The challenge fishermen faced in servicing this market was daunting:
the little boats they had at the beginning of the fifteenth century were no
match for the powerful storms of the North Atlantic. But, responding to the
closure of the North Sea, shipwrights along the Atlantic coast adapted the
combined lore of the Mediterranean and the North Sea to produce a
sturdy, two-masted, deep-hulled ship known as a dogger.
The dogger gave the northern Europeans a vessel in which they could
confront the tempestuous northern seas, just as the carrack had given the
southern Europeans. Whereas the carrack had evolved from warfare, the
dogger was designed purely for fishing and was an early example of private
initiative. In a dogger, fishermen were able to chase the cod far out into the
Atlantic. It was a desperate chase. The cod nearly eluded them. As great
stretches of pack ice chilled the waters around Greenland, the huge schools
of cod migrated southwestward all the way down to Cape Cod. At what
cost in sunken ships and drowned crewmen we will never know, but the
fishermen followed the cod. They had certainly reached Iceland by 1413.
By roughly the time that Columbus sailed, thousands of Basques,
Portuguese, Frenchmen, Englishmen, and other western Europeans had
found their way to the shores of Newfoundland and probably to the North
American mainland.
These voyages were financed by merchants in Dieppe, La Rochelle,
and Bayonne and across the Channel in Bristol and other towns in the west
of England. Unlike the Spanish, the French and English governments did
little to help or control their sailors. So these sailors lacked the resources to
found colonies and had no interest in founding any. They simply wanted
beaches in coves along the coast of Newfoundland and New England
where they could clean, dry, or salt their catch. There, while they camped
out and were busy processing their catch, they were approached from time
to time by curious Indians. We must imagine, since we have no records,
what happened then. They must have swapped small items such as nails,
fishhooks, twine, or simple tools for the fur capes the Indians were wearing.
When they took these capes back to Europe, as we know from portraits
painted then, fur became a symbol of status for royalty and rich merchants.
The furs the fishermen brought set off a fashion craze that would continue
for the next two centuries and would do much to shape America.
54 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA