Codfish weren't quite that plentiful, but they were certainly worth crossing the Atlantic for. And they were easily transported: Crews salted them aboard ship, dried them when they got home, and then sold them by the hundreds of thousands. The alternative was to go over with two crews, one to fish and another to preserve the catch on shore. The fish were split down the middle and then laid on racks, called flakes, to cure all summer in the Newfoundland air. Either way, the result was a rugged slab of protein that could be treated as indelicately as shoe leather and then soaked back to a palatable form. Soon European ships were shuttling back and forth across the North Atlantic in a hugely lucrative—if perilous—trade.
For the first fifty years the European powers were content to fish off Newfoundland and leave the coastlines alone. They were jagged, gloomy places that seemed to offer little more than a chance to impale one's ship. Then, in 1598, a French marquis named Troilus de Mesgouez pulled sixty convicts from French prisons and deposited them on a barren strip of sand called Sable Island, south of Nova Scotia. Left to shift for themselves, the men hunted wild cattle, constructed huts from shipwrecked vessels, rendered fish oil, and gradually killed one another off. By 1603, there were only eleven left alive, and these unfortunates were dragged back to France and presented to King Henri IV. They were clothed in animal skins and had beards halfway down their chests. Not only did the king pardon them their crimes, he gave them a bounty to make up for their suffering.
It was around this time that Cape Ann was first sighted by Europeans. In 1605, the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain was working his way south from Casco Bay, Maine, when he rounded the rock ledges of Thatcher's, Milk, and Salt islands and cast anchor off a sandy beach. The natives drew for him a map of the coastline to the south, and Champlain went on to explore the rest of New England before returning to Cape Ann the following year. This time he was clawing his way up the coast in some ugly fall weather when he sought shelter in a natural harbor he'd missed on his previous trip. He was greeted by a party of Abenaki Indians, some of whom wore the scraps of Portuguese clothing they had traded for a hundred years before, and they made a great show of hospitality before launching a surprise attack from the woods of Eastern Point. The Frenchmen easily fended them off and on the last day of September, 1606, with the Indians waving goodbye from the shore and the oaks and maples rusting into their fall colors, Champlain set sail again. Because of the sheltered coves and thick shellfish beds he called the place "Beauport"—The Good Harbor. Seventeen years later a group of Englishmen sailed into Beauport, eyed the local abundance of cod, and cast their anchor. The year was 1623.
The ship was financed by the Dorchester Company, a group of London investors that wanted to start tapping the riches of the New World. Their idea was to establish a settlement on Cape Ann and use it to support a fleet of boats that would fish all spring and summer and return to Europe in the fall. The shore crew was charged with building a habitable colony and drying the catch as it came in. Unfortunately, luck was against the Dorchester men from the start. The first summer they caught a tremendous amount of fish, but the bottom dropped out of the cod market, and they didn't even make expenses. The next year prices returned to normal, but they caught almost no fish at all; and the third year violent gales damaged the boats and drove them back to England. The company was forced to liquidate its assets and bring its men home.
A few of the settlers refused to leave, though. They combined forces with a band of outcasts from the tyrannical Plymouth colony and formed the nucleus of a new colony at Gloucester. New England was an unforgiving land in those days, where only the desperate and the devout seemed to survive, and Gloucester wound up with more than its share of the former. Its most notorious citizen was the Reverend John Lyford, whose deeds were so un-Christian—he criticized the Church and groped a local servant girl—as to be deemed unprintable by a local historian; another was a "shipwrecked adventurer" named Fells who fled Plymouth to escape public whipping. His crime was that he'd had "unsanctioned relations" with a young woman.