The Taste of Empire

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In which it is fish day on the Mary Rose, anchored in Portsmouth harbour (Saturday 18 July 1545)

How the trade in Newfoundland salt cod laid the foundations of the Empire

Saturday 18 July 1545 was a fish day on the Mary Rose. The crew ate on the cramped gun deck, sitting wherever they could find room. Fish days were not popular; sailors referred to salt cod as ‘poor John’. But on this Saturday, the meal provided a welcome break from frantic activity as all 185 soldiers, 30 gunners and 200 mariners on board were busy readying the ship for war. That morning Nicholas Cooper and a couple of fellow cooks had climbed up to the sterncastle, passing crew members busy festooning the decks with anti-boarding netting. They had come to fetch the salt cod, which had been steeping in large vats of fresh water for the last 24 hours.¹ The ship’s crew was divided into messes of six to eight men who ate together. Those men whose turn it was to prepare the food for their mess that day gathered on deck to collect their share of the fish. Each man was entitled to one quarter of a 24-inch salt cod.² They tied the fish into cloth bags and secured them with a peg bearing the mark of their particular mess. The bags ensured that even though the fish disintegrated into flakes as it cooked, every mess received their fair share. The men piled the bags of cod into wooden buckets and the cooks carried them down the steep companionways to the galley, a pocket of light and warmth in the dank darkness of the hold.³

The depths of the ship soon filled with the smell of cooking fish as the bags were set to simmer in the larger of the galley’s two cauldrons. When it was ready, it was carried back up to the hungry crew on the gun deck. In each mess the fish was doled out in equal portions into the men’s wooden bowls and they set to eating with wooden or horn spoons.⁴ On fish days, every man was allowed four ounces of cheese and two of butter, and as the ship was in port, every man was also given a loaf of bread. This made a welcome change from the hard and worm-eaten ship’s biscuit that they had to make do with when they were at sea.⁵ They washed down the salty fish with gulps of beer. Their wooden drinking bowls were filled by a cook boy moving around the gun deck giving each man a portion of his daily allowance of a gallon of beer.

While the crew ate, their superiors discussed their fate. Anchored alongside the Mary Rose in Portsmouth harbour was the flagship, the Henry Grace à Dieu. Here the king, Henry VIII, was in council with the Lord Admiral of the Fleet, Viscount Lisle, and the Mary Rose’s commander, Vice Admiral George Carew. A French fleet had set sail for England 12 days previously and was expected to engage the English in battle the next day. As the three men schemed, Lisle sketched a battle plan on the back of a document that happened to be lying on the table. It placed the Mary Rose, one of the fleet’s bigger warships, at the centre of the coming engagement.⁶

By the end of the following day, almost all of the crew of the Mary Rose were dead, drowned when she sank only a few minutes after going into battle. The gunners had just fired a round of cannon when a chance gust of wind caused the ship, overloaded with ordnance, to simultaneously turn and heel over. A Flemish survivor described how water flooded in through the open gun ports as the Mary Rose tipped beneath the waves.⁷ Most of the men were on the upper decks, where they were caught in the web of anti-boarding netting and taken down as she sank. At most 40 survived, perhaps only as many as 25, out of a crew of 415.⁸

The wreck has bequeathed to us one of the best collections of Tudor artefacts, including shoes and tunics, medicine vials and bandage rolls, carpentry tools, guns, bows and arrows, and the skeletons of 179 men, a rat and a dog. Six of the skeletons were found in the galley.⁹ Nicholas Cooper and his fellow cooks appear to have been busy preparing a tongue and some fresh beef when the ship went down. They were probably making a meal for the officers. Scattered across the galley floor were ten pewter plates belonging to the ship’s commander, on which the food was meant to be served.¹⁰ Divers found wooden bowls on the gun decks. It is from one of these that we know Nicholas Cooper’s name, because he had inscribed it on his bowl. On the orlop deck and in the hold below it, archaeologists recovered the vertebrae of cattle and pigs, as well as thousands of fish spines amid the remains of the casks and wicker baskets that once held them. These were the residue of the ship’s store of beef, pork and cod.¹¹ Salt meat and fish, biscuit, beer, cheese and butter were cheap, durable foodstuffs that could be stored for long periods and transported over great distances without becoming (completely) inedible.

The Tudor military ration drew mainly on local food sources: under Henry VIII, England was self-sufficient in staple foodstuffs. The pork and beef on the Mary Rose would have come from English herds of swine and cattle; the cheese from Gloucester or Cheshire; and the butter would have been made locally from the milk of Hampshire’s dairy herds. But the fish was not a local product. Genetic analysis of some of the thousands of fish bones found in the wreck indicates that the cod had been caught in the northern North Sea and around Iceland. But one of the bones analysed was from a fish that came from much further afield, belonging to a genetic cluster of cod that lived off the north-eastern coast of the American continent.¹² By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Tudors were clearly venturing thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean in order to secure a staple foodstuff. This reliance on faraway places to supply England (and later Britain) with food was to become a hallmark of empire.

The importance of the Newfoundland fish trade in laying the foundations of the British Empire is frequently overlooked. The focus is usually on the story of maritime exploration and the quest for spices. But it was cod fishermen from the West Country who were the first Englishmen to acquire knowledge of the Atlantic currents and winds that later helped those explorers who went in search of a sea route to the Spice Islands.¹³

The medieval Christian practice of abstaining from meat on fast days had given rise to thriving European fisheries. In the fourteenth century, the Dutch mastered the art of pickling their North Sea herring catch in salt, which enabled even those devout northern Europeans living far inland to forgo meat on Fridays.¹⁴ In the fifteenth century, pickled herring was eclipsed by Norwegian stockfish, air-dried cod that was distributed throughout northern Europe by the Hanseatic League.¹⁵ The League’s attempts to monopolise the North Sea catch drove the English to seek new fishing grounds. They found one on the continental shelf just off Iceland. The Danish authorities soon complained that the English who set up camp there in the summer months treated the island as though it were their own, digging ditches, putting up tents, even building houses, and assaulting competing Icelandic fishermen.¹⁶ While the Icelanders wind-dried their catch, the English at first simply salted the cod before piling it in the holds of their boats. But over time, they combined these two preservation methods, lightly salting the fish before allowing it to dry in the air. The end product was both tastier than Norwegian stockfish and could be kept longer.¹⁷

A substantial share of the English fishermen’s Icelandic catch was bought by Bristol merchants. Indeed, in the second half of the fifteenth century, Bristol emerged as England’s major fish entrepôt.¹⁸ This was because the city dominated England’s wine trade at the time. The Englishman’s tipple of choice was sweet ‘sack’ from the Iberian peninsula.¹⁹ The Spanish and Portuguese had little use for England’s staple export of woollen cloth: they preferred to exchange their wine for salt cod, which they regarded as a tasty and affordable alternative to meat.²⁰ Thus Bristol ships would sail to Iceland to buy up salt cod, and then continue to southern Europe and as far afield as the Spanish Canary Islands and the Azores, to exchange the fish for wine.²¹ The city’s place at the heart of this trade in fish for wine made Bristol a centre of knowledge about Atlantic navigation.

It was therefore no coincidence that the Venetian Zuan Caboto (better known by his anglicised name John Cabot) set sail from Bristol when in 1497 he went in search of a northern sea route to the Spice Islands. A group of Bristol merchants had already funded at least three western voyages to search for the mythical land of Hy-Brasil, said to lie beyond Ireland. They certainly knew that the seas in this part of the ocean were thick with cod. Moreover, some of these expeditions had almost certainly found land: they returned to Bristol laden down with salted and dried cod that it would have been impossible to dry on board ship.²² Cabot would have drawn on this local knowledge, and after only 35 days at sea, his expedition arrived on the north-eastern coast of Canada. He had ‘discovered’ not the hoped-for sea route to the Indies but the land the Vikings had called Helluland and that Henry VII now christened Newfoundland.²³

Cabot’s discovery was much celebrated. The parsimonious king granted him a generous pension of £20 a year, to be paid from Bristol’s customs receipts. The Duke of Milan’s envoy in London wrote of sailors’ reports of seas ‘swarming with fish’.²⁴ The cod were supposedly so abundant that they could be caught without fishing nets or lines by simply lowering weighted baskets into the water. The envoy claimed that there was talk that England would ‘have no further need of Iceland’.²⁵ But the king was not particularly interested in the shoals of fish. His imagination was caught by Cabot’s claim that he would be able to follow the Newfoundland coastline until he reached Cipango (Japan), which he claimed was a source of spices and jewels. Henry was entranced by a vision of London as Europe’s new spice entrepôt.²⁶

The king’s and Cabot’s dreams were not to be realised for another century. In the meantime, the Bristol merchants quietly got on with making the most of the riches that had been discovered.²⁷ In 1501, Hugh Elyot sailed into Bristol harbour with the first recorded cargo of cod to arrive in Europe from North America. The 36 tons of salt cod were worth £180, which was equal to the annual income of a prosperous landed estate.²⁸ However, despite the evidence of such bounty, in the early years of the sixteenth century only a handful of West Country fishermen ventured to Newfoundland. The low level of domestic demand–due to the fact that the English lacked the southern Europeans’ ability to transform the board-like fish into tasty dishes–meant that there was little incentive for English fishermen to choose the longer and stormier voyage across the Atlantic rather than the familiar journey to Iceland.²⁹ The seas off Newfoundland were instead dominated by the Bretons and the Basques, whose home markets were greedy for salt cod.³⁰

The reasons for English fishermen to participate in the Newfoundland venture became more compelling over the course of the century. When Henry VIII inherited the throne from his father in 1509, he was determined to recover the territory England had once held in France and began enlarging the English navy: the Mary Rose, completed in 1511, was part of his ambitious shipbuilding programme.³² The Anthony Roll, an illustrated inventory of his navy, records that by 1545 the king had used the wealth he had confiscated from the monasteries to build up a fleet of 58 ships from the five that he had inherited from his father. These were the beginnings of the navy that eventually played an important role in creating Britain’s seaborne empire.

The expansion of the Tudor armada substantially increased the demand for salt cod. The Anthony Roll suggests that at full strength, Henry’s navy would have employed about 7,700 men. If each of these was given a quarter of a salt cod on each of the two weekly fish days, then the annual naval demand in the 1540s would have amounted to over 200,000 salt fish.³³