1 “Icelui donc ayant fait batir un tres beau navire … pour l’envoyer aux Terres-Neuves a la pecherie de la molue, qui etait son trafic le plus ordinaire, se mit en la fantasie d’y faire le voyage dedans.” Jean-Arnaud Bruneau de Rivedoux, Histoire veritable de certains voiages perilleux & hazardeux sur la mer, ausquels reluit la justice de Dieu sur les uns, & sa misericorde sur les autres : tres-digne d’estre leu, pour les choses rares & admirables qui y sont contenues (Paris: Thomas Portau, 1599), 108–109.

2 For the early historiography on the fishery, see Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven/Toronto: Yale University Press/Ryerson Press, 1940); Michel Mollat, ed., Histoire des pêches maritimes en France (Toulouse: Privat, 1987); D. W. Prowse, A History of Newfoundland from the English, Colonial, and Foreign Records with Numerous Illustrations and Maps (London: Macmillan and Co., 1895); Charles de La Morandière, Histoire de la pêche francaise de la morue dans l’Amérique septentrinale, vol. 1, Des origines à 1789 (Paris: G.-P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1962); Georges Musset, Les Rochelais à Terre-Neuve, 1500–1789 (La Rochelle: by the author, 1899); Édouard Gosselin and Charles de Beaurepaire, Documents authentiques et inédits pour servir à l’histoire de la marine normande et du commerce rouennais pendant les xvi^e et xvii^e siècles (Rouen: H. Boissel, 1876). For a representative sample of more recent work, see Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Selma Huxley Barkham, “The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador 1536–1632—A Summary,” Arctic 37, no. 4 (1984): 515–19; Michael M. Barkham, “La industria pesquera en el País Vasco peninsular al principio de la Edad Moderna: ¿una edad de oro?” Itsas Memoria. Revista de estudios marítimos del País Vasco 3 (2000): 29–75; Brad Loewen and Vincent Delmas, “Les occupations basques dans le golfe du Saint-Laurent, 1530–1760. Périodisation, répartition géographique et culture matérielle,” Archéologiques 24 (2011): 29–61; Laurier Turgeon, “Codfish, Consumption and Colonization: The Creation of the French Atlantic World during the Sixteenth Century,” in Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move, ed. Caroline A. Williams (London: Ashgate, 2009), 33–56; Jacques Bernard, Navires et gens de mer à Bordeaux (vers 1400–vers 1550) (Paris: SEVPEN, 1968); Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, “Terra Nova through the Iberian Looking Glass: The Portuguese-Newfoundland Cod Fishery in the Sixteenth Century,” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 1 (1998): 100–117; George A. Rose, Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries (St. John’s: Breakwater Books, 2007).

3 Henry Percival Biggar, ed., The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, 1497–1534: A Collection of Documents Relating to the Early History of the Dominion of Canada (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911), doc. 6, “Various Articles of the Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VII,” pp. 12–23, here p. 12. The earliest record of fish being brought back from this region to Europe is by an English vessel in 1502, but surviving evidence points to a multi-communal commercial fishery coalescing between 1504 and 1508.

4 For an introduction to the sixteenth-century fishery, see Laurier Turgeon, Une histoire de la Nouvelle France. Français et Amérindiens au xvi^e siècle (Paris: Belin, 2019), chapter 1; W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), chapters 1–2; Pope, Fish into Wine, 11–32; Innis, The Cod Fisheries, chapters 1–2.

5 This distinction is clearer in English than in Romance languages like French, since the modern English term “Newfoundland” is etymologically distinct from Terra Nova (on which more below). The English form “New Isle” appeared in 1498, and the more familiar Newfoundland in 1502, but these forms are limited to a few English-language sources throughout the century. Modern French does not mark this difference, and instead employs Terre-Neuve to signify the island of Newfoundland proper. I nevertheless argue that in the sixteenth century, Terre-Neuve had a different signification—the one that is explored in this article. At some point in the early seventeenth century, the broad meaning of Terre-Neuve in French was lost and the term was assigned to the island alone. A full explanation of this process will require further research, but it likely reflected the convergence of English settlement in the southeast of Newfoundland island, the emergence of the Petit Nord fishery (worked primarily by Bretons and so giving the French a permanent presence on the island), and the increased cartographic representation of the northwest Atlantic by mapmakers who tended to assign place-names based on landforms like islands. Around the same time, “Newfoundland” took on a narrower meaning in English for similar reasons. The question of Newfoundland contra Terra Nova therefore cuts across both linguistic and temporal boundaries.

6 For some examples of how historians have dealt with this problem, see Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Sharika D. Crawford, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (1992; New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003); Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961); Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Paul Stock, “History and the Uses of Space,” in The Uses of Space in Early Modern History, ed. Paul Stock (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–18. See too the excellent discussion in Sandra Pannell, “Of Gods and Monsters: Indigenous Sea Cosmologies, Promiscuous Geographies and the Depths of Local Sovereignty,” in A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories, ed. Peter Boomgaard (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 71–102.

7 For examples from the Pacific which point to this relationship, see Judith Binney, “Tuki’s Universe,” New Zealand Journal of History 38, no. 2 (2004): 215–32; Margaret Jolly, “Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands,” Contemporary Pacific 19, no. 2 (2007): 508–45.

8 I follow Jennifer Lee Johnson in using the terms “fishworker” and “fishwork” to describe those who harvest, process, and sell fish, and their activities. The notion of fishwork provides an essential contrast with subsistence fishing, stressing the commercial nature of their labor. See Johnson, “Eating and Existence on an Island in Southern Uganda,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 1 (2017): 2–23. Peter Pope has written on the gendered dimensions of the Newfoundland fishery, advocating for the use of “fisher man/men.” See Peter E. Pope, “Fisher Men at Work: The Material Culture of the Champ Paya Fishing Room as a Gendered Site,” in Tu sais, mon vieux Jean-Pierre: Essays on the Archaeology and History of New France and Canadian Culture in Honour of Jean-Pierre Chrestien, ed. John Willis (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2017), 43–62.

9 The use of Terra Nova, typically as Terranova, has increased in some parts of the scholarship as a substitute for Newfoundland, particularly among those who work on the participation of Spanish Basques in the fishery. Though it is good that researchers are employing the term, it has yet to be interrogated or considered as part of a wider European system of geographic thought. For examples, see Selma Barkham, “The Spanish Province of Terranova,” Canadian Archivist 2, no. 5 (1974): 73–83; Robert Grenier, Marc A. Bernier, and Willis Stevens, eds., The Underwater Archaeology of Red Bay: Basque Shipbuilding and Whaling in the 16th Century, vol. 1, Archaeology Underwater: The Project (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 2007); Miren Egaña Goya, “A Permanent Place in Newfoundland: Seventeenth-Century Basque Tombstones in Placentia,” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 33, no. 1 (2018): 172–99; Goya, “Basque Toponymy in Canada,” Onomastica Canadiana 74, no. 2 (1992): 53–74.

10 Caroline Ménard, La pesca gallega en Terranova, siglos xvi–xviii (Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas/Universidad de Sevilla/Diputación de Sevilla, 2008), 417.

11 Archives municipales du Havre, EE78, Armements navals, 1359–1669, “1543. La Catherine de Rouen affreté et armé pour le voyage de terre-neuve.”

12 Carter, The Road to Botany Bay; Yi-Fu Tuan, “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, no. 4 (1991): 684–96.

13 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (2000; New York: Routledge, 2002), 219.

14 Hieu Phung, “Naming the Red River—Becoming a Vietnamese River,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 51, no. 4 (2020): 518–37.

15 As demonstrated by the archaeologist Peter Pope, who interprets the fishery as a vernacular industry, a loosely structured operation in which knowledge was developed and transmitted within closely knit communities of fishworkers. See Pope, Fish into Wine, 21–32. On the knowledge of fishwork more broadly, see James M. Acheson, “Anthropology of Fishing,” Annual Review of Anthropology 10 (1981): 275–316; Bror Olsen and Trond Thuen, “Secret Places: On the Management of Knowledge and Information about Landscape and Yields in Northern Norway,” Human Ecology 41, no. 2 (2013): 273–83; Brian M. Fagan, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Gísli Pálsson, “Enskilment at Sea,” Man 29, no. 4 (1994): 901–27; Thorolfur Thorlindsson, “Skipper Science: A Note on the Epistemology of Practice and the Nature of Expertise,” Sociological Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1994): 329–45.

16 Charles O. Frake, “Cognitive Maps of Time and Tide among Medieval Seafarers,” Man 20, no. 2 (1985): 254–70.

17 I am here relying on archival surveys by myself and other scholars of the sixteenth-century fishery. Much of the information mobilized in this study is drawn from notarial records held in the following archives: Archives départmentales (hereafter “AD”) Charente-Maritime (La Rochelle), AD Seine-Maritime (Rouen, Le Havre, Jumièges, Fécamp, and Dieppe), AD Calvados (Honfleur), AD Loire-Atlantique (Le Croisic), AD Gironde, (Bordeaux); Stadsarchief Amsterdam; and Westvries Archief (Hoorn and Enkhuizen). It also uses material from the Archives municipales in Saint-Malo, Rouen, Le Havre, La Rochelle, Bayonne, Ciboure, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Biarritz; the British Library in London; and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands in the Hague.

18 As explored in the following works: Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Bernard, Navires et gens de mer à Bordeaux; Laurier Turgeon, “Pour redécouvrir notre 16^e siècle : les pêches à Terre-Neuve d’après les archives notariales de Bordeaux,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 39, no. 4 (1986): 523–49; Sylvie Desachy and Archives départmentales du Tarn, eds., De la Ligurie au Languedoc. Le notaire à l’étude (Albi: Un Autre Reg’art, 2012).

19 “Venans de la ville de Rouan, où lesdits nommez avoint vendu du poysson qu’ilz avoint esté quérir et pescher és parties de la Terre-Neusfve.” Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 35, “Pardon to the Mate of a Newfoundland Fishing-Vessel,” pp. 116–18, here p. 117. The original is held in AD Loire-Atlantique, B21, Courts and Jurisdictions, fols. 15r–16v, January 1513.

20 Selma de L. Barkham, “A Note on the Strait of Belle Isle during the Period of Basque Contact with Indians and Inuit,” Études Inuit Studies 4, no. 1/2 (1980): 51–58; James A. Tuck and Robert Grenier, Red Bay, Labrador: World Whaling Capital A.D. 1550–1600 (St. John’s: Atlantic Archaeology, 1989); Brad Loewen and Claude Chapdelaine, eds., Contact in the 16th Century: Networks among Fishers, Foragers, and Farmers (Gatineau/Ottawa: Canadian Museum of History/University of Ottawa Press, 2016), 1.

21 Barkham, “The Basque Whaling Establishments in Labrador”; Denis Laborde and Laurier Turgeon, “Le parc de l’Aventure basque en Amérique,” Ethnologie française 29, no. 3 (1999): 397–408.

22 For example, in March 1592 the vessel Marie, based in La Tremblade in Saintonge, departed La Rochelle for Terra Nova. It was to make “a voyage to Terra Nova to fish for cod on the bank” (un voyage a la Terre Neufve a la pesche des moulues sur le banc). AD Charente-Maritime, 3 E 203, notaire Bigeard, fol. 89r, March 10, 1592. The ship returned to port that September.

23 See, for instance, AD Charente-Maritime, 3 E 221, notaire Cousseau, fol. 66v, April 18, 1620. On this date, the two ships the Marie and the Jacques from La Rochelle left for a voyage “de terre-neufve sur le banc banquereau ou lisle de sable.”

24 Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle, Sable Island: The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic (New York: Walker & Co., 2004).

25 The Bristol-Azorean voyages were a series of joint ventures organized by merchants from Bristol and the Azores settlements, often employing Azorean pilots and mariners. For the early voyages, see John L. Allen, “From Cabot to Cartier: The Early Exploration of Eastern North America, 1497–1543,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 500–521; Bernard G. Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier: Sources for a Historical Ethnography of Northeastern North America, 1497–1550 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961); Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America, vol. 1, The Northern Voyages A. D. 500–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Peter E. Pope, The Many Landfalls of John Cabot (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

26 For the context in 1502, see David B. Quinn with Alison M. Quinn and Susan Hillier, eds., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, vol. 1, America from Concept to Discovery: Early Exploration of North America (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 110–19.

27 In January 1576, the two notaries Pierre Gonnyer and Jehan Champaigne in the Norman port of Honfleur recorded a contract for the ship Jehan, which was bound that spring for “the Terras Novas” (des terres neufves). In the next entry, on the bottom of the same page, they recorded that the ship Esperance was going “to Terra Nova” (de terre neuve): AD Calvados, 8E/6500, fols. 22r–22v.

28 Peter Pope, “Transformation of the Maritime Cultural Landscape of Atlantic Canada by Migratory European Fishermen, 1500–1800,” in Beyond the Catch: Fisheries of the North Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic, 900–1850, ed. Louis Sicking and Darlene Abreu-Ferreira (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 123–54, here p. 123.

29 In a recent article, two members of the “Cabot Project,” Margaret Condon and Evan Jones, revealed a new document relating to the explorer William Weston which refers to the region as “nova terre.” They date it to early 1501 and note the parallels to the phrase Terra Nova. They do not however explore the full meaning of the term Terra Nova, though they acknowledge it as an “alternative” to Newfoundland. While nova terre is similar, the word order (Terra Nova is always written noun-adjective) and the fact that it is in Latin in a Latin document do distinguish it from the Portuguese phrase which became popular after 1501. We should thus be hesitant to treat it as more than an isolate. See Margaret M. Condon and Evan T. Jones, “William Weston: Early Voyager to the New World,” Historical Research 91, no. 254 (2018): 628–46, here p. 631.

30 On the Norman moment, see Michael Wintroub, The Voyage of Thought: Navigating Knowledge across the Sixteenth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

31 See also Visconte Maggiolo’s 1511 map, cited in note 67 below. On Corte-Real, see Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, docs. 21–24a, pp. 59–70, and doc. 27, pp. 92–96; Morison, The European Discovery of America, vol. 1.

32 Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 24, “Royal Confirmation to Michael Corte Real of the Lands Granted to Him by His Brother Gaspar, 1502,” pp. 67–70, here p. 68.

33 Ibid., doc. 28, “A Tax Laid on Newfoundland Cod in Portugal, 1506,” pp. 96–97, here p. 96.

34 Of particular importance may have been connections between Breton and Portuguese mariners. For this connection, see Henri Touchard, Le commerce maritime breton à la fin du Moyen-Âge (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967); A. H. de Oliveira Marques, “Bretanha e Portugal no século xv,” Arquipélago-Revista da Universidade dos Açores 1, no. 1 (1995): 21–28.

35 For the 1508 case, see Rouen, AD Seine-Maritime, series 001B, Parlement de Normandie, no. 324, October 21, 1508. For the map, dated 1507/1508, see Johannes Ruysch, Universalior Cogniti Orbis Tabula Ex Recentibus Confecta Observationibus (Rome: Bernardinus Venetus de Vitalibus, 1508), Providence, John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection, https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/s/fnjc1m; Gregory C. McIntosh, The Johannes Ruysch and Martin Waldseemüller World Maps: The Interplay and Merging of Early Sixteenth Century New World Cartographies (Long Beach: Plus Ultra, 2012).

36 For Aragon, see Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 32, “Warrant of Queen Joanna to Juan de Agramonte Covering the Agreement with King Ferdinand for a Voyage to Newfoundland,” p. 102–107, here p. 102. For Nantes, see AD Loire-Atlantique, B21, Courts and Jurisdictions, 15r–16v, January 1513. For Beauport, see Saint-Brieuc, AD Côtes-d’Armor, H 69, abbaye Notre-Dame de Beauport (1198–1790).

37 For Capbreton, see Archives municipales de Capbreton, CC 5. For Galicia, see Ménard, La pesca gallega en Terranova, 417.

38 A state document of 1520 makes reference to purchasing “200 Newlond fishe” while outfitting two ships for a voyage to Ireland. See J. S. Brewer, ed., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII: Preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and Elsewhere in England, vol. 3, part 1, 1519–1521 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1867), no. 800, “Costs of Preparing the Two Galleys for Transporting the Earl of Surrey into Ireland,” p. 279.

39 Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 32, “Warrant of Queen Joanna to Juan de Agramonte Covering the Agreement with King Ferdinand for a Voyage to Newfoundland,” p. 102–107, here pp. 102–103.

40 On Breton-Portuguese connections see Touchard, Le commerce maritime breton; de Oliveira Marques, “Bretanha e Portugal no século xv.”

41 On October 1, 1516, the Frances of Saint-Brieuc offloaded fish in Bristol, as did the Kateryn of Honfleur on September 10, 1517. Both are recorded as coming from what the documents call “Terra Nova.” See Susan Flavin and Evan T. Jones, “Bristol ‘Particular’ Customs Account, 1516/17,” April 3, 2009, transcription and translation of the Exchequer “particular” controller’s account for Bristol for 1516–1517, Kew, National Archives, E122/21/2, http://hdl.handle.net/1983/1297 (here rows 13–14 and 3515–16). In their published account of these records, the editors translate this as “New World.” As will be discussed below, this is a misleading interpretation, and the database preserves the original phrase Terra Nova. See Flavin and Jones, Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent 1503–1601: The Evidence of the Exchequer Customs Accounts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009).

42 For instance, Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 6, “new Isle” and “New Ilande,” p. 12; doc. 7, “ixole nove,” p. 13; and doc. 8, “insule nove,” p. 15.

43 Stephanie Pettigrew and Elizabeth Mancke, “European Expansion and the Contested North Atlantic,” Terrae Incognitae 50, no. 1 (2018): 15–34. The authors suggest that Spitsbergen/Svalbard was known as Nieuw Landt to the Dutch, but this seems to have been only briefly used and quickly replaced by its more familiar names. Novaya Zemlya is the modern Russian name, a literal translation of New Land.

44 W. Jeffrey Bolster has done so most explicitly, explaining in a section of The Mortal Sea entitled “Assessing Abundance” the European reaction to the quantity, variety, and quality of marine life in the northwest Atlantic. This is meant to contrast with the supposed paucity of European fish stocks: “The explorers’ voyages were thus journeys in space and journeys through time—ecological time; their accounts reflected not just American abundance, but the depletion of European coastal systems … nothing else explains the astonishment of [early explorers]. …The baselines they had taken for granted no longer made sense.” Bolster, The Mortal Sea, 34–48, citation p. 45. This has recently found echoes with a team of fisheries historians who associate the early reports from Caboto of abundant fish stocks with the start of a “Fish Revolution,” and use it to approach the sixteenth-century history of fishing from a quantitative perspective. See Poul Holm et al., “The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500),” Quaternary Research 108 (2022): 92–106.

45 Laurier Turgeon has gone so far as to suggest that “New Land [Terra Nova] evoked the mythic origins of a virgin territory, exempted from original sin. … The term expressed the hope of attainment of the utopia of the terrestrial paradise …” It is a wonderfully poetic image, in which the island and waters of Terra Nova rise out of the Atlantic like a gift from heaven, providing opportunity and easy riches to any who crossed the ocean. See Turgeon, “Codfish, Consumption, and Colonization,” 49.

46 Keith Matthews, “A History of the West of England-Newfoundland Fishery” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1968); Gillian T. Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland 1577–1660 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969); David H. Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). On Parkhurst, see David B. Quinn with Alison M. Quinn and Susan Hillier, eds., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, vol. 4, Newfoundland from Fishery to Colony: Northwest Passage Searches (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 7.

47 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Delle nauigationi et viaggi […], 3 vols. (Venice: Luca Antonio Giunti, 1550–1559), 3:423–34. For a partial transcription, see William Gilbert, “Beothuk-European Contact in the 16th Century: A Re-evaluation of the Documentary Evidence,” Acadiensis 40, no. 1 (2011): 24–44.

48 Jean Alfonse, Les voyages avantureux du capitaine Jan Alfonce, ed. Mellin de Saint-Gelais (Poitou: J. de Marnef, 1559), 27.

49 Well into the mid-sixteenth century most Europeans still associated codfish with Iceland, Shetland, and Norway rather than Terra Nova. As late as the 1590s, an English military manual was recommending that soldiers be fed “shotland [Shetland] cod” to ensure they stayed strong and fit—nearly a century after the rise of the Terra Nova fishery. William Garrard, The Arte of Warre: Beeing the Onely Rare Booke of Myllitarie Profession […] Corrected and Finished by Captaine Hichcock (London: [John Charlewood and William Howe?] for Roger Warde, 1591), 362.

50 Ramusio, Delle nauigationi et viaggi, 1:301.

51 Alessandro Magno, “Account of Alessandro Magno’s journeys to Cyprus, Egypt, Spain, England, Flanders, Germany and Brescia, 1557–1565,” Washington, DC, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a.259.

52 The original quote comes from Adriaen Coenen’s Visboek, written in the 1570s. On this text, see Christiaan van Bochove, “The ‘Golden Mountain’: An Economic Analysis of Holland’s Early Modern Herring Fisheries,” in Sicking and Abreu-Ferreira, Beyond the Catch, 209–43; Floris P. Bennema and Adriaan D. Rijnsdorp, “Fish Abundance, Fisheries, Fish Trade and Consumption in Sixteenth-Century Netherlands as Described by Adriaen Coenen,” Fisheries Research 161 (2015): 384–99.

53 Rouen, AD Seine-Maritime, series 001B, Parlement de Normandie, no. 324, October 21, 1508.

54 AD Charente-Maritime, 3 E 203, notaire Bigeard, 1592; AD Calvados, 8E/6510, notaires Pierre Debaonne and Jehan Robinet, 1598.

55 Henry Percival Biggar, A Collection of Documents Relating to Jacques Cartier and the Sieur de Roberval (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1930), doc. 212, “Examination of Newfoundland Sailors Regarding Cartier,” pp. 447–67.

56 A copy of the report on the 1554 raid can be found in the Vargas Ponce collection at the Madrid Naval Museum (Col. Vargas Ponce, book 1, no. 18). The original can be found in Oñati, Archivo histórico provincial de Guipúzcoa, JD IM/2/12/11. For this project I have used the transcript by the French historian Édouard Ducéré in his Histoire maritime de Bayonne. Les corsaires sous l’Ancien Régime (Bayonne: E. Hourquet, 1895), appendix 1, pp. 333–44.

57 See, for instance, Stadsarchief Amsterdam, 75/99–101, October 10, 1596, the ship Zeeridder bound for “Terra Neuf” to buy fish.

58 Anonymous, “Regyme pour congnoistre la latitude de la region et aussi la haulteur de la ligne equinotialle sur nostre orison,” Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 24269. This text was probably written in the mid-1540s, perhaps 1544, judging by the dates in the almanac. We do not know for sure who wrote it, though several possibilities including the merchant Jean Cordier have been suggested. On the Norman context, see Michel Mollat du Jourdin, Le commerce maritime normand à la fin du Moyen Âge. Étude d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris: Plon, 1952); Charles Bréard and Paul Bréard, Documents relatifs à la marine normande et à ses armements aux xvi^e et xvii^e siècles pour le Canada, l’Afrique, les Antilles, le Brésil et les Indes (Rouen: A. Lestringant, 1889).

59 “Cest les noms des mariniers de mon naffvire pour terre neuffve.” AD Côtes-d’Armor, 1E, 1573–1606, 2783, fol. 35.

60 “Le pays que le vulgaire appelle Terre Neuuve, qui dès le commencement qu’elle fut descouuerte iusques à ce iourdhuy, a porté et porte encore ce nom.” André Thevet’s North America: A Sixteenth-Century View, ed. and trans. Roger Schlesinger and Arthur Stabler (1986; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 54 (translation modified).

61 Quinn, Quinn, and Hillier, Newfoundland from Fishery to Colony, 7.

62 This strange and mythical place continued to feature on maps throughout much of the sixteenth century. Kirsten A Seaver, “Norumbega and Harmonia Mundi in Sixteenth-Century Cartography,” Imago Mundi 50, no. 1 (1998): 34–58.

63 Chet Van Duzer and Lauren Beck, Canada before Confederation: Maps at the Exhibition (Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2017); Derek Hayes, America Discovered: A Historical Atlas of North American Exploration (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2004).

64 Alban Berson, “L’île aux démons : cartographie d’un mirage,” Borealia: Early Canadian History, October 2018, https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/2018/10/24/lile-aux-demons-cartographie-dun-mirage/; Van Duzer and Beck, Canada before Confederation; Schlesinger and Stabler, André Thevet’s North America.

65 Frank Lestringant, Le livre des îles. Atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 151–77.

66 Visconte de Maggiolo, [World Map] (Naples, 1511), Providence, John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection, 3-Size Codex Z 2.

67 Gregory C. McIntosh, The Vesconte Maggiolo World Map of 1504 in Fano, Italy (Long Beach: Plus Ultra, 2013); Massimo Quaini, “Cartographic Activities in the Republic of Genoa, Corsica, and Sardinia in the Renaissance,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward, part 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 854–73; McIntosh, The Johannes Ruysch and Martin Waldseemüller World Maps.

68 For a useful overview of the cartography of early Newfoundland and Canada, with several detailed examples, see the recent essay collection Van Duzer and Beck, Canada before Confederation; William Francis Ganong, Crucial Maps in the Early Cartography and Place-Nomenclature of the Atlantic Coast of Canada, ed. Theodore E. Layng (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964).

69 McIntosh, The Johannes Ruysch and Martin Waldseemüller World Maps. For the use of the term in a 1512 letter to Caboto from the king of Spain, see Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 34, “Sebastian Cabot Consulted about Newfoundland,” pp. 115–16.

70 For examples, see Van Duzer and Beck, Canada before Confederation, 36 and 68–69. See too the example of how Champlain uses bacalao in the early seventeenth century to denote a small island: Miren Egaña Goya, “Presencia de los pescadores vascos en Canadá s. xvii: Testimonio de las obras de Samuel de Champlain (1603–1633),” Zainak. Cuadernos de Antropología-Etnografía 33 (2010): 375–92, here p. 384.

71 Alonso de Santa Cruz, Islario general de todas las islas del mundo (1539–1560), Madrid, Biblioteca nacional de España, MS Res. 38, fol. 298r.

72 For a good discussion of Bacalaos as a place-name, see Goya, “Basque Toponymy in Canada,” 55–57. This includes a number of examples of the use of Bacalaos on surviving maps and in geographic texts. On the etymology of the term, see Joan Coromines, Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana, vol. 1, A–C (Bern: Editorial Francke, 1954), 358–59.

73 “Que trouveres grands bends de faulqnetz et aussi de grandes bends de petis oyselletz qui sappellent marmyons vous serez denvyron a quarante lieues du banc.” Anonymous, “Regyme pour congnoistre la latitude.” Faulqnetz may be faulconet, a diminutive of falcon and here referring to terns or other seabirds. It is unknown what type of bird marmyons signifies. Though there have been speculations as to the identity of the author (a name is written on the last page of the book, amongst several sketches), there is no clear evidence as to who is responsible for these sections on Terra Nova.

74 Stephanus Parmenius, The New Found Land of Stephen Parmenius: The Life and Writings of a Hungarian Poet, Drowned on a Voyage from Newfoundland, 1583, ed. and trans. David B. Quinn and Neil M. Cheshire (1972; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). Parmenius’s letter was published by Hakluyt in the 1580s, but I have chosen to use the more modern and refined translation by Quinn and Cheshire.

75 Ibid., 70.

76 Quinn, Quinn, and Hillier, America from Concept to Discovery, docs. 148–52, pp. 206–14.

77 “Dixo que en Gran Baya venian á su nabio muchos yndios y con ellos comian y benian y se trataban muy bien y les daban pielles de benados y de lobos a trueque de achas y cuchillos y otras cosillas.” Biggar, A Collection of Documents, doc. 212, “Examination of Newfoundland Sailors Regarding Cartier,” pp. 446–67. For Odelica’s testimony, see pp. 459–64.

78 “É que su trato dellos es seto de pellejas de martas y otras pellejas y que los que van lleban toda cosa de hierro; y que los yndios entienden toda lengua, francesa y ynglesa y gascona é la lengue ellos hablan.” Ibid. For Lefant’s testimony, see pp. 448–54.

79 Here I follow Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Carter, The Road to Botany Bay; Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Plus Ultra: Cartography, Space, and Hispanic Modernity,” Representations 79, no. 1 (2002): 28–60; Tuan, “Language and the Making of Place”; Pannell, “Of Gods and Monsters.”

80 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 229–30 (emphasis in original).

81 Alfred Gell, “How to Read a Map: Remarks on the Practical Logic of Navigation,” Man 20, no. 2 (1985): 271–86.

82 Padrón, “Mapping Plus Ultra.”

83 Gell, “How to Read a Map,” 282.

84 María Nieves Zedeño, “On What People Make of Places: A Behavioral Cartography,” in Social Theory in Archaeology, ed. Michael B Schiffer (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 97–112, here p. 107 (emphasis in original).

85 Christer Westerdahl, “The Maritime Cultural Landscape,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 21, no. 1 (1992): 5–14, here p. 5 (emphasis in original).

86 For descriptions of fishwork practices, see Charles de La Morandière, La pêche française de la morue à Terre-Neuve du xvi^e siècle à nos jours. Son importance économique, sociale et politique (Paris: École pratique des hautes études, 1967); Pope, “Transformation of the Maritime Cultural Landscape”; Olaf U. Janzen, “The Logic of English Saltcod: An Historiographical Revision,” The Northern Mariner/Le marin du nord 23, no. 2 (2013): 123–34.

87 This phrase was ubiquitous in the obligation, avittaillement, and congé contracts which form the bulk of records in the notarial and city council registers. On the language of notaries, see Turgeon, “Pour redécouvrir notre 16^e siècle”; Bernard, Navires et gens de mer à Bordeaux.

88 Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 28, “A Tax Laid on Newfoundland Cod in Portugal, 1506,” pp. 96–97.

89 Pope, “Transformation of the Maritime Cultural Landscape,” 124.

90 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014); Paul C. van Royen, Jaap Bruijn, and Jan Lucassen, eds., Those Emblems of Hell? European Sailors and the Maritime Labour Market, 1570–1870 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997). A better comparison might be found in Daniel Vickers and Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

91 See the surviving crew list in AD Côtes-d’Armor, 1 E, 1573–1606, 2783. See too Romain Grancher, “Fishermen’s Taverns: Public Houses and Maritime Labour in an Early Modern French Fishing Community,” International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 4 (2016): 671–85.

92 “Le 26 du mois arrivasmes à Tadoussac, où il y avoit des vaisseaux qui y estoient arrivez dés le 18, ce qui ne s’esoit veu il y a plus de 60. ans, à ce que disorient les vieux mariniers qui voguent ordinairement audit pays.” The Works of Samuel de Champlain, vol. 2, 1608–1613, ed. H. P. Biggar, trans. John Squair and William F. Ganong (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1925), 117.

93 Fikret Berkes, Sacred Ecology: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Resource Management (Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1999).

94 Goya, “A Permanent Place in Newfoundland.” See too the evidence for Christian burial practices in Lori M. White, “The Saddle Island Cemetery: A Study of Whalers at a Sixteenth-Century Basque Whaling Station in Red Bay, Labrador” (MA diss., Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2015).

95 Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 61, “A Projected Voyage to Newfoundland,” pp. 134–142, here p. 136.

96 Anonymous, “Regyme pour congnoistre la latitude.” This is likely Renews harbor on the Avalon peninsula, named for a merchant-venturer from Normandy who visited the region around 1508.

97 Biggar, A Collection of Documents, doc. 212, “Examination of Newfoundland Sailors Regarding Cartier,” pp. 448–54.

98 Recent archaeological work has shown the close material culture and commercial bonds between First Nations communities and fishworkers. Nonetheless, in the sixteenth century these exchanges had a limited influence in terms of patterns of behavior, knowledge diffusion, and social relationships between the two groups. See Jack Bouchard, “‘Gens sauvages et estranges’: Amerindians and the Early Fishery in the Sixteenth-Century Gulf of St. Lawrence,” in The Greater Gulf: Essays on the Environmental History of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, ed. Claire Campbell, Ed MacDonald, and Brian Payne (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2020), 35–68; Marcel Moussette, “A Universe under Strain: Amerindian Nations in North-Eastern North America in the 16th Century,” in “The Recent Archaeology of the Early Modern Period in Québec City,” special issue, Post-Medieval Archaeology 43, no. 1 (2009): 30–47.

99 For a good overview of the documentary problem, see Gilbert, “Beothuk-European Contact in the 16th Century.” Much of the best recent archaeological work can be found in Loewen and Chapdelaine, Contact in the 16th Century.

100 For fraternization, see the account of Lefant and de Odeliça in Biggar, A Collection of Documents, doc. 212, “Examination of Newfoundland Sailors Regarding Cartier,” pp. 448–64. See too Charles A. Martijn, “Early Mi’kmaq Presence in Southern Newfoundland: An Ethnohistorical Perspective, c. 1500–1763,” and Charles A. Martijn, Selma Barkham, and Michael M. Barkham, “Basques? Beothuk? Inuit? Innu? or St. Lawrence Iroquoians? The Whalers on the 1546 Desceliers Map, Seen through the Eyes of Different Beholders,” both in “The New Early Modern Newfoundland: Part 2,” special issue, Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 44–102 and 187–206; 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, no. 3/4 (1989): 117–47.

101 Donald H. Holly Jr., Christopher Wolff, and John Erwin, “The Ties That Bind and Divide: Encounters with the Beothuk in Southeastern Newfoundland,” Journal of the North Atlantic 3 (2010): 31–44; Donald H. Holly Jr., “Social Aspects and Implications of ‘Running to the Hills’: The Case of the Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland,” Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 3, no. 2 (2008): 170–90; Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600–64 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993).

102 Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd, “From Environmental Case Study to Environmental Kin Study,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 59, no. 3 (2020): 385–93, here p 386. See too Zoe Todd, “Fish Pluralities: Human-Animal Relations and Sites of Engagement in Paulatuuq, Arctic Canada,” in “Cultures inuit, gouvernance et cosmopolitiques/Inuit Cultures, Governance and Cosmopolitics,” ed. Frédéric Laugrand, special issue, Études Inuit Studies 38, no. 1/2 (2014): 217–38.

103 Susan M. Manning, “Contrasting Colonisations: (Re)Storying Newfoundland/Ktaqmkuk as Place,” Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2018): 314–31.

104 This problem is discussed in the context of early cartography in Hoffman, Cabot to Cartier.

105 On post-1580s changes, see Cell, English Enterprise in Newfoundland; Gillian T. Cell, Newfoundland Discovered: English Attempts at Colonisation, 1610–1630 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1982); Pope, Fish into Wine; Loewen and Delmas, “Les occupations basques dans le golfe du Saint-Laurent”; Maarten Heerlien, “Van Holland naar Cupidos Koe: Hollandse Newfoundlandhandel in de context van de internationale kabeljauwvisserij bij Newfoundland in de zestiende en de zeventiende eeuw” (MA diss., University of Groningen, 2005); Poul Holm et al., “Accelerated Extractions of North Atlantic Cod and Herring, 1520–1790,” Fish and Fisheries 23, no. 1 (2022): 54–72; Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois, eds., Champlain. La naissance de l’Amérique française (Sillery/Paris/La Rochelle: Septentrion/Nouveau monde/Conseil général de la Charente-Maritime, 2004).

106 Bassi, An Aqueous Territory; Crawford, The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean.

107 Thorlindsson, “Skipper Science,” 343.

108 AD Côtes-d’Armor, H 69, abbey of Notre-Dame de Beauport, 1514. A transcript can be found in Biggar, The Precursors of Jacques Cartier, doc. 36, “Agreement between the Monks of Beauport and the Inhabitants of the Island of Bréhat,” 118–23, here p. 119. In 1524 the residents of Saint-Waast in Normandy were brought before the Parlement in Rouen, where they argued that codfish from Terra Nova, which they had been catching for years, were not subject to the local taxes that had long gone unpaid. Rouen, AD Seine-Maritime, series 001B, Parlement de Normandie, no. 388, December 23, 1524.