# Question regarding Europeans "secretly" fishing in Atlantic waters close to North America pre-1492 **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 2, 2016, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661 "2016-05-02T02:35:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/41 "2016-05-03T06:03:45Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Yeah well, wouldn’t work for Basque fishermen… you leave something on land in the Basque country and it gets wet. A reason why chistorra is sold uncured and has to be cooked thoroughly (unlike dry chorizo) is that it’s simply not possible to cure it, given the weather patterns in the areas where it’s traditionally made; the nearest dry-curing areas are one or two days from the coast by pre-motors-travel. One of the reasons why many meats which were traditionally nothing more than meat and pepper or meat and salt now have “drying agents” is that they’re being made in places where the weather is not dry enough. I’m not sure if we’re talking at cross-purposes. I meant that, in order to make transatlantic fishing expeditions worthwhile in the days of smallish wooden ships, a drying operation _based on the other side of the ocean_ would enable people to increase the value of their catch/cargo on the (eventual) home journey - That is, a ship would catch lots of fish, land it for processing and drying, then go and catch more - then return home with the dried fish from multiple catches (dried=more compact for shipping). If your point is that the Basque fishermen had no tradition of doing this at home, and so would not attempt it on a foreign shore, That makes sense, and I don’t disagree. I guess I’m just surprised that in an era of smallish wooden vessels, the risk/cost/benefit equation of transatlantic fishing ever could have worked out, even after taking into account the abundance of catch. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/42 "2016-05-03T06:09:38Z")
What you say in the second paragraph. Building drying operations in those distant shores would have required a large change of mindset; sailing for weeks was already normal. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 6:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/43 "2016-05-03T06:19:49Z")
Fair enough, and I think there’s enough in this thread to make me reconsider my view to one of mere surprise, rather than denial. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 10:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/44 "2016-05-03T10:10:07Z")
> [@Mangetout](#): > > Sending lone fishing vessels right across the Atlantic would have been quite risky and difficult, given the state of shipbuilding technology at that time. They wouldn’t be lone vessels, but (small) fleets. ---
**Author:** ![Meurglys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/258eb7/32.png) [@Meurglys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meurglys)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 10:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/45 "2016-05-03T10:43:46Z")
The book I mentioned above only dates European fishing there to 1508, maybe 1504 but another more speculative book, **Terra Incognita** by Rodney Broome, says broadly the same as is quoted above about the Hanseatic League changing it’s rules in the book Cod. It also mentions the increased catches in the mid-15th C by the Basques and their secretiveness about their fishing grounds. It also makes some mention of unexpectedly large salt purchases by some fishermen. Both books agree that eventually fleets numbering into the hundreds were sailing to the Grand Banks annually and also setting up drying operations on shore. ---
**Author:** ![Xema](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/9de053/32.png) [@Xema](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Xema)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/46 "2016-05-03T13:27:55Z")
Much of the prime fishing areas of the Grand Banks are more than 200 miles from the nearest land, and some of the best are more than 300 miles. So there would have been strong incentive to use preservation techniques that did not require land-based drying. ---
**Author:** ![davidmich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@davidmich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidmich)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/47 "2016-05-03T15:00:38Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > What you say in the second paragraph. Building drying operations in those distant shores would have required a large change of mindset; sailing for weeks was already normal. What do you make of this? Plausible? > **[Pre-Columbian contact that probably happened](https://indigenoushistory.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/pre-columbian-contact-that-probably-happened/)** > > Pre-Columbian American history is one of my biggest areas of interest. And one of the things I’ve learned over the course of studying it is that unlike in European history, where “theory unsupporte… 1. Basque fisherman on the northeast coast, 1300s-1400s There’s a lot up in the air on this one, with some people taking it as a given that it happened and others saying there’s no evidence whatsoever. The evidence is compelling but all very circumstantial: the Basque established themselves ridiculously early in the region of the North American northeast (the first record is 1517 but they already appeared well-established with the Native people), a Basque-Algonquian pidgin showed up almost immediately, and adult light-skinned, curly-haired, green-eyed Natives were around the area very early on. In addition, European records show that the Basque had found a mysterious source of cod on an island west of Iceland. They were highly secretive of this source but even when they were cut off from Icelandic fishing they continued to bring in fish from the west. My thought: the evidence isn’t solid enough to say it definitely happened but I would be very very unsurprised if this gets proven to be true in the next decade. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/48 "2016-05-03T15:05:56Z")
Shrug, my thoughts on it are that it’s possible but it doesn’t really matter, and that some of that “evidence” don’t mean shit. Do you know how long does it take for a pidgin (actually I guess it would more properly be called a trade language) to start developing, when people who want to be able to communicate and have no common language meet? As long as it takes them to realize that they want to communicate and have no common language. It would be harder if either party is a “pure monolingual”, but any Basque who didn’t live atop a mountain / in the depths of the woods would not have been one and from what I know about the Algonquins neither would they. ---
**Author:** ![davidmich](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@davidmich](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidmich)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/49 "2016-05-03T15:24:59Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Shrug, my thoughts on it are that it’s possible but it doesn’t really matter, and that some of that “evidence” don’t mean shit. > > Do you know how long does it take for a pidgin (actually I guess it would more properly be called a trade language) to start developing, when people who want to be able to communicate and have no common language meet? As long as it takes them to realize that they want to communicate and have no common language. It would be harder if either party is a “pure monolingual”, but any Basque who didn’t live atop a mountain / in the depths of the woods would not have been one and from what I know about the Algonquins neither would they. Cod: The Fish that Changed the World - History, Recipes, Fishing Stocks (1998) Author Mark Kurlansky goes into medieval Basque relationship to cod fish 14 minutes into this video. Well worth a listen! ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2016, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/50 "2016-05-03T15:33:15Z")
Ajoarriero, dude. That’s not the sum total of medieval Basque relationship to cod but it is the summum 😃 (potatoes not required, unlike marmitako, making marmitako post-medieval). ---
**Author:** ![Meurglys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/258eb7/32.png) [@Meurglys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meurglys)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2016, 10:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661/51 "2016-05-04T10:46:05Z")
If you google for ‘dry fishery’ you’ll find several good cites for the existence of land based drying and salting operations starting in the 16th C. The book I cited above, How Deep is the Ocean, also has two chapters on 16th C fishing on the Grand Banks and details of how the shore operations worked. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-regarding-europeans-secretly-fishing-in-atlantic-waters-close-to-north-america-pre-1492/753661.md?page=2)