Cod by Mark Kurlansky

grounds, which included the Grand Banks, the Scotian shelf, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, all of which were off the coast of loyal British colonies. But even France, America’s great ally, did not back New England. Supporting a revolution against England was one thing, but the French did not believe it was in their own interests to allow the New Englanders back into the Grand Banks. The French position was that while all nations had a right to the high seas, offshore grounds were the property of the owners of the coastline. The little islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon still allowed France to be one of the proprietors of the coastline. To this day, the French claim fishing rights in a strip of Canadian waters because of this minuscule possession.
    International law of the sea was not clear on this concept. It was still widely held that the seas had no nationality. The first recognized claim on ocean territory, a three-mile limit in the North Sea, did not come into force until after the Napoleonic wars. But the New Englanders had on their side John Adams, America’s most underrated founding father. It was Adams, whose face is on no currency and has inspired few monuments, who argued in the Continental Congress for complete independence from England, who won his argument by forging a Massachusetts-Virginia alliance and then bringing along the colonies in between, who chose Colonel George Washington to lead the Continental Army, who wrote “Thoughts on Government,” which became a blueprint in designing the United States government, and who then plucked from their ranks young Thomas Jefferson for a protégé and assigned him to write the Declaration of Independence on the grounds that the young Virginian was a better writer than himself.
    To the fury of the representatives of southern colonies, Adams had a provision written into the British negotiations declaring that fishing rights to the Banks could not be relinquished without the approval of Massachusetts. This led to one of the first North-South splits in the United States. Southerners complained that the interests of nine states were being sacrificed “to gratify the eaters and distillers of molasses” in the other four.
    Adams had defended Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence line by line at the Continental Congress in a nonstop two-and-a-half-day argument, while Jefferson, the reticent author, sat in silence. Among the few battles Adams lost was the one over a substantial passage against slavery, calling it “cruel war against human nature.” Yet he defended the cod and molasses trade despite its slavery connection. He explained to his fellow American delegates the commercial value of the cod trade in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. But he also argued that New England cod fishermen had proven themselves to be a superb naval force. Adams now called the New England fishery “a nursery of seamen and a source of naval power.” He argued that the groundfishermen of New England were “indispensably necessary to the accomplishment and the preservation of our independence.”
    Many of the Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, saw fishing rights as a point they could concede. But Adams would not yield. Finally, on November 19, 1782, a year and a month after British troops surrendered at Yorktown, the British granted New England fishing rights on the Grand Banks.
    But the Americans had not won access to markets. They were barred from trade with the British West Indies, a tremendous commercial loss for New England resulting in a tragic famine among slaves cut off from their protein supply. Between 1780 and 1787, 15,000 slaves died of hunger in Jamaica. In time, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland took up the slack, and their fisheries too became largely geared for low-grade West India saltfish.
    During the colonial period every turn of history seemed to favor New England fisheries. But after American independence, this