English A: Literature (HL) "Grand Banks"

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'But when do we see life, Captain?'

'Not long to go now, Mrs Meek. Not long now.'

Everyone was impatient for land. We had picked up the scent of North America and it was suddenly real enough to plan on.

Sometime in the small hours, we had crossed on to the Grand Banks, an enormous apron of sandy flats out south and east from the coasts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Here the cold water of the south-going Labrador Current collides with the warm water of the Gulf Stream as it bends east towards Europe. This sudden mixing of warm and cold produces the chilly steam in which the area is almost continuously enshrouded. It also produces the kind of busy, circulating aerated water in which krill and zooplankton breed, and the food chain that starts with krill and zooplankton ends with cod, whales and man.

John Cabot discovered the Grand Banks in 1497, on the return voyage from his search for the North-West passage to Cathay. Over the banks, his men (aboard the tiny ship, the Mathew) found cod shoaling so densely that they had only to lower baskets over the side to bring them up groaning with fish.

It was a miraculous draught of fishes – an image that fitted wonderfully well with the theological rhetoric in which so much of the European colonization of America was conducted. The New World was Canaan, the land across the water that God promised to the Israelites. It was a moral duty to 'plant a Christian Habitation and regiment ' there 'to redeem the people of the Newfound land and those parts from out of the captivity of that spiritual Pharaoh, the devil'. Cabot's baskets of fish, with the powerful echo of the disciples casting their nets on the other side, were seen as happy confirming portents that the conquest of America was an evangelical mission.

The view from the Conveyor's bridge was of a watery world so dank and sun-starved that it was hard to imagine anyone being thrilled by it. Yet in the sixteenth century the fish of the Grand Banks inspired as much excitement as the gold, spices and tobacco of the southern discoveries.

In Haklyut's Voyages the Banks earn as much space as Florida and the West Indies. They were the place where fishermen's tall stories came true. By 1578 – nearly thirty years after the settlement of Virginia and more than forty years before the arrival of the colonists in Massachusetts – an adventurer called Anthony Parkhurst wrote a letter to Haklyut in which he reported he had encountered about 380 fishing vessels working the Banks during the previous summer. There had been fifty English boats, the rest were Spanish, French and Portuguese. In 1583, Edward Hayes, a ship's captain on the Gilbert expedition, called the Grand Banks 'the most famous fishing in the world.'

It is a hard fact to grasp. Europe was not fished-out. There were huge stocks of cod in the North Sea and the Eastern Atlantic. Although the Church (in England, the Crown) had stimulated the fishing industry by turning Friday into a pan-European fish-eating day, the demand can't have been so great as to force a crossing of the Atlantic in order to meet it. Yet the fishermen came.

They were the first Europeans to make themselves at home in America. They fished the Grand Banks from April to July every year, traded with the Indians, laid up stocks of gear and provisions in the natural harbours of Newfound land, Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia.

The Russians, working along the extreme easterly fringe of the Banks, were the last survivors of the international floating city of boats which used to fish over Whale Bank, Green Bank, St. Pierre Bank, Misaine, Banquereau, Cando and the rest. Everyone on the Conveyor could remember the time when these few hundred miles were an intricate slalom course, as the ship twisted and dodged through the fishing fleet, more than not in thick fog. When Canada increased its fishing limit to 200 miles in the 1970s, the Grand Banks emptied of boats. An hour after reaching the Banks, our own radar was drawing a blank again, and we were alone in the squabbling birds, the colours of our containers looking vulgar and strident against the sober grey

Jonathan Raban from 'New World' in  

                              Granta 29 (Winter 1989)