264 The Codfish in American History. 
val Gov. Winthrop writes sadly, “Our money was now [in 
1640] gone.” (Journal II., 24.) 
In this emergency attempts were soon made to keep money in 
the country by a law which forbade carrying it out on pain of 
forfeiture, and by a fiat money act for coining ninepences and 
ordaining that they should pass current as shillings. Hence 
originated the Pine Tree shillings of the Old Bay State now 
prized so highly by numismatists. The Puritans would not read 
Shakespeare, but, like his Jack Cade, they decreed that “seven 
half penny loaves should be sold for a penny.” 
Fortunately necessity soon invented a more excellent way for 
making money plenty in every man’s pocket. 
A new and better fish market than that in the mother country 
was discovered and utilized to the utmost.. The navigation act 
commanded that all exports be first carried to England, but 
when the market there proved poor, exporters pushed on to 
Spain, Portugal and Italy where it was of necessity good. In 
those rigidly Catholic countries fish was indispensable,— thanks 
to fasts which had been abolished in England. The demand was 
great and increasing. Prices were high, and payments made, 
when desired, in the one thing most lacking and so most desid- , 
erated in the homes of the Puritans,— which was money,— gold 
and silver. Possibly the term cod-fish aristocracy was an 
Americanism coined to define the earliest variety of blue blood 
which cropped out in Boston. Cod had yielded them “ the po¬ 
tentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice ” which 
Dr. Johnson espied in Thrale’s London brewery. 
But the navigation act — based on the assumption that colo¬ 
nies had no rights which a mother-country was bound to re¬ 
spect— laid on the necks of American colonists a yoke too 
heavy to be borne. From the outset it was evaded without any 
conscientious scruples — especially in regard to the trade in 
fish to the West Indies. It was soon so far relaxed as to au¬ 
thorize sending fish to all ports south of cape Finisterre — the 
most northern point in Spain. The fish trade, — mainly in cod, 
expanded and was differentiated. The refuse culls, known as 
poor Jack became in the sugar islands the only luxury of Sambo, 
the medium grades contented his creole master, while the se- 
