Fishwork is for the birds: Humans and birds in the sixteenth-century northwest Atlantic

Abstract

The history of the northwest Atlantic in the sixteenth century is often a story of people searching for sea life: the quest for cod, the hunt for whales, the conquest of the waters of what European mariners called Terra Nova. But while historians and archaeologists have focused on the water’s surface and what lay below, it is striking how much mariners cared about what flew above. Birds of all kinds appear early and consistently in European accounts of Terra Nova, treated with rapturous attention by visitors and distant geographers alike. This essay argues for a three-dimensional Terra Nova that takes into account the central role played by birds in shaping the early European fishery and European interactions with First Nations. Far from ancillary characters, birds propelled human behavior. This article considers the broad range of evidence to argue that a complete environmental history of the northwest Atlantic must put the interactions between birds and humans at the center of our analysis.