But then why would they travel farther if they didn’t expect to catch any more fish than they would close to home?
Not from a contemporary perspective.
The Vikings went to the island of Iceland, the island of Greenland, and the island of Vinland. They sailed along the shores of other now-Canadian islands and may have sailed by or landed on easternmost Quebec. Even so, there’s no good evidence that they thought they had been to another continent rather than a string of raggedy, cold, and dangerous islands in the far north.
Columbus wouldn’t have thought they had any connection with his goal. He wanted a western route to tropical Asia. A few frozen islands around the Arctic was the antithesis of the proof he looked for.
Read Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” for a description of the extremely abundant wildlife in the Gulf of St Lawrence - cod schools so thick that “you could practically walk on them”, and codfish 6 feet long and more. Basically, a fortune in fish, theirs for the taking.
The one though was that the Basque fishermen knew of this motherlode but kept it secret to avoid having the whole rest of Europe invading their favourite fishing hole. If they didn’t know about it before Columbus, they sure were there pretty soon after him. I remember reading archaeological investigations of remains of temporary landing sites and fish processing plants with Basque terra cotta tiles as part of the construction, from the very early 1500’s in Newfoundland and Labrador.
It’s pretty sure that L’Anse aux Meadows was not Vinland, Vinland has yet to be found. it may be underwater.
In better fishing grounds, you catch the same number of fish in a shorter time period.
A recent episode of NOVA investigated a possible Viking settlement south of L’Anse aux Meadows, closer to the mainland. It’s very reasonable to assume the Vikings at some point sailed to the mainland, possibly setting foot on shore. Beyond that is a lot of speculation. However, this new possible settlement was found using radar to locate possible structures. With technology like that in play, and if the Vikings ever did build structures on the mainland, then at some point strong evidence may be found.
Even if the Vikings didn’t ever set foot on the mainland I think they deserve credit for reaching North America before Columbus did. IIRC Columbus never reached the mainland until his third voyage. The lure of gold and fairer weather would probably have led to more Viking exploration, they just didn’t find anyplace better to live than home even with the clever marketing of ‘Green’ and ‘Meadow’ lands.
Some interesting evidence has turned up in, of all places, Toronto!
In summary: a part of an axe, with a Basque maker’s mark, was found deliberately buried in a Huron village circa 1500-1530, located in what is now a suburb of Toronto.
This still doesn’t solve the question, as its burial post-dates Columbus, but it is interesting just how far the material travelled via internal trade.
A land base means the catch can be landed, then preserved by salting and drying, making it possible to sail back home with a larger catch/cargo than if the fish was preserved on board.
Sending lone fishing vessels right across the Atlantic would have been quite risky and difficult, given the state of shipbuilding technology at that time.
Even in the 1800s,fish were salted aboard ship. The fish was first placed in brine, then split and given a first salting in the hold, and then given a second salting before being packed away. It wasn’t dried.
The Banks are far enough off shore that it wouldn’t have been practical to move back and forth to shore just to salt the fish. Time shuttling back and forth would also severely limit the time you could spend catching fish.
The Grand Banks were so extremely productive that it was worthwhile to sail there to fish from Europe in the early 1500s. It would have been just as attractive and feasible in the mid 1400s.
However, by the 1510s and 20s the French and Portuguese were regularly sending small fleets to the Grand Banks, and there wasn’t all that much change in shipbuilding technology between say the 1470s/80s and 1510.
Moreover, there is some evidence that the French preferred to eat “green-cured” fish (that is, packed in brine) rather than the “dry-cured” (split, salted and dried) cod more popular elsewhere. This preference is cited (see, e.g., here) as one reason why the French did not pose much challenge to English territorial claims in Newfoundland: the French didn’t need to process on land to the same extent as the English.
Yes there was. That is almost exactly the point of development of the Caravel -a revolution in Iberian ship design.
The caravel was developed by about 1450, however, and would already have been available to fishermen in the late 1400s. Two of Columbus’s ships may have been caravels.
Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” discusses a lot on how the fisheries collapsed through willful blindness by the Fisheries department over the second half of the 20th century. Before that, fish - especially cod - were so incredibly abundant in the Grand Banks and Gulf of St. Lawrence simply because they had not been systematically exploited. A few hundred Basque caravels would have been nothing compared to the factory fishing of recent decades.
Early explorers reported that the fish were so thick, you could almost walk on them when passing through giant schools of cod. Other fish, seals, and wildlife in general were incredibly abundant, since the local natives did not have significant sea-going technology.
Presumably the limiting factor to filling up a ship was fishing technique and the travel distance. Logically, the Basques would have been secretive about heir good fortune. I have yet to hear of anyone approaching this from the opposite tack - were the Basque fishing ports consistently rolling in the riches from fortunate large catches in the late 1400s?
The only reference I have found was in a popular history book:
Cod—The Fish that Changed the World
https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/kurlansky-cod.html
Here’s an extract from the NYT of the first chapter:
The NYT review: A Nice Kettle of Fish
The amount of salt carried would have been however much was needed to preserve as much fish as the ship could carry.
The amount of fish the ship could carry was not a function of where it was being fished.
And Mangetout, I’ve never heard of salting cod and herring on land. Anchovies and sardines yes, because those are day-trippers, but not cod or herring. Those were salted on the ships within our lifetime (and still might, but I’m not sure what effect the anasakis regulations have had).
Because they could fill their ship much faster in rich fishing grounds than they could where there were less fish, even taking travel time into account.
Maybe not salting alone, but salting, then air drying on land is common (and has been for centuries)
This is Point Rosee on the southwestern corner of Newfoundland. That’s actually not as close to the mainland, but is a lot closer to Nova Scotia.
There’s evidence that the Norse Greenlanders engaged in considerable trade with the natives, including a trading post on Baffin Island and hints of others including possibly one in northern Labrador.
Yes. It seems certain that L’Anse aux Meadows was just a way station for a settlement further south.
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.