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Studies in Migration Worldwide

 

Seasonal Migrations and Material Culture in the Sixteenth-century North Atlantic

Jack Bouchard

 

     Red Bay, on the southern coast of Labrador, was never meant to be preserved in historical memory. In the sixteenth century, the small inlet near the Strait of Belle Isle was used by Basque whalers as a processing station for turning whales into oil.1 Its proximity to the biologically rich waters between Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River made it an ideal location to butcher and boil the whales that were caught in vast quantities by the skilled mariners from Spain and France. Each summer, the bay would be filled with vessels of all sizes, the shore lined with stoves and huts; each winter it would be devoid of human life. The whaling station likewise doubled as an impromptu trading post during the few warms months of the year. Algonkian-speaking groups, most likely the Innu (or Montagnais), regularly met with sailors and engaged in a brisk exchange.2 A map from the early eighteenth century shows Amerind and Basque domiciles side-by-side along the coast of Red Bay, and the contact was so sustained that an independent Basque-based pidgin language developed in northeast North America.3 But like their European counterparts, the Algonkians did not overwinter in Red Bay. Rather, they too treated the spot as one point in a regular pattern of seasonal migration, arriving in early summer and leaving for their southern forest hunting grounds as the weather cooled. Red Bay thus served as a nexus for two systems of migration of disparate origin that became closely interconnected as the sixteenth century progressed.

     Red Bay was a convenient spot to stop but was never considered as a place of permanent settlement. When the boats stopped showing up each year, sometime in the early seventeenth century, it should have been forgotten. But the Basque mariners left behind a wealth of goods that have been preserved in the mud and cold waters of Labrador: pots, axes, kilns, harpoons and even the remains of entire sailing ships. It is thanks to the discovery of these artifacts by Canadian archaeologists that Red Bay is now a major historical landmark in Labrador, and indeed that we have any record at all of what was an important and sustained seasonal migration by Europeans that would otherwise be invisible in the records.4


 
Figure 1
 
  Seventeenth-century whaling.
Text of the lower, right-hand image: "They place 2 or 3 coppers on a roe and the chopping boat on one side and the cooking boat on the other side to receive the oyle of the coppers, the chopt blubber being boyled is taken out of the coppers and put in wicker baskets or barrows through which the oyle is drained and runs into the cooler which is ½ full of water out of which it is conveyed by troughs into buts or hogsheads." Source: John Churchill, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 4 (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1704), 808.
 

     In many ways, the Atlantic world is defined by the movement of millions of people, both voluntary and involuntary, around the ocean's rim. As a result, the study of migration has gained increasing prominence in the field of Atlantic history.5 Still, Atlantic historians refer to migration almost universally in the sense of one-way movements.6 An initial group of colonists voyages to the Americas; Africans are forcibly deported to the colonies; more and more immigrants relocate from the Old World to the new. In such a narrative, the materiality of migration is predominantly one of a settled society replicating itself. As important as this framework is for understanding the role of population movements in creating a new Atlantic world, it marginalizes more complex and cyclical patterns of migration. In particular, the focus on transplantation has ignored those who migrated about the Atlantic basin not as a permanent relocation but as part of a temporary, seasonal system. The time has therefore come to revisit this historical setting, to consider the different types of migration and the material worlds that the migrants created. This article uses the example of the far North Atlantic in the long sixteenth century to study the unique properties of seasonally migratory societies. In this exploration, we ought to focus on migrant material cultures as a reflection of the cyclical systems that determined how such societies functioned.

     From the late-fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, many coastal communities in northwest Europe embraced long-distance seasonal expeditions to fisheries off the coast of what is today eastern Canada, above all to the cod-rich waters around Newfoundland. These were an extension of the inshore fisheries of northwest Europe that had developed in the Baltic and North Sea during the late medieval period. Yearly voyages to North Atlantic fishing and whaling grounds involved only a small fraction of the western European population but were marked by two important trends. First, the total number of individuals involved was surprisingly large, possibly involving over ten thousand mariners in several hundred vessels by the end of the sixteenth century.7 It was as though an entire city relocated to the Grand Banks for the summer. Second, the same communities participated in the voyages over the long term, sending their populations out each year. These fishing grounds drew mariners from all over the European seaboard, including the Basques, Portuguese, Spanish, Normans, English, Bretons and Dutch. The voyages became deeply ingrained in a particular part of the population, that of the small port towns and emerging cities of the northwestern European littoral. Records from the city of La Rochelle show that in 1523 it served as a provisioning base for numerous ships from several small towns in Brittany—Croisic, Pornic, Benic, Blavet and St. Brieux.8 These otherwise insignificant villages were actively involved in the great movement westwards. When their ships set sail for Terra Nova (as the area around the Gulf of St. Lawrence was then known) in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the small, all-male crews could expect to spend anywhere between three and six months on the small, wooden vessels. It was not uncommon to spend the entire trip at sea without ever setting foot on shore. This meant severing ties with family and experiencing an unstable existence at the mercy of nature for almost half a year. What is most remarkable is that sailors and laborers from all over Europe chose to embark on these voyages year after year, for the better part of three centuries. Each summer the coastal communities of Europe, from the tiny harbors to the major port cities, sent forth their youngest men (and often their richest merchants) to the edge of the known world. In doing so they became participants in a vast system of seasonal migrations.

     In the woodlands of northeast North America, a parallel system of seasonal migration had developed that allowed the relatively small groups of Amerindians living there to take advantage of the region's biological resources, to ensure their survival. The fundamental principle adopted by groups such as the Mi'kmaq of Acadia or the Beothuk of Newfoundland was simple: in the summer, people lived on the coast to consume abundant sea life; in the winter, they dispersed in the forest to hunt game and forage. The migrations were therefore binary in structure, dividing life each year between coast and interior, and between gathering and hunting. The short-term need to find food in the face of seasonal environmental changes became institutionalized as a long-term pattern of regular migration. Mi'kmaq and Beothuk life became rhythmic, a mixture of migration and temporary residence that became the very foundation of the society.9


 
Figure 2
 
  Hunting grounds of Northeast North America
Showing Red Bay harbor and the summer (coastal) and winter (inland)
habitations of Mi'kmaq and Beothuk. Courtesy of the author.
 

     If European migrations involved a demographically consistent subset of the coastal population, the seasonal migrations of many Northeast Amerind peoples involved entire societies (what we could variously call tribes, nations or kinship groups). Thousands of individuals moved long distances overland and retained their cohesion as families and political units. One French missionary on the Gaspé Peninsula, Chrestien Le Clercq, informed his European readers that, "They follow the ancient custom of our first fathers, who remained encamped in a place only so long as they found there the means of subsistence for their families and their herds. In the same manner, also, our Gaspesians decamp when they no longer find the means to subsist in the places where they are living; for, having neither animals to feed, nor lands or fields to cultivate, they are obliged to be almost always wanderers and vagabonds, in order to seek food and the other commodities necessary to life."10 But Le Clercq had missed the organized principles upon which this migration rested, seeing aimless wanderings where there was really a straightforward economic logic. Sites of habitation were chosen for their abundance of food and were revisited to minimize risk—the low ratio of people to land ensured long-term stability. Upon relocation to a new site, property (usufruct) rights over particular spaces were allocated each time to the different families, so that they were clearly conceived of as sites of habitation and exploitation.11

     The Algonkian and European migratory systems did not operate according to a purely human logic. Unlike shepherds and nomads, neither the Algonkians nor the European fishermen were tracking domesticated animals. Rather their migratory systems existed as adaptations to the environmental conditions of the far North Atlantic, and continued to adapt to deep ecological change over the course of the sixteenth century. Both European mariners and Algonkian families arrived on the coast in the late spring because that was when currents, winds, and temperatures all combined to bring the marine life of the far North Atlantic out of the frigid depths and towards the warmer littoral. European and Amerind fishing, whaling, and harvesting coincided with the reproductive cycles of their prey. It was the reliability of this biological rhythm that made these migratory systems possible, yet they were not set in stone. The European expansion into the North Atlantic coincided with a drop in temperatures over the course of the sixteenth century that may have driven whales and codfish southward and westward into new waters off the coast of North America.12 As this cooling continued, in the late sixteenth century the Basque whalers moved operations from the Strait of Belle Ile southwards to the St. Lawrence River (giving their name to the fluvial Isle-aux-Basques) so as to follow their migrating prey. Simultaneously we see the disappearance of the Beothuk in Newfoundland and the movement of the Innu closer to the St. Lawrence River, both of which compelled Europeans to seek new southerly sites of contact. Thus, over time, the points of habitation for both Algonkians and Europeans would shift southwards.

     What sets the European fishing and Algonkian systems of seasonal migration apart from other travels in the Atlantic world is the relationship between habitation and production. Both the Algonkian food collection and the European fishing/whaling required participants to stay in the same place for an entire season. French and English boats bobbed in the waves off of Newfoundland for months at a time, gathering enough fish to justify their difficult voyages. Mi'kmaq families remained on the coast to gather as many fish and shellfish as possible during the warm months of spring, summer, and fall. These were not merely sites of economic production, but of settlement. Men, and in the Algonkian case women, ate, drank, slept, socialized, hunted, traded, gambled, and prayed in these temporary habitations. They were villages in all but name, and vanished after every change of the season.

     To be a seasonal migrant does not mean embracing a life of material poverty. Rather, seasonal migrations require unique material cultures that set their practitioners apart from other societies. In predominantly illiterate societies, few records survive but considerable quantities of artifacts that have been passed down to us. For this reason, some of our best evidence and insight into seasonal migration comes from the material remains of these societies.

     Because of the inherent movement of migratory societies, the Basques and Algonkians gave preference to light, utilitarian goods. Individuals had to carry everything on their person, including European sailors who were allocated minimal cargo space on their ships.13 This discouraged property accumulation and encouraged concepts of value different from those of more settled societies, or even of other colonial societies in the Atlantic world. The small set of permanent material goods that were carried on seasonal migrations could become extremely valuable. A knife, harpoon, bow, or coat needed to be maintained and cherished. Power and status became associated with individual durable items, rather than in the accumulation of vast sums of material wealth. These two seasonal migratory systems, that of the northwest Europeans and the Algonkians, show considerable overlap in material culture.

     Only a small part of a migratory society's goods were constructed of durable materials, and such items tended to acquire a value disproportionate to their numbers. For fishermen and whalers, this meant goods brought from Europe proper. If certain items could be fashioned in the Americas, the tools of the trade—the fish hooks, harpoons, fishing lines, and the very boats that were the foundations of men's livelihoods—had to cross the ocean. Fishhooks were fashioned out of iron and tied to hempen ropes, both of which were made in the coastal communities from which ships sailed. Salt, without which there could be no processed cod, had to be purchased and shipped from Iberia or France. Casks and sacks of provisions to keep the mariners alive all had to occupy valuable cargo space, for fisherman had no time to gather food. European ships were stuffed full with flour, salt, wine, cider, pork, fishing equipment, and wooden barrels (to transport fish back). By the end of the migratory season, almost all of this would have been consumed, but to the individual sailors these durable goods comprised the material life of the voyage.

     In the Amerind context, the permanent goods would primarily have been the stuff of survival: hunting tools, snowshoes, blankets, jewelry, clothing, woodworking tools, and weapons of war.14 Most were made of wood, hide, bone, and stone—metal was exceedingly rare in this part of North America and was used primarily for prestige goods. Some preserved food (mostly dried and smoked fish) would be carried from one migratory site to another, but most food was gathered and consumed locally. Greater familiarity with the environment allowed Algonkians to exploit a wider variety of materials than Europeans: pelts, bark, porcupine quills, bird feathers, antlers, and tree roots all made their way into daily goods. The fact that many of these items were carried and preserved indicates that Algonkians were able to transmute a number of otherwise flimsy materials into permanent goods.

     After the introduction of European goods to the northeast, the material conditions of Algonkian society began to change. In this way the material culture of the two migratory systems converged permanently. With trade between the two societies, metal tools became increasingly valued and sought after by the Mi'kmaq and Beothuk, as they were stronger than traditional implements, while various metal and glass items conferred social status. Iron axes, arrowheads, spearheads, and knives replaced traditional implements. European clothes and food may have been included in the exchange. Thus, Algonkian society moved closer to that of Europe over time, giving increased value to a wider variety of permanent metal material goods. Some of our best evidence for this convergence comes from the records of early European explorers, who frequently stated exactly what Amerind societies were most eager to acquire. It is noteworthy that the first things sought out tended to be simple tools: hatchets, knives, axes. On his 1534 voyage around the Gulf of St. Laurent, Jacques Cartier found "sauvages" who showed a "great joy" when offered "hatchets and knives, rosaries and other merchandise."15 In 1597 the English captain Charles Leigh gave away "coats and knives" to whatever natives he met.16 A chance encounter between Amerindians and one of Henry Hudson's voyages in 1611 saw furs exchanged for hatchets, and even indigenous fur coats for European wool ones.17 Algonkians tended to demand the practical stuff of survival in their exchanges. Trade was carried out within the context of migratory material culture.

     In both the Algonkian and European cases, we should note the ways in which the relationship between migration and permanent goods set these societies apart from others in the Atlantic world. The Mi'kmaq, Beothuk, and Innu all relied on seasonal migration far more than their southern neighbors in New England or the St. Lawrence Iroqouis around what is today Montréal. These latter groups practiced settled agriculture and did not have to rely on seasonal hunting and gathering. The result was that they lived in more permanent wooden structures, including walled towns, and stored food surpluses in a way that the northeastern Algonkians never did. Pottery and prestige goods would have been more common in the settled south, along with agricultural implements such as hoes and storage devices for seed corn.

     A second major group of materials that formed part of the seasonal migratory world consists of items connected with temporary sites of habitation. Both Europeans and Algonkians occupied seasonal sites by constructing shelters from materials available on hand. In both cases the shelters tended to conform to a narrow range of simple designs that had been honed by tradition, such as the one-room shack or the wigwam. Wood was the main resource used for this purpose, though bark, hides, sod, and clay could be incorporated as needed. We have already pointed to the main things Europeans produced: shelter, drying racks, stoves, and boats. Houses and drying racks were built of wooden planks, while some Europeans used local timber to make small skiffs for coastal fishing. Mariners were expected to double as craftsmen, though in some cases skilled carpenters were brought along.18 Documentary evidence suggests that settlements were planned ahead of time. An illustrative case comes from the Basque ships La Conception and Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, both of which sailed for the area around Red Bay in 1566.19 Amongst the goods inventoried on the two ships were: 20 barrels of earth for building ovens; nails for the construction of cabins; and 6000 tiles for roofing of cabins, oil-processing facilities, or use in kilns. The nails and tiles were manufactured goods that could not be produced in Labrador, but were nonetheless used for creating more sophisticated structures on-site. The twenty barrels of earth seems an odd item until we remember that the barren, rocky coasts around the Straits of Belle Ile would have been devoid of the clay necessary for the building of proper ovens. In these ships' inventories, we see that Europeans came to Terra Nova prepared for construction, but were prepared only for simple structures of wood and cheap tile. Many of the material goods created on-site were subsequently left behind, and form the basis of our archaeological evidence for seasonal migrations.

     Algonkian societies were marked by temporary and seasonal creations that would have involved a wider range of objects than with fishermen. Many tools for food production, such as nets, baskets, canoes, and traps, could be produced on-site. Cooking implements such as clay pots, spits, and hide bags were used, and could be discarded afterwards. Algnonkian wigwams were specifically designed to be temporary, strong, and easy to build; they were constructed of bark or hides places over a conical wooden frame. The missionary Le Clercq noted that, "They are so light and portable, that our Indians roll them up like a piece of paper, and carry them thus upon their backs wheresoever it pleases them."20 Unlike European shelters, the design of Mi'kmaq shelters had been honed by families over many generations and were therefore much more spacious and comfortable than fishermen's shacks.

     The line between permanent and temporary materiality should be seen as a fluid one. The clearest indication of this fluidity comes from archaeological research on the Beothuk society of Newfoundland. It appears to have been common for the Beothuk to move into European settlements after they had been abandoned for the season, and to strip the abandoned equipment of valuable metal. The boats and shacks left behind were often held together by iron nails, which the Beothuk subsequently reworked into objects for their own use.21 Fishhooks and pins have been found which had once been simple nails. Thus we can see how one group's temporary material goods could become another's permanent tools.

     A final group of material goods that played a significant part in the far North Atlantic was the commodities produced for exchange. For Europeans, this above all meant the processed fish and the whale oil that were carried from the American coast to Europe, crammed into every crevice of the ship's hold. These consumables had been created out of European tools at the sites of temporary habitation, and would soon be passed on to the marketplace. If fishermen and whalers bequeathed much of their material world to posterity, in their own lifetime they produced goods that traveled the globe. The preserved fish produced in Newfoundland found its way aboard ships sailing to Brazil and Southeast Asia. The cities of the Mediterranean survived on the dry, salted cod that came back to Europe each fall. Whale oil lit lamps in Barcelona, Istanbul, and Moscow. Even cod liver oil, left to ferment in vats on the open boats, was used all over Europe and the Americas. We can therefore see historical connections linking the material culture of the north Atlantic to the wider world.

     Algonkian societies were no strangers to trade and commodity production. Archaeological evidence suggests that pre-contact trade networks ran up and down the various riverine networks of northeast America, above all the St. Lawrence River.22 With the arrival of Europeans, these networks centered on the coast, putting groups such as the Innu and Mi'kmaq in a prime position to act as intermediaries. Before contact, coastal peoples produced various crafts and raw materials (such as valuable stones, dyes, bones) for exchange. After contact, the focus shifted to food (often for malnourished fishermen), crafts, and furs for trade. Even people, taken back to Europe as hostages, were valued for the perceived "backwardness" of their material culture and put on display in the major cities of the continent. Beaver pelts famously became the most desirable material for hats in Western Europe. Over time pelts would come to displace all other trade goods and in some Amerind societies would lead to a significant restructuring towards an export-based economy.23 The need to hunt beavers and deer would displace other survival strategies and encouraged increased reliance on European goods. In the seventeenth century, the need to supply an international market with furs would begin to disrupt the traditional Algonkian migratory system. By the 1660s many of the northeast Amerinds had abandoned seasonal migration entirely in favor of an economy based on exchange with European traders.

     In both the European and Algonkian cases, the pressures of seasonal migrations drove creative solutions to the production of temporary material goods. Both Amerind and European societies were able to maximize their economic efficiency by making as many items as they could on-site rather than carrying them over long distances. Algonkian shelters were custom-designed for the migratory lifestyle and their hunting techniques were adapted to make use of temporary tools as much as possible. Europeans developed fish processing stations that could be rapidly constructed, used, and abandoned without waste of space or time. These practices stand in contrast to other societies in the Atlantic world, which gave preference to the production of permanent goods of all types. While serving in the fisheries, the European mariners lived in a material world unlike either the urban or rural communities of their homeland. In Terra Nova there was no real property (in the legal sense), the foundation of Western concepts of wealth. Unlike their compatriots back home or the settlers in the colonies, Europeans in the fisheries could not live in or own permanent structures of wood or stone. There would have been no horses or oxen, little metal or fresh food, and next to nothing that did not smell of fish, salt, and smoke. The Mi'kmaq and Beothuk would likewise have seemed out of place amongst their maize-growing, longhouse-living brethren to the south.

     Yet in neither instance should we interpret these migratory systems as anomalies. Rather, they were societal adaptations designed to fit the specific ecological niche of the far North Atlantic. Direct migration and permanent settlement were impractical in the frigid subarctic climate, but there were still viable economic reasons to fish and hunt. Seasonal migrations allowed both Algonkians and Europeans to enjoy the benefits of the northern parts of the Atlantic without the risks of other forms of migration.

Jack Bouchard is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, currently working on his dissertation in Atlantic history. His project focuses on maritime commerce in the far North Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular he is interested in the ways that fishing and whaling operations in the subarctic waters off of Canada and Iceland were developed by small communities from all across the European littoral. He is currently researching how early fishing expeditions were organized in Basque, Biscayan French, and Dutch port towns. He can be contacted at jackbbouchard@gmail.com.


 
Notes

1 The remains of the Basque whaling station were discovered only in the 1970s. Since then, many leading scholars have begun to integrate Red Bay into the wider narrative of Basque participation in the Atlantic world. See James Tuck and Robert Grenier, Red Bay, Labrador: World Whaling Capital, 1550-1600 (St. John's, Nfld.: Atlantic Archaeology, 1989). The official Parks Canada webpage of this National Historic Site also has useful information: http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/nl/redbay/index.aspx.

2 Selma Barkham has argued that the Basques were particularly friendly towards Amerindians, in particular the Innu. This resulted in a close trading relationship between the two groups during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She also notes the antagonistic relationship between the Basques and the Inuit of Labrador. Selma Barkham, "The Mentality of the Men behind Sixteenth-Century Spanish Voyages to Terranova," in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700, eds. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

3 The maps, drawn in the early eighteenth century, according to Barkham, may reflect earlier settlements or show a later iteration of the whaling station: "Carte particulière depuis la rivière des Esquimaux jusqu'à la pointe Belsamon dans le golfe de St Laurent à 50°½ du nord," in France, Service Historique de l'Armée de Terre (cote 7 b 67). For the Basque-Algonkian dialect, see Peter Bakker, "'The Language of the Coast Tribes is Half Basque': A Basque-American Indian Pidgin in Use between Europeans and Native Americans in North America, ca. 1540-ca.1640," Anthropological Linguistics 31, 3/4 (1989), 117-147.

4 See the useful website at http://www.heritage.nf.ca/exploration/basque.html. This site, along with others affiliated with Red Bay, includes many helpful images of recovered artifacts.

5 For examples of migration in Atlantic history, see Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000).

6 Only for the late nineteenth century does cyclical migration begin to get attention amongst Atlantic historians. In the Caribbean, for instance, it is now recognized that there was a system of cyclical labor migration among various British colonies: see Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013). European historians, by contrast, have long noted the importance of seasonal migration to the European economy. In her Moving Europeans, Leslie Moch discusses at length the major systems of seasonal migration that allowed European agriculture to function in the pre-industrial age. Leslie Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

7 A number of visitors to Newfoundland in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century gave accounts that included attempts to estimate the number of ships present on the Grand Banks. Later historians combined these estimates with port records to assess the size of the fishery. Giles Havard and Cécile Vidal list 500 French ships in 1580 alone: Giles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l'Amérique Francaise (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), 57. Peter Pope cites 15-18,000 by the later seventeenth century: Peter Pope, "Transformation of the Maritime Cultural Landscape," in Beyond the Catch: Fisheries in the North Atlantic, North Sea and the Baltic, 900-1850, eds. Louis Sicking and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 139.

8 These records are from the Archives Départementales de Charente-Maritime and are collected in David Quinn, New American World, Vol. IV: Newfoundland from Fishery to Colony and Northwest Passage Searches (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 89-90.

9 For an excellent summary of the Mi'kmaq way of life before contact, see: Charles A. Martijn, "Early Mi'kmaq Presence in Southern Newfoundland: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, c.1500-1763," Newfoundland Studies nos. 1-2 (2003), 44-102.

10 Chrestien Le Clercq, trans. William Ganong, New Relations of Gaspesia, with the Customs and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910), 100. Le Clercq's work dates originally to 1691 and describes either the Mi'kmaq or a closely related group of Algonkians.

11 The exact nature of real property rights amongst various Amerind groups is still not fully understood, but was certainly much less rigid than in most European societies. One interesting study in the Canadian context notes the ways in which even deep-woods hunting in the winter was marked by complex patterns of division of land and hierarchical control, and serves as representative of broad patterns amongst northeast Amerinds. Colin Scott, "Hunting Territories, Hunting Bosses and Communal Production among James Bay Cree," Anthropologica 28, 1-2, (1986), 163-173.

12 John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 438-440.

13 Cargo space given to sailors was usually reserved for a portion of the ship's goods that had been allocated to the crew according to the share system. It was more worthwhile for a poor sailor to use his available space to carry valuable cod or furs for reselling than to bring material goods with him.

14 James Tuck, Maritime Provinces Prehistory (Ottawa: Archaeological Survey of Canada, National Museum of Man, 1984).

15 Jacques Cartier, Relation originale du voyage de Jacques Cartier au Canada en 1534 (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2008), 18.

16 Quinn, New American World, 71.

17 Toby Morantz, "Plunder or Harmony? On Merging European and Native Views of Early Contact," in Warkentin and Podruchny, Decentering the Renaissance, 48-49.

18 In 1571, for instance, the Basque Nuestra Senora de Yçiar, out of Deva, sailed for the whaling grounds off of Newfoundland carrying a carpenter, a caulker and even pre-built shallops for whale-hunting. Quinn, New American World, 101-103.

19 Selma Barkham, "Building Materials for Canada in 1566," Bulletin of the Association for Preservation Technology 5, 4 (1973), 93-94.

20 Le Clercq, New Relations of Gaspesia, 100.

21 Peter Pope, Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 73-74.

22 For one example, see Bruce Bourque and Ruth Whitehead, "Tarrentines and the Introduction of European Trade Goods in the Gulf of Maine," Ethnohistory 32, 4 (1985), 327-341.

23 Denys Delage, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993).


 
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