102 GILPIN — ON THE COD FISH. 



cause — continents discovered and named from it. Cape Cod, cape 

 Baccaro, the Magdaline penny with its obverse of a stock-fish, 

 and the three diamond port, common at Newfoundland, all attest 

 the estimation which the learned geographer, the wealthy banker, 

 or the poor peasant in Portugal, who toils over his arid vines that 

 ■he may exchange them for fish to keep the fasts of the church he 

 loves so well, have held for centuries this fish in. More strange 

 is it, to think that poised upon his ever fanning fins, fathoms below 

 the ocean, he has been the unwitting agent in so many changes 

 moral, material, and religious, on this earth's surface. But it is 

 rather as he concerns our own Province that he is the subject of 

 this night's paper. Our people, dwelling many of them on the 

 sea-board, and none of them a day's journey from it — find in 

 him an inexhaustible supply of food. The salt provision used 

 of necessity except by the inhabitants of towais, is thus healthily 

 Taried, and the surplus easily cured, finds its wa}^ to the city 

 in single quintals, in tens, or in hundreds, there to be exchanged 

 for tea and molasses, or various clothing for the winter's cold. 

 All along our seaboard dwells a marine population, half 

 farmer half fisher, or "navigator" in provincial idiom, who 

 steadily pursue this employment. As we have seen that the 

 herring, the mackerel, and the gaspereaux, are surface feeders, 

 and are thus dependent upon the winds and the various currents, 

 which sometimes spread their food in acres, close beside our door, 

 and again waft it away seaward for miles, and at all events spread 

 it only in summer, and are thus uncertain in their movements 

 and unconstant in their frequenting certain shores, and disappear 

 always in winter, — so this family are bottom feeders, are certain 

 in their feeding grounds, and always to be found both summer 

 and winter. Thus the employment is certain and the supply 

 Tegular. Following, as we have noticed before, the sun in his 

 vernal path, these bottom feeders approach the shore in spring, 

 from the deep soundings of sixty or seventy fathoms to which 

 they had retired in early fall. It must be that the land and 

 shallow waters warmed by the summer heats are no"w swarming 

 with creatures which they hunt for food, and that in this pursuit 

 they approach the land. During summer and early fall, cod arc 

 cauffht in vnrions sizes, iroin the face of the rock to five or six 



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