The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (16 page)

The English were quick to make use of their doggers. In 1412, just a year
after they were excluded from Bergen, "fishermen out from England" appeared off southern Iceland in defiance of Norwegian and Hansa monopolies. "Thirty or more" fishing boats arrived in 1413 and exchanged merchandise for cattle. The sailors endured hard conditions. In 1419, a gale
on Maundy Thursday wrecked twenty-five English fishing boats. "All the
men were lost, but the goods and splinters of the ships were cast up everywhere."13 Before long, the English were so well established in the Icelandic cod trade that Bergen's restrictions were relaxed out of necessity.

The English dogger fleets were so efficient that Iceland's leaders soon
complained to their Danish masters that the foreigners were decimating
the fish population. Denmark protested in turn to English King Henry
V, who promptly prohibited the voyages by proclamation in every port,
despite protests from the House of Commons that "as is well known"
the cod had forsaken their former haunts off Norway. Neither English
fisherfolk nor Icelanders living close to the fishing grounds took any
notice of the prohibition, for the trade was extremely lucrative to both
sides. One dogger could carry ten men with the summer's provisions
and salt for the catch and return with about 30 tons of fish. The fleet
left England in February or March and with favorable winds and a bit
of luck would reach Iceland in about a week. If they were unlucky, winter gales would swamp several of their boats and wash many crewmen
overboard. Once off Iceland, the doggers fished some distance from shore all summer, with only occasional passages home to unload their
catch and reprovision. They were fearless seamen, who suffered incredible hardships from ice-cold spray and cutting winds, with almost no
protection whatsoever. Imagine lying to a March gale far from land in
the open Atlantic, no means of keeping warm for fear of fire, drifting at
the mercy of huge waves, pumping constantly to keep afloat, in nearzero temperatures, in soaking clothes. The fishermen routinely endured
conditions that are unimaginable today. But the Lenten market had to
be satisfied.

The fish themselves were sold in October and November for the following Lent. If stored carefully between layers of straw, the dried fillets
would keep for up to two years. Quite simply, Icelandic cod was money.
Its value endured far longer than the gold of the Indies.

For decades, English fishermen were unchallenged by competitors. But
inevitably, the ubiquitous Hanse began arriving on the fishing grounds in
the 1430s, even transporting cod direct to London. Fighting broke out,
cargoes were plundered, diplomatic notes exchanged. Icelandic waters
were too crowded and cod stocks were becoming depleted, partly because
of occasional severe cycles of colder sea temperatures. The more enterprising Basque and English skippers sought new fishing grounds farther out
in the Atlantic.

Cod abounded on the continental shelves off Europe, Iceland, and North
America. Norse exploration north and west in warmer times had coincided
with the range of the vast cod schools. As pack ice increased and water temperatures fell off Greenland, the schools shifted southward and westward
away from Iceland, where stocks seem to have been erratic, although the
fluctuations are poorly documented. With inexorable skill, fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century skippers followed the cod far over the western horizon.

Fisherfolk are reticent people who know that their living depends on
carefully guarded knowledge, passed from one generation to the next and
never committed to paper or shared with officials. The Basque were already formidable coastal voyagers, unafraid of passages of 2,000 kilometers or more across the Bay of Biscay to the North Sea and beyond. They pursued whales into subarctic waters and followed them west to Greenland along ancient sailing routes. They visited the Norse Eastern Settlement as early as 1450, where their artifacts have been found, then probably dropped southward along the Labrador coast not soon afterward.
There they found not only whales but cod in abundance. Inevitably, rumors of new fishing grounds and mysterious lands far to the west spread
from taverns and fishing villages to merchants' ears.

Bristol, on southwestern England's Severn River, had by 1300 become
a major trading port. Its well-protected harbor occupied a strategic location midway between the cod of Iceland and the vineyards of southwestern France and Spain. Bristol prospered off this trade until 1475, when
the Hanseatic League abruptly cut off the city's merchants from buying
Icelandic cod. By this time the worthy burghers of Bristol were well aware
of Basque fishermen's activities in the Atlantic Ocean. They had also
heard persistent rumors of lands far over the western horizon, among
them a place called Hy-Brazil. In 1480, a wealthy customs official,
Thomas Croft, and a merchant named John Jay sent a ship in search of
Hy-Brazil as a potential base for cod fishing. The following year, Jay dispatched a further two ships, the Trinity and the George. History does not
record whether they ever landed anywhere, but the ships returned with so
much cod that the city told the Hanseatic League it was not interested in
negotiations to reopen the Icelandic fishery.

Croft and Jay kept quiet as to where the cod came from, but inevitably
the word got out. In 1497, five years after Christopher Columbus landed
in the Bahamas, the Genovese merchant Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot)
sailed westward from Bristol searching not for cod but for a northern
route to the spice fields of Asia. Thirty-five days later, he sighted a long,
rocky coastline washed by a sea teeming with cod, where Basque fishing
vessels abounded. A letter written by an Italian visiting London, who
heard tales of Cabot's voyage, recounts how "the sea is covered with fishes,
which are caught not only with the net but with baskets, a stone being
tied to them in order that the baskets may sink in the water." For their
part, the Bristol men aboard the Mathew returned in great satisfaction for
their ships "will bring so many fishes that this kingdom will no longer
have further need of Iceland."14

By 1500, huge fishing and whaling fleets sailed every year for the Grand
Banks. Half a century later, more than 2,000 Basques visited Labrador each summer, where they processed their catches before sailing home on
the fall westerlies. Bristol fleets sailed first to Portugal for salt, braving the
stormy Bay of Biscay in winter, then crossed to Newfoundland for cod.
They returned to Portugal with their catch, then filled their holds with
wine, olive oil, and more salt for Bristol. English vessels beat southward
along the rugged Nova Scotia and Maine coasts following a bonanza of
cod. On May 15, 1602, the ship Concord rounded a "mighty headland,"
Cape Cod, and "anchored in 15 fathoms, where we took great store of
codfish." The Concord's skipper, Bartholomew Gosnold, noted that in
spring "there is upon this coast, better fishing, and in as great plentie, as in
Newfoundland ... and, besides, the places ... were but in seven faddome
water and within less than a league of the shore; where in new-found-land
they fish in fortie or fiftie faddome water and farre off." 15 He had left on
his voyage just after his wife Martha had given birth and named a tree-covered island after her: "Martha's Vineyard." For two decades, fishermen
were content to catch and dry their cod close offshore during the favorable
months, but no one stayed through the stormy and harsh winters in a time
of increasing severe cold. Then, in 1620, the Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to settle New England, to "serve their God and to Fish." 16 Thus it
was that cooler conditions in the Arctic after the eleventh century,
stormier, more unpredictable weather at sea, and the search for better fishing grounds helped Europeans settle in North America.

The world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries consisted of one vast peasantry, where between 80% and 90% of
people lived from the land and from nothing else. The
rhythm, quality and deficiency of harvests ordered all material
life.

-Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life

emur-en-Auxois is an ancient mining community near Dijon, in
France's Cote-d'Or. A stained glass window in the sixteenth-century
church depicts Saint Medard, who always interceded for rain, and Saint
Barbara, patroness of miners and protector against thunder and lightning. Saint Barbara appears as a martyr with bare breasts, her body lashed
with stripes, her flesh torn by red-hot pincers and spitted on hooks. She is
finally burnt at the stake. Her martyrdom immunizes humanity against
the vagaries of weather and guides miners' picks safely into the bosom of
the earth.

The image of saint as protector and martyr appeared in stained glass,
in wood, and on canvas. Dozens of saints' days commemorated the spiritual benefactors who protected farmers and townspeople against drought
or rain. In 1350, when Europe was at the mercy of increasingly unpredictable weather, forecasting was confined to what one could see from
atop a hill or church tower, to immediate spikes of cold, extreme heat, or
torrential downpours that at best could be foretold a day ahead in the
coming. Even those cultivating the most fertile soils kept a constant eye
on the skies, on telltale signs of the passing seasons, on early flowerings of apple trees, vivid sunsets that portended heavy rain, unseasonable frosts
that killed ripening grapes. No rural community ever kept systematic
records of the weather that brought prosperity one year and desperate
hunger the next. Human memory, cumulative experience and folklore,
and a belief in the power of saints were their only protection. Vulnerability was a reality of daily life: however adaptable farmers were, Europe still
lacked an effective infrastructure for moving large quantities of grain and
other commodities at short notice.

Tree rings and ice cores chronicle the ever changing climate after
1320-through the terrible years of the Black Death, through the Hundred Years War, fought mainly on French soil, the reign of Elizabeth I of
England, and the ascendancy and defeat of the Spanish Armada. The
rings and cores record irregular cycles of warmer and colder summers, of
wet springs and extreme heat waves, seemingly with no long-term pattern
until the late sixteenth century, when cooler conditions became more
prevalent. Those who suffered through good and poor years left few
records behind them, except for occasional references to exceptionally
good or poor harvests, or unusually wet or dry weather. They accepted
unpredictable cycles of good or bad years as happenstance, or the result of
Divine Will, but, in fact, they were living in a climatically somewhat different world.

The Medieval Warm Period had seen few of the pronounced extremes
that marked the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. The years of the Great
Famine, 1315 to 1319, were the wettest between 1298 and 1353. According to the Bishop of Winchester's archives, 1321 to 1336 were dry or
unusually dry. Decades of unexceptional weather then followed. The next
wet years of significance came between 1399 and 1403, but they never
approached the extremes of the famine rains. With no food shortages to
contend with on more than a local level, Europe quickly recovered from
the great hunger.