless men and women who came into contact during the period, whilst highlighting and illustrating the porous and fluid nature, in practice, of the early modern Atlantic world.

Chapter 1

Codfish, Consumption, and Colonization: The Creation of the French Atlantic World During the Sixteenth Century¹

Laurier Turgeon

Introduction

The historiography of the Atlantic World is one that has dealt largely with shipping and trade. Historians, historical archaeologists, and cultural geographers have been primarily concerned with identifying shipping routes, measuring the volume of the different trades (including the trade in human beings), determining their impact on European economies, evaluating their role in the formation of a merchant class, and speculating about their contribution to the development of capitalism. The Atlantic World is also a world of colonization, and there has been much interest in the establishment of colonial societies, their trade with native groups, the production of colonial products, their social and economic impact in the colonies, and their distribution in Europe. However, very little work has yet been done on the anthropology of their consumption.² Because consumption comes at the end of the distribution chain, it is generally taken for granted, whereas it is in fact the initial stage of economic activity and of the colonial process. After all, it is the desire of consumers that determines the demand for the goods traded, their value, their market and, by extension, the types of economic, social, and political institutions established in the colonies.³ To gain a better understanding of the meaning of trade in the Atlantic world, it is important to consider the anthropology of the consumption of colonial products such as codfish, furs, tobacco, cacao, coffee, and sugar.⁴ What attracted European consumers to these New World products? How were they integrated into European consumer habits and how did they change them? What impact did the consumption of colonial products have on European national food cultures? The answers to these questions can teach us a great deal about the circulation of colonial goods, the meanings of their consumption, and the role played by New World products in European colonization and nation-building.

This chapter is based on a case study of one colonial product in one European country, namely, codfish in France. Codfish was the first New World product consumed massively in France. It has seldom been considered a colonial product because the cod fishery began long before the establishment of a colony – assuming that we define a colony as the endeavour to found a permanent settlement on a territory, exploit its resources, and place its indigenous peoples or other forms of subservient labour in the service of the settlers. Nonetheless, the cod fishery allowed the French to ‘occupy’ the coasts of north-eastern North America, to symbolically consume this space and progressively construct a colonial territory. In a sense, their colonial project originated in the fishery. The fishermen preceded the explorers – sometimes serving as their guides – and they were the first to exploit the resources of the North American continent. The fishery was a ‘proto-colonial’ activity that helped to initiate the process of colonization through consumption.

Since codfish is a food, its consumption expressed effectively the desire to colonize. Eating gives agency to foods and to people. It represents a form of social action by the choice of the foods eaten, by the people who eat them, by the manner in which they are prepared, by the place where they are eaten, and by the performance of eating itself. To be consumed, foods must be displaced, transported from their place of production to their place of consumption, and thereby effectively express appropriation of the peoples and the places they come from. The act of eating is indeed a powerful political tool, for it responds to a vital need of the human body and, at the same time, places the body on stage.⁵ Eating is a concrete everyday practice that rapidly becomes a structured habit. Its agency is therefore repetitive, perfomative and routinized, and it has profound long-lasting effects on social practices.⁶ Further, what is eaten is incorporated into the body and becomes an integral and material part of the self.⁷ As the saying goes, ‘you are what you eat’. A food is more than a sign, or a representation of something; it is an essence in itself. This material association between biological and cultural domains is what makes alimentary practices so efficient in the appropriation of territories, the construction and manipulation of social relationships, and the process of colonization. It is not surprising that most colonial products brought from the Americas in the early modern period were foods (codfish, coffee, cocoa, and sugar) or habit-forming addictive products like tobacco. In this chapter, I hypothesize that to eat codfish in France during the sixteenth century was to participate in a quest for imperial power and in the construction of a political economy of colonization.

The Rise of the French Cod Fishery

From the early sixteenth century, the French cod fishery expanded at a rapid pace in all the major ports of the Atlantic seaboard. Cod fishing in Newfoundland is mentioned as early as 1510 in the Rouen archives,⁸ and in 1517 in Bordeaux.⁹ In the same year a Basque merchant from Saint-Jean-de-Luz also sold in Bordeaux a large quantity of green cod, most likely from Newfoundland.¹⁰ The Basques took the route to Newfoundland at about the same time as the Normans and Bretons; ‘Terres Nabes’ appears in the maritime archives of Cap Breton in 1512 and again in those of Bayonne in 1519.¹¹ Beginning in 1520, outfitting for cod-fishing increased: at least three at Fécamp in 1522 and five at La Rochelle in 1523.¹² These few indications gleaned from notarial and judicial archives that have been poorly preserved must represent only a fraction of the entire scope of the cod-fishing enterprise. An English source from this period reveals that the French fishing fleet numbered more than 100 ships.¹³

The fishery, already substantial in the 1520s, grew at a remarkable rate from the middle of the century. Wherever they have been preserved, the notarial archives reveal a rapid increase in voyages to Newfoundland. In Bordeaux, departures registered by notaries grew from approximately ten per year in the 1540s to more than 50 per year from 1560.¹⁴ The same rate of increase is recorded in the neighbouring port of La Rochelle.¹⁵ At Rouen, the number rose to nearly 100: 73 outfittings for 1549 and at least 94 for 1555.¹⁶ Altogether, incomplete documentation for these three ports alone provides a list of more than 150 ships for certain years during the 1550s. To these already high figures we should add the outfitting that would have taken place in other large cod-fishing ports like Saint-Malo,¹⁷ Sables d’Olonne, and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, for which we do not have precise documentation, as well as another 50 or so small ports which each outfitted a few ships per year.¹⁸ For example, the small ports in Saintonge (Blaye, Meschers, Talmont, Mortagne, Marennes, and La Tremblade) harboured some 30 cod-fishing vessels in the 1560s.¹⁹ Others managed to accumulate small fleets quite rapidly: Croisic, the service port for Nantes, already maintained 25 cod-fishing vessels in 1565, and Granville had 15 by about 1572.²⁰ In 1580, the English writer, Robert Hitchcock, taking his information from correspondents in the French ports, estimated the entire French fishing fleet to number approximately 500 vessels, while his French counterpart, Antoyne de Montchrétien, numbered it, at the beginning of the 17th century, at more than 600 vessels for the ports of Normandy and Brittany alone.²¹

Although incomplete, these statistics nonetheless point to an immense fishing enterprise that has been largely overlooked in the maritime history of the North Atlantic. In fact, the French Newfoundland vessels represented one of the largest fleets in the Atlantic. These 500 or so ships had a combined loading capacity of some 40,000 tons burden (1.4 m³), and they mobilized 12,000 fishermen-sailors each year. And the French were not alone in this enterprise; other European countries also had cod-fishing vessels. The English navigator Anthony Parkhurst, during a reconnaissance voyage he undertook for the English navy in 1578, assessed the European fishing fleet in Newfoundland at 100 Spanish ships, 50 Portuguese ships, and 30–50 English ships.²² Although the fishing activity of the Iberian countries declined toward the end of the century, English activity augmented considerably, so that the total number of ships remained high.²³ The Newfoundland fleet surpassed by far the prestigious Spanish fleet that trafficked with the Americas, which had only half the loading capacity and half as many crew members.²⁴ These statistics demonstrate that the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence represented a site of European activity fully comparable to the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. Far from being a marginal space visited by a few isolated fishermen, Newfoundland was one of the first great Atlantic routes and one of the first territories colonized in North America. While North American codfish obviously did not possess the economic value of silver and gold, it demanded larger numbers of vessels and men – perhaps double what was needed for the routes that led to South America – and had far reaching implications for the North Atlantic maritime economy.

Codfish throughout the Realm

Little known in the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth century codfish became the most widely consumed fish in France, surpassing hake and even herring, the king of medieval fishes.²⁵ Pierre Belon devotes a long article to codfish in La nature et diversité des poissons (Paris, 1555) – the first natural history of fish written in French – which states that ‘there is no place where it is not sold’.²⁶ Indeed, after mid-century, codfish overran the wharfs of all the large Atlantic ports. In Nantes, for instance, the commerce in codfish, which already dominated that of all other salt-water fish at mid-century, tripled within a decade.²⁷ From there, codfish ascended the Loire to Tours and Orleans, and then Pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World
• 1 Codfish, Consumption, and Colonization: The Creation of the French Atlantic World During the Sixteenth Century
• 2 Negotiating Fortune: English Merchants in Early Sixteenth-Century Seville
• 3 Interlopers in an Intercultural Zone? Early Scots Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1630–1660
• 4 ‘A People So Subtle’: Sephardic Jewish Pioneers of the English West Indies
• 5 Subjects or Allies: The Contentious Status of the Tupi Indians in Dutch Brazil, 1625–1654
• 6 ‘To Transmit to Posterity the Virtue, Lustre and Glory of their Ancestors’: Scottish Pioneers in Darien, Panama
• 7 Controlling Traders: Slave Coast Strategies at Savi and Ouidah
• 8 Walking the Tightrope: Female Agency, Religious Practice, and the Portuguese Inquisition on the Upper Guinea Coast (Seventeenth Century)
• 9 Slaves, Convicts, and Exiles: African Travellers in the Portuguese Atlantic World, 1720–1750
• 10 The Life of Alexander Alexander and the Spanish Atlantic, 1799–1822
• Bibliography
• Index