Sarah Luria

Associate Professor, Department of English

 

Cod

 Bronze Weathervane Cod

"Cod has long played a vital role in the fortunes of Massachusetts -- Cape Cod didn't get its name for nothing. Today, the Massachusetts House of Representatives is likely the only legislative body in the country (and possibly the world) to deliberate under a giant carved wooden codfish -- the Sacred Cod, whose head points at whichever party is in power."
Source http://www.boston-online.com/cod.html

The Cod is a symbol of Massachusetts and most especially of Boston. Its importance in the success of early New England cannot be overstated, as Mark Kurlansky argues in his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York, 1997). Kurlansky calls the cod "the fish that built Boston." It was cod fishing that raised the early Europeans from "starving settlers" to prosperity--a colony wealthy, in fact, that by the 18th century it no longer needed England. Indeed, as Kurlansky points out, "commerce" almost beame the "New England religion" (74-75):

The members of the 'codfish aristocracy,' those who traced their family fortunes to the seventeenth-century cod fisheries, had openly worshiped the fish as the symbol of their welath...Many of the first Amerian coins issued from 1776 to 1778 had cofish on them, and a 1755 two-penny tax stamp for the Massachusetts Bay Colony bored a codfish and the words staple of Massachusetts. (79; emphasis original)
The cod is not only a symbol of Boston, and its wealthy families with whom Shaws own family was identified, but of Boston's tie to slavery. Cod fishing and the manufacture of salt cod in New England formed one of the points of the triangle trade in slavery. Salt cod was traded to the Carribean where it was used as a cheap source of salt and protein for slaves. Those slaves in turn produced molasses which was shipped back to Boston.

New England society ws the great champion of individual liberty and even openly denounced slavery, all the while growing ever more affluent by providing Carribean planters with barrels of cheap food to keep enslaved people working sixteen hours a day. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, more than 300 ships left Boston in a good year for the West Indies. (Kurlansky 82-83)

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