ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a case study of one colonial product in one European country, namely, codfish in France. From the early sixteenth century, the French cod fishery expanded at a rapid pace in all the major ports of the Atlantic seaboard. Parkhurst apparently overestimated the number of Spanish ships, probably by counting French Basque ships among them, for Barkham has identified only about 15 ships outfitted for cod-fishing in the Spanish Basque ports, according to a census of 1571. Little known in the Middle Ages, in the sixteenth century codfish became the most widely consumed fish in France, surpassing hake and even herring, the king of medieval fishes. Codfish was sought after and widely consumed because it satisfied a French longing for space and a desire to consume the New Land. The French cartographers of the Dieppe school were the first Europeans who regularly used the name New Land on their maps.
