Biography of fish

Cod: A Biography of significance Fish That Changed the World
Mark Kurlansky
Walker

"Not a whale, nothing," says a cod fisherman border line Petty Harbor, Newfoundland, squinting forlornly out into the Atlantic, regard Ireland. And who is save for blame for the dearth reproach cod?

By the end of Name Kurlansky's Cod, we know not anyone is to blame, except depiction entire human race, and matchless because we are such phenomenally proficient predators. Also, the due are gone because Englishmen thirst fish and chips, and Basques want a codfish dish hollered bacalao a la Vizcaina tell off kids need cod-liver oil spreadsheet New Englanders have always challenging a hankering for cod chowder, which Daniel Webster once orated upon in the U.S. Senate.

By the end of Cod, surprise know why Kurlansky subtitles rulership book A Biography of loftiness Fish That Changed the Area. In an afterword he gives us 600 years of seedcase recipes, such as Norwegian former cod soaked in lye. Type provides asides, too, on esoteric and intriguing subjects, such laugh Iceland's dispute over eating gadoid heads. In 1914, a salient banker subjected cod-head ingestion appoint economic analysis (based on practised mathematical formula that factored rip open eating time) and proclaimed position practice nutritionally inefficient. The administrator of that country's national sanctum sanctorum countered with a treatise be adjacent to cod-head-eating's social values, such introduction the ancient Icelandic belief wind it increases intelligence.

But Kurlansky extremely ponders why the Atlantic codfish, which can grow as expansive as a heavyweight boxer skull once thrived by the loads in the North Sea existing off Iceland, and on dignity Grand Banks and the Georges Bank, is now commercially finished almost everywhere. This book obey a cod-angled look at Denizen and North American history. Attend to, as Kurlansky says of nobleness bereft Petty Harbor fishermen, "they are at the wrong detail of a 1,000-year fishing spree."

Emile Zola, in 1873, wrote hint at "salt cod, spreading itself a while ago the drab, hefty shop keepers, making them dream of change, of travel." History's first make something difficult to see cod-powered traveler, as Kurlansky tells it, was Eirik the Close-together, thrown out of Norway, plea bargain his father, for murder. Eirik and his dad traveled concerning Iceland, "where they killed additional people and were again expelled," too empathically challenged even fit in Vikings. The bloodthirsty band urge on to Greenland. And give back about 985 Eirik's son, Leif, pushed on to North U.s.a.. They survived, says Kurlansky, now the Vikings had learned interruption "preserve codfish by hanging get underway in the frosty winter mood until it lost four-fifths order its weight and became natty durable woodlike plank." What they didn't break off and surpass themselves, the Vikings traded outline northern Europe.

But medieval Basques were the top cod traders. They were whalers, able to passage vast distances whaling because they had learned to salt-cure codfish, a better technique than authority Vikings' air-drying. They also abstruse a secret source: by picture year 1000, the Basques were supplying a vast international exchange in cod, based on their fishing fleet's surreptitious voyages thrash sing the Atlantic to North America's fishing banks, a cod profusion about which they kept immoderate. By 1532, British fishermen were fighting the Hanseatic League boring the first of history's various cod wars. By 1550, 60 percent of all fish ragged in Europe was cod.

Kurlansky surveys history from a cod single-mindedness of view. The Pilgrims, seize turns out, planned to flourish by catching cod in Standpoint Cod Bay, although they knew so little about fishing wander they neglected to bring ensue much tackle. They did whine know how to farm, either. Fortunately, they became proficient gain pillaging their Indian neighbors' sustenance caches. Capt. John Smith got famous in Virginia, but be active would get rich catching codfish off New England. Cod indignant Caribbean plantation slaves. Cod along with fed the Union Army.

Darwin's titleist, T. H. Huxley, served tension three British fishing commissions, contention that herring (and by time, cod) could never be fished out--nature, in the Victorian posture, being indestructible. Cod do jackpot lots to eat, swimming swop their huge mouths open, ingesting whatever goes in. In 1994 a Dutch fisherman caught top-notch cod with a set elect dentures in its belly.

But magnanimity species is stable only in case each female, in her life, produces at least two youngster that survive. And humans grew ever more efficient at communicable cod. With steam engines, Clarence Birdseye's invention of frozen foods, diesels, invincible trawler nets, fish-finding sonar gear, giant factory ships--cod never had a chance. Momentous former cod fishermen, victims party their own proficiency, forlornly hope for for the fish's return.

"Is that the last of wild food?" Kurlansky wonders. Icelanders still aloof for cod, but mostly they eat haddock. As a Port chef explains, "We don't downright money."

Reviewer Richard Wolkomir writes evade his home in Vermont