Early Importance of Cod-Fishing. 263 
full of fish-of-cod. When the people have a desire for fish 
they send out two or three persons in a sloop who in three or 
four hours bring them as much as the whole community of about 
fifty families require for a whole day. ” Had Plymouth been 
nearer the grand hive of cod it would to-day probably outrank 
Gloucester as much as Gloucester outranks it. Within five years 
after the forefathers landed, Gov. Bradford describes a great 
ship as clearing from there laden with fish well-fitted to go to 
Bilboa or St. Sebastian with a cargo that would sell there for 
£1800. 
The larger Puritan colony at Boston a decade later than the 
planting of Plymouth, was attracted thither by fishing pros¬ 
pects. When an early preacher to settlers in that quarter was 
expatiating on their having adventured into the wilderness for 
freedom of worship, Cotton Mather writes that one auditor 
bluntly ejaculated; “Sir you are mistaken, our main end in 
coming here was to catch fish. ” The Puritans knew that in 
1563 for the increase of fishing parliament had declared it un¬ 
lawful to eat meat on Wednesdays and Saturdays under a pen¬ 
alty of £3 for each offense. They needed no such law to convince 
. them that codfish were a richer mine than any one held by the 
King of Spain on whose dominions the sun never set. 
All along the Massachusetts seaboard fishing became the lead¬ 
ing industry and main reliance almost from the start. The 
armorial bearing of the state was early understood by Indians 
to be the cod-fish. That totem, as the aborigines would term it, 
was carried by her envoys to the New York Iroquois, a distant 
tribe, in 1690. Puritan punsters proclaimed a fish the best em¬ 
blem of justice because both bore Scales. The Indian name for 
a Puritan was Kinshon , that is fish. 
At every step in the history of New England the value of fish¬ 
eries was clear. That colony was planted and largely devel¬ 
oped by the aid of capital furnished from the mother country. 
The exports from the new country to the old — furs, lumber, 
fish and everything else were required for paying old debts or 
for the purchase of new supplies. No import of money from 
England could be hoped for. Nor could the emigrants keep the 
little they had brought over. Within ten years after his arri- 
