by DGR News Service | Mar 26, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling, Repression at Home, The Problem: Civilization, Toxification, White Supremacy
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
This article originally appeared on Mongabay.
by Hyury Potter and Fabio Bispo on 17 March 2021 |
Translated by Claudia Horn
- The Amazônia Minada reporting project has revealed 1,265 pending requests to mine in Indigenous territories in Brazil, including restricted lands that are home to isolated tribes.
- Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, Funai, holds 114 reports of isolated tribes, of which 43 are within Indigenous lands targeted by mining.
- In addition to the spread of diseases such as COVID-19 and malaria, mining activity poses health threats from the mercury used in gold extraction, which contaminates rivers and fish.
- Indigenous groups have filed a lawsuit with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court against the government, demanding protection for isolated Indigenous peoples.
With much of the world under some kind of lockdown over the past year, working from home has become the default for many. But not for miners in Brazil, who have stepped up their efforts to start exploiting Indigenous territories in the Amazon, including areas that are home to isolated tribes.
Mining on demarcated Indigenous lands is prohibited under Brazil’s Constitution, but that didn’t stop miners from filing 143 requests last year, the highest number in 24 years, with the National Mining Agency (ANM). Of those requests, 71 are for areas where isolated Indigenous tribes live, according to data from Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs. Indigenous activists and researchers warn that isolated groups have no contact with society and are highly vulnerable to any disease brought from outside.
In a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Federal Court last July, the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) and eight political parties denounced illegal mining in areas of identified isolated peoples. They called on the federal government to adopt measures and avert what they called a “real risk of genocide” due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet even as the pandemic was entering its fifth month in Brazil, the lawsuit revealed the government had not implemented any protective measures in several areas that are home to isolated peoples.
The threat from mining, which can bring disease into rural forest areas, becomes tangible when considering the hundreds of requests from mining companies to operate on lands where isolated peoples live. Of the 114 reports of isolated peoples that Funai holds, 43 are within 26 Indigenous territories in the Amazon. These same territories are targeted by at least 1,265 requests for prospecting or mining activities, according to mapping data from the Amazônia Minada reporting project as of Jan. 29 this year.
“Isolated peoples have a strong connection with their environment,”
says Leonardo Lenin, who worked for 10 years with Funai’s unit for isolated ethnic groups, and who is currently executive secretary of the Observatory of Human Rights of Isolated Peoples and Recent Contact (OPI).
“Any invasion has a violent impact on their lives because the land is what guarantees their well-being,” he says.
Luísa Pontes Molina is an anthropologist who investigates illegal mining in the Indigenous Munduruku territories in the state of Pará. She warns of the health risks that mining poses to Indigenous peoples. In addition to spreading diseases such as malaria and COVID-19, mines harm the environment. Liquid mercury, used to bind gold particles, contaminates the rivers and fish that Indigenous communities depend on, according to a recent study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and WWF Brazil. The study found traces of mercury in the entire population tested in the central region of the Tapajós River in Pará state, which includes the municipalities Itaituba and Trairão where the Munduruku people live.
Molina says there is evidence of isolated people living in the municipality of Jacareacanga, in southwest Pará, which have not been reported to Funai. That region is also the subject of 106 requests for gold mining that overlap with the protected Munduruku Indigenous Territory. Funai records at least one isolated Indigenous community in this area.
“Many communities of the Alto Tapajós have been reporting of and denouncing illegal mining and other crimes in the region since 2015. This also includes invasions near isolated groups. But despite these reports, Funai’s budget for inspection is cut more and more,” Molina says.
She adds she has tracked cases of illegal mining and public enforcement, and found that,
“in October 2020, just 2,000 reais [$345] were allocated toward monitoring and inspection in the region of Tapajós.” The study is still in progress, but preliminary findings suggest “state neglect in fighting illegal mining on indigenous lands,” Molina says.
The Amazônia Minada project, an initiative of the InfoAmazonia journalism outlet, cross-references the location of mining applications filed with ANM against demarcated Indigenous territories in the Amazon. Its Twitter feed, @amazonia_minada, tracks ANM processes in real time and tweets when a new mining application is filed within a protected area of the Amazon.
18 mining requests for restricted lands
Most of the mining requests are for land within demarcated territories where most of the Indigenous inhabitants have already made contact with the outside world but where some groups also live in isolation. But there are also 18 mining applications targeting four protected areas with the special classification “restricted,” which means they have been demarcated based on the presence only of isolated peoples.
Six of these requests were filed by the company Bemisa Holding, controlled by the Opportunity Group. Its owner, banker Daniel Dantas, was investigated for financial crimes and convicted in 2008 on bribery charges, but was acquitted in 2016 on a technicality. All six of Bemisa’s mining requests are for copper prospecting on Piripkura land in the state of Mato Grosso. Although the territory was declared restricted in September 2008, ANM in the preceding months still granted exploration permits for the company’s six applications, valid until 2012. On Jan. 19, 2021, the Piripkura land became the target of another application for gold mining, filed by the Miner Cooperative of Vale do Guaporé.
The isolated Piripkura people first made contact with the outside world in 1989, when Funai worker Jair Candor encountered two of the community members who had remained on their land after invasions by outsiders. Over the next three decades, there have been 14 contacts with these two individuals. According to Candor’s account in the documentary Piripkura, evidence of traces of their life in the area guarantees the sustained restriction of the land. Any sign of the pair’s track is photographed proof. All the material is kept secret so as not to reveal the location of the area; the two men are believed to be the last members of the Piripkura ethnic group.
Mining giant Vale, responsible for the two biggest mining-related disasters in Brazilian history, in Mariana and Brumadinho, requested access to the territory of the isolated Tanaru, in Rondônia state. Its application to mine platinum came in 2003, three years before the territory was officially declared restricted. However, the ANM system shows the company managed to unblock the application in 2018. There is no record of ANM’s approval of this application.
Last year, Vale announced to its shareholders that it would abandon all its mining applications within Indigenous lands, only to back down right after.
It has more than 200 active applications within Indigenous lands, 62 in areas where isolated peoples live. Two applications are in the land of the isolated Ituna/Itatá nation in southwest Pará, through the company Mineração Santarém Ltda.
Vale has denied having any active mining bids in the Tanaru and Ituna/Itatá territories, saying that the processes “are no longer pursued by the company since 1989.” Although ANM records show 200 applications on behalf of the group and its various ventures, Vale says “most of these processes were dropped by Vale itself, while pending approval by the ANM.” However, application number 886.223/2003 in the ANM registry, which intersects with the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, does not indicate Vale has given up on its request to mine there.
The Ituna/Itatá land spans 1,420 square kilometers (548 square miles), about the size of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city. It was declared restricted in 2011, following three decades during which Funai workers collected evidence of the presence of isolated indigenous peoples. However, the territory is a constant target of miners, landowners, ranchers and politicians. Zequinha Marinho, a senator from Pará, has even requested the end of the restricted status for the Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Territory through a legislative decree, saying there are no isolated tribes in the region according to “knowledge of the facts.”
In February 2020, an anthropologist linked to the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro was arrested for entering the Ituna/Itatá protected area without authorization. He had tried to block an intervention by the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, to remove cattle from the land. In November 2020, the Federal Public Ministry in Pará (MPF-PA) also recommended the suspension of an expedition by Funai. According to the agency, any entry into the area should only be allowed after the removal of invaders who had occupied the Indigenous land and who presented a threat to the life and security of public officials as well.
“You have to leave the Indigenous people in their territory, but that doesn’t happen. What we usually see is permissiveness from the state,”
says a Funai official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The Ituna/Itatá lands, for example, are being taken over by squatters. Precisely because they are isolated, these people will not be vaccinated. The precaution with them must be permanent in regard to COVID-19 and any other disease that a miner or squatter can transmit,” the official says.
Denialism and indifference
In July 2020, when Indigenous organizations were already counting nearly 400 Indigenous victims of COVID-19, APIB and eight parties filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Federal Court to force the government to protect Indigenous peoples. Justice Luís Roberto Barroso ordered emergency “situation room” meetings: one for Indigenous peoples and another specifically to monitor regions of isolated peoples and peoples of recent contact.
The meeting on measures for isolated peoples was coordinated by the Institutional Security Cabinet (GSI) of the president’s office, and denounce as “mild” by Beto Marubo, a representative of APIB and leader of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja).
“By calling on the Supreme Federal Court, we hoped to end the denialism of the Bolsonaro government, but it is clear that this has not happened and will not happen,” Marubo said. “The situation room meetings are coordinated by GSI members who have no idea how to protect an isolated Indigenous community. In practice, they are indifferent.”
At the end of July, with Brazil on track for the most COVID-19 deaths after only the U.S., the GSI admitted in a petition to the court that eight Indigenous lands did not have any kind of barrier to prevent people from entering. Three of them are home to isolated peoples: Alto Rio Negro (in Amazonas state), Alto Turiaçu (Maranhão), and Enawenê Nawê (Mato Grosso).
Eight months since APIB filed its lawsuit with the court, and with the COVID-19 death toll among Brazil’s Indigenous people at more than 1,000, the Bolsonaro government has presented no protection plans that Indigenous organizations, medical experts from Fiocruz, and other associations have been able to approve. Three versions have been rejected by Justice Barroso, and a fourth is under consideration.
Indigenous rights activists warn the scenario may only get worse, citing a bill proposed by the Bolsonaro administration that aims to allow mining activity on Indigenous lands. This bill, known as 191/2020 , was shelved last year by Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of the lower house of Congress at the time. But there are fears that it will be revived under the newly inaugurated speaker, Arthur Lira, whose campaign was supported by Bolsonaro.
On Feb. 15, Bolsonaro told supporters and the press during an event in São Francisco do Sul, Santa Catarina state, that “we have to regularize” the exploitation of Indigenous lands. He said it would be “very good because Indigenous people are no longer people who are living isolated, but they are integrating more and more into society.”
That same day, Mongabay requested clarification from the federal agencies ANM, Funai and GSI; as well as from Bemisa Holding. We received no responses from any of them by the time this report was originally published in Portuguese.
UPDATE
On February 15, we asked for a response from Bemisa on the processes mentioned in the report, but there was no feedback. After the publication of this article on March 17, the mining company wrote to Mongabay and informed that in 2011 it asked to waive the six requirements at Piripkura Indigenous Land, in Mato Grosso state. However, all processes are still active in the ANM system and on behalf of Bemisa.
This report is part of Amazônia Minada, a special project of InfoAmazonia with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund/Pulitzer Center.
This story was first reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and published here on our Brazil site on March 2, 2021.
![On the Proposed Mining of “Thacker Pass, Nevada” [Dispatches from Thacker Pass]](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2021/03/SarahGPoemPhoto_sm-980x735-1-1.jpg)
by DGR News Service | Mar 22, 2021 | Alienation & Mental Health, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Human Supremacy, Indigenous Autonomy, Listening to the Land, Movement Building & Support, Music & Art, The Problem: Civilization
Upon the Proposed Mining of “Thacker Pass, Nevada”.
A poem by Sarah Gar, a visitor to the land of the Paiute and Shoshone people and the sagebrush creatures.
It’s quiet here.
And I’m not talking
about experimental silence,
American guru silence,
or any sleek human site
that seeks inner peace
(and other noise)
to drown out the drawing-down
and drying-up of every sacred thing.
I’m talking about silence
of lands beyond witness,
a silence embedded and embedding,
the one nestling in the nighthawk’s cries
and cradling these words.
Tall sagebrush touches it —
4 feet 33 millimeters
of branching space,
where voice and silence
play by listening,
weaving water and light
without worrying who
appears as what
before whom.
It’s as if nothing can be said
to arrive or leave in wild places.
Even our breath cannot be said
to enter this place
where it meets other selves
always here and already inside.
But when Grandmother comes,
wakes the fire with practiced taps,
the flames flare in reminder
of whose Spirits keep this place.
Even in “deserted” places
dry soil knows to gather
soft and firm around water,
forming delicate strata
to nourish roots
and catch the drifting seed.
We, too, know to gather,
asking if we are also this place,
and if so,
how we can return.
To get here
we must track ourselves
by species memory,
a long way back,
to when losing one’s way
first became possible.
We trace back to the end’s beginning,
when the volume had to rise,
to create an endless diversion,
to mask the pesky screams
of women and slaves.
Yes, we tracked ourselves,
even did a blood spatter analysis.
A few facts emerged to tell us:
- We are the losing and the lost.
- There’s nothing lonelier than empire, and nothing stranger than killing one’s beloved.
These facts cleared the room.
Even history couldn’t erase them.
The clock ticked.
Corporations continued to cut down the ancient ones.
And so we rose, rotating and revolving
pulled forward by the falling-apart feeling
which is love.
This must be love because,
as sung by Paiute and Shoshone,
danced by pronghorn and coyote,
this place would hold forever,
streams passing
through trouts’ gills,
sun glancing off scales
and into eagle’s eyes
as she watches over.
Past and future
would nest together,
quiet as grouse eggs,
speckled and constellating,
in tacit reference to each other.
Birth and death would spiral together,
strong and fragile as pyrg shell,
and we would learn again
to listen and to hold
this language,
the spinning of the silence
that found us first,
soft as jackrabbit,
buried as bones,
strong spines of sage
and mountain song.
As a former English professor from the East Coast, Sarah now focuses on writing and activism in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry grieves patriarchal and colonial violence, summons reverence for the natural world, and upholds matriarchal cultures which cherish life.
by DGR News Service | Mar 18, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, The Problem: Civilization
This article is the second part of a series that originally appeared on Climate and Capitalism. You can read the first part here.
by Ian Angus
“In the sixteenth and partly still in the seventeenth, the sudden expansion of trade and the creation of a new world market had an overwhelming influence on the defeat of the old mode of production and the rise of the capitalist mode.” — Karl Marx[1]
Accounts of transatlantic trade in the 1500s typically focus on what Perry Anderson calls “the most spectacular single act in the primitive accumulation of European capital during the Renaissance” — the plunder of precious metals by Spanish invaders in South and Central America.[2] Year after year, well-guarded convoys carried gold and silver to Europe, simultaneously enriching Spain’s absolute monarchy and destabilizing Europe’s economy.
Spain’s treasure fleets certainly played a big role in the long-term development of European capitalism, but they were not alone in creating a disruptive transatlantic economy. While Spanish ships carried silver and gold, a parallel trade involving far more ships developed far to the north. Historians of capitalism, including Marxists, have paid too little attention to what Francis Bacon called “the Gold Mines of the Newfoundland Fishery, of which there is none so rich.”[3]
‘Swarming with fish’
Remarkably little is known about the Venetian navigator who sailed from England to North America in 1497. His real name was Zuan Cabotto, but he was known as Juan Caboto in Spain and John Cabot in England. In 1496, Henry VII granted him letters patent “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians.”[4] With financial backing from Italian bankers and merchants from the west England port of Bristol, he sailed west on May 2, 1497, in a small ship with about 18 crew.[5] Thirty-five days later, he “discovered” new territory on the far side of the Atlantic.
Of course, the large island that became known as Newfoundland had been discovered long before: there is evidence of human settlement on the island nine thousand years ago, and the Beothuk people had been there for 1500 years when Cabot claimed it for the English king and the Catholic Church. Cabot wasn’t even the first European — Viking explorers briefly settled in Newfoundland around 1000 CE, and it is possible that Basque and Portuguese fishers sailed to the cod-rich waters earlier in the 1400s. Nevertheless, Cabot’s rediscovery of Newfoundland is important to the history of capitalism, because it alerted Europe’s fast-growing merchant class to a major opportunity to profit by expropriating nature’s free gifts.
Like Columbus, John Cabot was seeking a direct route to Asia — as historian Peter Pope writes, he “sought Japan, but his greatest discovery was cod.”[6] Shortly after the Matthew returned to Bristol in August 1497, the Milanese ambassador in London wrote to the Duke of Milan:
“They assert that the Sea there is swarming with fish which can be taken not only with the net but in baskets let down with a stone, so that it sinks in the water. I have heard this Messer Zoane [Cabot] state so much. These same English, his companions, say that they could bring so many fish that this Kingdom would have no further need of Iceland, from which there comes a very great quantity of the fish called stockfish.”[7]
Gold rush
Within a decade of Cabot’s return, fishing “opened up in Newfoundland with the enthusiasm of a gold rush.”[8] By 1510, dozens of ships from France, Spain and Portugal were travelling to the land of cod every spring, and by mid-century there were hundreds. The Newfoundland fishery drove “a 15-fold increase in cod supplies … [and] tripled overall supplies of fish (herring and cod) protein to the European market.”[9] Cod, formerly a distant second to herring, comprised 60% of all fish eaten in Europe by the late sixteenth century.[10]
Some accounts of early modern fishing give the impression that Newfoundland cod were caught by brave independent fishers who crossed the Atlantic in tiny boats. A few may have done that, but not enough to a cause the immense leap in commodity fish production that historians have dubbed the North Atlantic Fish Revolution. That was accomplished by thousands of skilled fishworkers who crossed the ocean in large ships that were financed by merchant capitalists. Transatlantic fishing was big business from the beginning.
Beginning in the 1500s, the Newfoundland fishery developed in two main forms that continued for centuries.
- Inshore: Most fishers targeted the cod that come near land to prey on smaller fish each summer. The fish were caught from small open boats and taken ashore every day for processing.
- Offshore: Late in the century, French ships began working the Grand Banks, a large, relatively shallow area that extends about 300 kilometers (200 miles) south and east of Newfoundland, where cod gather to spawn. The fish were caught and preserved on the ships, eliminating frequent trips to shore.
Both fisheries developed factory-like operations, with a structured division of labor between workers skilled in the various tasks of catching and preparing fish.
The offshore fishery caught and preserved fish on ships similar to the Dutch herring busses described in Part One. In each ship, up to 20 men worked long days in production lines. The cod were caught by fishers, each working several baited lines at once. Preparers beheaded, gutted, split, and deboned the fish. Particularly valuable parts such as the liver were set aside, and the rest of the animal was heavily salted and stacked in the ship’s hold. When the hold was full of what was called wet or green (actually pickled) cod, the ship returned to Europe. Some made two or three roundtrips each year.
Inshore operations involved more ships and workers, but were more time-limited, because the best inshore fishing occurred from June to August, when millions of capelin (a small smelt-like fish) spawn in shallow waters, attracting hungry cod.[11]
Each spring, cargo ships travelled from western Europe to bays and inlets along the Newfoundland coast. Each ship carried up to 150 workers, many barrels of salt, and a dozen or so open fishing boats that had been built in Europe, then disassembled for compact storage. Long beaches known for particularly good fishing attracted multiple ships, so some seasonal fishing camps housed thousands of workers at a time.
After landing in May or early June, the workers assembled their boats and built wharves, sleeping huts, work sheds, and outdoor drying racks. As on the offshore ships, there was a factory-like division of labor. Three or four men rowed out in each small boat every morning. When a boat was full — each could hold hundreds of fish — it returned to shore, where skilled workers beheaded, gutted, split, and deboned the cod. Summers in Newfoundland were too warm for the Norwegian method of freeze-drying, so the fish was lightly salted before being laid out in the sun and turned frequently for several weeks. The result, known as salt-cod or Poor John, was tastier than Norwegian stockfish, and largely replaced it as the leading mass-produced food commodity in England and southern Europe.
The cod were so plentiful that often more were caught and dried than one ship could carry, so an intermediate trade developed in which Dutch merchants on sack ships purchased dried fish from Newfoundland beaches during the season and resold it in Europe.
Through the 16th century, cod fishing was concentrated on Newfoundland’s east and south coasts. A different extractive industry developed near the island’s northwest corner.
The world’s first oil boom
In the 1970s, Selma Huxley Barkham radically changed our understanding of the 16th century fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador. With little institutional support — she taught English part-time to pay her bills — the Canadian archivist spent years in northern Spain, digging through libraries and archives in search of references to 16th century Basque voyages to Terranova. Her discoveries rewrote the history of sixteenth century Newfoundland: she found convincing evidence that in addition to the thousands of men who came for cod, up to 2,000 Basque whalers spent each year in the area now known as the Strait of Belle Isle, between the island’s northern peninsula and the Labrador mainland. Following her leads, archaeologists have found several sunken ships and the remains of over a dozen 16th century whaling stations on the Labrador shore.
Basques from France and Spain had dominated commercial whaling in Europe for five hundred years. Hunting in the Bay of Biscay, they primarily targeted bowhead and right whales, which were large — up to 17 meters long — but much smaller than the animals that deep-sea whalers later hunted to near-extinction. Rights and bowheads were slower, and — a major advantage to the rowers who had to tow them ashore — they remained afloat when killed.
Basque merchants sold salted whale meat, which could be eaten on holy days because the whales were thought to be fish, and baleen, a flexible cartilage that was used to make corsets, buggy whips, umbrellas and such. But the big money maker was whale oil, produced by slowly heating blubber in large cauldrons. Barrels of Basque whale oil were used as far away as England and Germany for textile manufacturing, lighting, soap-making, and caulking ships.[12]
At some point, probably about 1530, Basque fishers discovered that each summer and autumn bowhead whales migrated in large numbers through the Strait of Belle Isle, where they could be caught relatively easily.[13] Intensive whale hunts soon began, with hundreds of teams of Basque whalers travelling annually to the Strait in “ships as large as anything afloat … some of them were capable of carrying up to two thousand barrels of whale oil, which weighed three hundred pounds each.”[14] For four to six months each year they lived and worked in whaling stations that were similar to the temporary cod fishing villages, with a major exception: instead of drying racks they built tryworks — rows of large stone ovens sheltered by tile roofs, where blubber was boiled down.
Whaling was dangerous work for the men and brutal for the whales. When whales were sighted from shore, several teams set out in chalupas — 8-meter long open boats — each crewed by a harpooner, a steersman and four or five oarsmen. Archaeologist James Tuck describes the usual method of attack:
“Whales were approached by rowing the boats to within as close as a meter, at which point the whale was harpooned with a barbed iron harpoon .… [on a rope that was attached] to a “drogue” or drag which the whale towed through the water until it tired…. Often several harpoons were thrust into the same whale and even then the chase might have taken hours and covered miles before the whale could be approached safely and killed by repeated thrusts of a razor-sharp lance. … Once the whale was killed it was towed by several boats — often against tide and wind — to one of the shore stations for processing.”[15]
On shore, flensers (whale butchers) removed the whale’s blubber in long spiral strips and cut it into thin pieces. Tryers heated the blubber slowly in copper cauldrons, controlling the temperature to avoid burning, and periodically skimming off oil and moving it to cooling pots, a process that required days of constant attention and work. The cooled oil was stored in 200-liter barrels that coopers assembled onsite.
Barkham’s research showed that whaling operations in the Strait of Belle Isle were “a resounding financial success from their inception.” She estimated that the Basque whalers produced upwards of 15,000 barrels of whale oil each year, and sold most of it on the way home in Bristol, London and Antwerp.[16]
But as so often happens when natural resources become mass commodities, the exploitation of whales in Newfoundland soon undermined the very basis of the industry. It’s obviously impossible to get exact numbers, but an authoritative study estimates that “as many as a third of the western Atlantic bowhead’s pre-hunt numbers were killed during the course of the 16th century.”[17] Bowhead whales reproduce slowly — females take 15 years to reach sexually maturity, and typically they have only one calf every 3 or 4 years — so the removal of a third of the migrating whales in a few decades had devastating effects.[18] By the early 1680s, overhunting had so reduced the bowhead population that some ships returned to Europe half-empty.
Over the next two decades, whalers shifted their hunts west to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and north to the Arctic, and intensive whaling in Newfoundland’s coastal waters ceased for nearly 300 years.
England vs Spain
Declining catches undoubtedly motivated Spanish Basques to hunt elsewhere, but the geographic shift was made more urgent by conflicts on the far side of the Atlantic.
For most of the 1500s, English ships and fishers were a distinct minority in the Newfoundland fishery, but by the end of the century Spanish ships had all but disappeared, and the English presence was growing rapidly. In the 1570s, about 50 English ships travelled to Newfoundland each year; by 1604 the number had tripled.[19] To understand how and why that happened, we must take a brief detour into European geopolitics.
Part 3 of this article will discuss how England replaced Spain, the role of the Newfoundland fishery in the development of English capitalism, and the environmental impact of early capitalist fishing.
You can find the original publication of Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism here: Part 1 Part 2
Notes
[1] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, (Pelican, 1981) 450-1.
[2] Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 61.
[3] Quoted in D. W. Prouse, A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial and Foreign Records (London: MacMillan & Co., 1895), 54.
[4] “First Letters Patent granted by Henry VII to John Cabot , 5 March 1496,” The Smugglers’ City, Department of History, University of Bristol.
[5] By comparison, five years earlier Columbus had sailed from Spain with three ships and a crew of 86.
[6] Peter E. Pope, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot (University of Toronto Press, 1997), 176.
[7] Quoted in Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea (Washington: Island Press, 2007), 33. Stockfish was dried cod.
[8] Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker Publishing, 1997), 51.
[9] Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research, 2019, 2.
[10] Kurlansky, Cod, 51.
[11] Although the cod are gone and capelin stocks are much reduced, the annual “capelin roll” still attracts large numbers of seabirds, whales, and tourists to beaches in Newfoundland and Labrador. The fish swim close to the beach, where they can be easily caught in small nets or even buckets.
[12] Brad Loewen, “Historical Data on the Impact of 16th-Century Basque Whaling on Right and Bowhead Whales in the Western North Atlantic,” Canadian Zooarchaeology, no. 26 (2009): 4.
[13] Until recently, historians believed that Basque whalers caught right whales in summer and bowhead whales in autumn, but DNA analysis of whalebones shows that bowheads made up almost the entire catch. B. Mcleod et al., “Bowhead Whales, and Not Right Whales, Were the Primary Target of 16th- to 17th-century Basque Whalers in the Western North Atlantic,” Arctic 61, no. 1 (March 2008), 61-75.
[14] Frederick W. Rowe, A History of Newfoundland and Labrador (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1980), 46.
[15] James A. Tuck, “The World’s First Oil Boom,” Archaeology 40, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1987), 51.
[16] Selma Huxley Barkham, “The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536-1632 — A Summary,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (December 1984), 518.
[17] Loewen, “Historical Data,” 15.
[18] The population impact was increased by the common practice of targeting mother-calf pairs: the calf was easy to kill, and the mother could then be harpooned when she approached to save her child.
[19] Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland, 1577-1660 (University of Toronto Press, 1969), 602, Kindle.
