This post introduces Jack Bouchard’s recently published Environmental History article, “Fishwork Is for the Birds: Humans and Birds in the Sixteenth-Century Northwest Atlantic.”
Maritime historians are in the business of looking down. We want to see, through the eyes of our historical sources and subjects, the flat surface of the Ocean Sea and what lies beneath. Despite the watery gaze of modern historians, it is time to acknowledge that mariners in the past spent much of their time looking upward. Standing on boats and beaches, they gazed at the sky to find the stars that helped them navigate. They stared at the clouds and winds which were the most immediate concern on a sailing ship. They lifted their eyes to a heaven which most believed to be real and present in their daily lives. Mariners understood seas as a multidimensional space, each dimension adding a crucial element to the perils and opportunity of ocean voyages and work. They also understood that this aerial dimension belonged to some other living beings: birds. Sometimes mariners squinted at far-off flapping specks to see if it was a winged harbinger showing that shore was close at hand. Sometimes they peered through a gunsight before blasting a bird out of the sky so that it could be cooked for supper. For those interested in the ocean (and the potential to exploit said ocean), the sky mattered, and this was the kingdom of birds.
Despite the watery gaze of modern historians, it is time to acknowledge that mariners in the past spent much of their time looking upward.
The need to look up forms the central argument in a recent article I have published in Environmental History on the place of birds in the sixteenth-century Atlantic fisheries. “Fishwork is for the Birds: Human and Birds in the Sixteenth-Century Northwest Atlantic” explores the role of birds, especially seabirds, in shaping the sixteenth-century Terra Nova fishery. This was the vast cod- and whale-fishery known to most as the Newfoundland fisheries, which constituted a site of permanent European occupation and extraction in the far north Atlantic basin. I argue that a full understanding of the fishery must move beyond water and fish, to take into account the things which flew. As they caught cod and boiled whales, European visitors ate birds and bird eggs to sustain themselves. In the long run, this would lead to overfishing and collapse; in the short run, it ensured a permanent European presence in a maritime world already crisscrossed by Indigenous communities, fish, whales, and birds. A close reading of surviving textual and archaeological sources suggests that Europeans Indigenous peoples viewed birds as key to the Northwest Atlantic – birds were guides, sources of food, supernatural beings, and commodities to be traded. There could be no cod without the gannet, no whale-hunt without the auk.
To that end, this essay is meant as a helpful critique of maritime historians, as well as a contribution to the growing field of animal history. To be clear, I offer this as a kind of self-critique first and foremost. As someone who works on the sixteenth-century Northwest Atlantic, it was prompted by a realization that I had been ignoring an important part of the story in my own work for far too long. Along with many other scholars, I have been taken in by the animal history movement and this essay was an attempt to bridge my work on fisheries and colonization with animal history, by focusing on flying creatures. Like many environmental historians in the twenty-first century, I have found that other-than-human animals have a way of inserting themselves into my work at unexpected moments. During the intermittent lockdowns of COVID I spent less time visiting archives and more time staring at animals outside my window, playing Wingspan (digital edition), and rediscovering a love of birdwatching I had long since forgotten. At the same time, as I worked through my project on Terra Nova, I gathered more and more references to creatures other than fish and whales. We are trained to think of ourselves as one kind of environmental historian – I am a fisheries historian, so what else could I study? Out of the way guillemot, I’m trying to find the cod! Only after some time did I suddenly realized that the birds in my sources were staring me back in the face, and that it was time to talk about them. If nothing else, it would let me make a lot of fun puns (birds, like fish, abound in English idiom).
My choice of the northwest Atlantic may have been motivated by my own work on the topic, but I think it is a useful and often overlooked place to study the problem of birds. The northwest Atlantic in the sixteenth century was a place where we must confront an important way that people interacted with birds: by slaughtering and eating them in in shockingly high numbers. (This was, after all, the place where the original penguin began its march to extinction and replacement.) It is a place where Europeans not only differed from Indigenous perceptions of birds, but European conceptions were themselves evolving and sometimes incoherent. Above all, it is a place where people clearly cared a lot about birds. They wrote of them, drew pictures of them, and wistfully talked of their fine flavour and seemingly endless numbers. Seabirds were one of the key food sources for fishworkers, and there are repeated allusions to incoming fishing ships using seabirds as navigational tools to find the fishing grounds of the northwest Atlantic. One quite literally followed the birds to find the fish.
Far harder has been my effort to recover other perspectives on sixteenth-century bird-life: That of Indigenous communities in the northwest Atlantic, and that of the birds themselves. A series of archival and epistemological issues make reconstructing Mi’kmaw, Beothuk, and Innu viewpoints before the late sixteenth century difficult, yet from what we know it is clear that birds were important to these different communities. They were sometimes the key sources of food which allowed communities to thrive in the early spring and mid-summer seasons. Birds were important to many Indigenous cosmologies and appear frequently in surviving artwork. As for the birds themselves, many experienced Terra Nova in the same way that Europeans did: as itinerant migrants. A number of seabirds pass through the northwest Atlantic only in the summer as part of their transoceanic migrations, arriving just as the fishworkers did and often for the same reason. These other-than-human beings had different ways of using coasts and forests than either European or Indigenous groups. Bird-space varied a great deal from species to species but offers the chance to reimagine the northwest Atlantic.
In general, the Northwest Atlantic before the mid-seventeenth century remains a rich and under-explored place for environmental research.
My hope is that my essay is the start of more research, not the final word. There is much we still do not understand. The ways that Europeans used seabirds to navigate the Atlantic and possibly Indian Oceans, for instance, is poorly understood. In general, the Northwest Atlantic before the mid-seventeenth century remains a rich and under-explored place for environmental research. Since finishing the article a year ago, I have had opportunities to dig into the problem a bit more. One thing which has become clearer is the way European thinkers linked birds and fish in their writings. One may find as well that sixteenth century recipe and cookbooks, especially those in Germany, emphasize fish and bird dishes, often intermixing them as substitutes. Things which flew and things which swam were often studied together by mid-century scholars, and whereas today we might purchase a birding guide or a book on fish, these would be combined in the sixteenth century. Combing through printed books, I found that Conrad Gessner’s influential natural histories are mostly devoted to birds and fish, with one following the other.1 A manuscript historia natural written around 1600 is framed around a lengthy section on birds followed by one on fish, crustaceans, and all forms of sea life. Land mammals, by contrast, form a tiny end section.2 A German Fischbuch of the mid-sixteenth century even includes the occasional bird in its discussion of swimming things.3 The French natural historian Pierre Belon went one step further and compared birds to humans, claiming that only one bone (the wishbone) separated us. Fishworkers and birds were considered the same at a basic level, even as birds and fish were studied together. We have clearly just scratched the surface of the multi-dimensional ways that Europeans and others thought about other-than-human animals.
Notes
1 Conrad Gessner, Fischbuch. Das ist ein kurtze, doch volkommne beschreybung aller Fischen so in dem Meer und süssen wasseren, Seen, Flüssen, oder anderen Bächen ir wonung habden., trans. Christoph Froschauer (Zürich, 1563); Conrad Gressner, Historiæ animalivm: Liber 4. De piscium & aquatilium animantium natura (Zurich: Apvd Christ. Froschovervm, 1554).
2 Biblioteca nacional de España. Mss. 4214.
3 Gregor Mangolt. Fischbüchlin von der Natur und eigenschafft der Fischen. Köln, 1575.
Jack Bouchard
Latest posts by Jack Bouchard (see all)
- Fishwork is for the Birds - November 20, 2024
- “Gens sauvages et estranges”: Amerindians and the Early Fishery in the Sixteenth-Century Gulf of St. Lawrence - March 10, 2020
- Presentism in Environmental History: The View from the Sixteenth Century - June 4, 2018