Canadian Coast Guard
<% else %>A History of the Canadian Coast Guard and Marine Services
by Thomas E. Appleton
Newfoundland
Because of the ocean barrier between the Old World and the New, our origins are bound up with the history of navigation. Whether by accident or design, it seems certain that the ancient Norse mariners made our shores, and it is highly probable that enterprising fishing skippers of the middle ages, like their counterparts today, ranged westwards from the fishing grounds of the North Sea and the continental shelf of Europe before John Cabot voyaged from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497 in an attempt to find a shorter sea route to the Orient. The riches of the Far East had an especial meaning for the businessmen of the middle ages, because of the luxury trade in spices. Spicing for foods, greatly in demand by the small but affluent society of courts and cloister, enabled cooks and kitchen maids to smother the none too plentiful supplies of doubtful meat in recognition of the strong palates of their masters and the demands, not only of taste, but of hygiene.
For the great majority of people there was little meat of any kind, spiced or otherwise, in the long winters of northern Europe, and Cabot's voyage, probably not the first to Newfoundland, failed to find the gateway to the East. Cabot was unaware that a whole continent lay between Europe and Asia but, unexpectedly, he had discovered the great fisheries which, without the aid of spices, would feed the world for generations to come. The secrets of Newfoundland, till then the exclusive property of a handful of most enterprising skippers, were now to form the common knowledge of an active trade. Cured cod, among the most stable, nutritious and acceptable foods then known to mankind, was a buffer against the ever recurring waves of famine which ravaged the primitive agriculture of all countries of that day.
The seaman of many nations battled their way across the Western Ocean to work the new-found fisheries, but principally it was the English, French, Portuguese and Spanish who, rolling and pitching in their cockleshells of boats, jostled together in that fiercely competitive business. Strangely enough, it was salt, and not cod, which upset the workings of the early international fishing fleets. There were two markets for the product, green cod, salted on board, for the sturdy housewives of northern Europe, and cured cod, dried either in Newfoundland or in the ports of discharge, for the hotter climates of the Mediterranean. Fishermen from the west country of England, the villages of Brittany and the sandy harbours of the Iberian Peninsula made annual voyages in the summer season, but seldom remained over the winter. The Portuguese, and to a lesser extent the French, hailing from countries with a sun-drenched summer, could get ample supplies of solar salt for all types of curing and indeed, they could dry green fish at home for the southern market, if not with the perfection of the Newfoundland cure, at least sufficiently well for the demands of the day. English skippers, faced with a home climate no more suitable for evaporative processes then than now, could neither make salt in sufficient quantities nor dry their catch, and they set up semi-permanent bases, with the familiar drying stages, in the harbours of Newfoundland, buying their salt from abroad or from the Portuguese.
Of the early contestants for Canadian natural resources, the Portuguese suffered setbacks on the international scene by reason of Spanish pressure, and both Spain and Portugal were affected by subsequent decimation of the Great Armada at the hands of England aided by those terrible enemies of unwieldy sailing ships, scurvy, lee shores and gales. The result was that the Portuguese fishermen on the Newfoundland coast contented themselves with the problems of the industry and the feeding of their people at home, and laid the foundation of an enduring, kingly, and satisfactory relationship which continues to this day.
The English and French, however, spurred by the most powerful courts in Europe and backed, on the one hand, by a growing maritime power which was to dominate the seas for more than two hundred years and, on the other, by the militant ambitions of the Bourbon house, were sowing the seeds of strife which would split the old world as surely as the dictators and communists split its successor.
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