Before the name: what was the place like before it was named?Footnote 1
“Having prepared a fine ship … to be sent to Terra Nova for cod-fishing, which was his most regular trade, he became wrapped up in the fantasy of going along on the voyage.”Footnote 1 In his collection of sea stories, published in 1599, Captain Bruneau de Rivedoux recounts the hapless mariner Pierre Houé’s mid-sixteenth-century voyage to the northwest Atlantic as a warning against the allure of dangerous transoceanic trips. But there is something about the phrase “his most regular trade” which captures the familiarity, the appeal, and the longevity of what we would today call the early Newfoundland fishery, an enterprise that even in Rivedoux’s time was several generations old.Footnote 2 A major commercial fishery was organized around the island of Newfoundland by various European mariners as early as 1505, less than a decade after the Italian Zuan Caboto’s first encounters with the cod-filled waters off what contemporaries in England identified as “the new Isle.”Footnote 3 Tens of thousands of mariners followed in their wake, seeking fish to alleviate European food insecurity and for their own enrichment, forming a seasonal and cyclical transatlantic enterprise that would last for generations.Footnote 4
Except that in the sixteenth century, Europeans did not go to Newfoundland to find fish—they went to a place they called Terra Nova.Footnote 5 Certainly that is what Rivedoux thought Houé was up to when he described his destinations as being aux terres neuves. Localized variations of the phrase Terra Nova are found in surviving European records across the sixteenth century and are the most consistent way that mariners described the places they visited in the waters of the northwest Atlantic. As we will see, how mariners used this term suggests that they thought about Terra Nova as an expansive and fluctuating space, defined by movement and actions rather than fixed positions (fig. 1).
Figure 1 Approximate dimensions of Terra Nova in the mid-sixteenth century
I take as a starting point that geography is as much a matter of mentally constructing worlds as it is of describing physical features on the earth’s surface.Footnote 6 These constructions, which we may call mental maps, correspond to the subjective geographies and experiences of place which all of us carry within our heads. Yet mental maps reflect not just personal but also collective experiences and shared knowledge, and this is what makes them such powerful tools for understanding the past.Footnote 7 The words and images historical actors used to represent places like the northwest Atlantic reflect not an objective reality but the assemblage and translation of their mental maps, their subjective understanding of different spaces. To understand a historical space like Terra Nova, then, we must work our way up from the bottom, following the behaviors and actions of mariners to see how these shaped concepts of space, and how these mental maps in turn informed wider European understandings of place and geography in the northwest Atlantic.
These mental maps are so important because historians need some way to describe the European project in the northwest Atlantic, especially during its formative decades. The approach to date has often been to apply later labels: Newfoundland, Canada, the British or French Empire. These nation-centric terms are ultimately teleological, spatially misleading, and reductive, and do not reflect the actual experience of fishwork in the sixteenth century.Footnote 8 Instead, the expression Terra Nova conveyed a complex set of experiences and patterns of human labor, which in turn constituted a shared mental map of the northwest Atlantic charged with meaning for those who visited during this period. This meaning derived from two elements that will be explored in this article. First, the phrase Terra Nova was tied to the practice of fishwork, so that to go to Terra Nova was in effect to go fishing on a seasonal basis in the northwest Atlantic. It was not a label of possession like many other names bestowed in the sixteenth century—Terra Nova did not connote an aspiration to control in the way that “New France” did, for instance. Rather, it was a label of practice, a name created through movement and labor. Second, the phrase Terra Nova was sufficiently vague and malleable to be useful to mariners who wished to keep their movements hidden from outsiders (whether state or church officials or competitors), but who also might have to move their operations around as seasons and weather shifted in the tempestuous and ever-changing northwest Atlantic. Terra Nova, in short, had the virtue of expressing the lived experience of fishwork while also being practically useful to mariners. Although the popularity of the phrase has been acknowledged in some of the historical literature on the early fishery, the transnational use, origins, and meaning of Terra Nova to sixteenth-century Europeans have not received proper attention.Footnote 9 When we pay close attention to the sources that mariners have left us, we can see that they were fully capable of vocalizing the mental maps they used to make sense of space.
This article, then, is a study of what it meant to go to Terra Nova in the sixteenth century, and of how historians and historical geographers should write about space and place in the early years of European expansion into the Atlantic basin. After briefly considering how we can study the mental maps of past mariners, I will examine the origin and use of the term Terra Nova, as well as its variations, by mariners in the sixteenth century. As will become clear, the phrase was employed early, broadly, and consistently to describe the northwest Atlantic by those who ventured there in search of fish. In its third section, the article will consider how Terra Nova worked as a shared mental map for mariners who participated in the fishery—where it was, what its boundaries might have been, and how Europeans thought about it. I hope to stress that Terra Nova was an idea as much as a place, which fluctuated according to environmental and economic realities at any given moment.
Ultimately, we will see that Terra Nova was a concept at once expansive, malleable, and confusingly imprecise, but which reflected the unique experiences of mariners in the sixteenth century. Insufficient attention has been paid in recent decades to the region in its earliest years of sustained European encounter or its multinational and transatlantic dimensions. Thinking with Terra Nova rather than Newfoundland is one way forward. Put simply, the phrase Terra Nova was employed by mariners to signify the places in the northwest Atlantic they went to do fishwork—where one fished, that place became part of Terra Nova. At its heart was the practice and knowledge of mariners, not the geographic conceits of explorers or states. To reconstruct the mental maps underlying Terra Nova, we must thus pay attention to how sixteenth-century mariners lived and worked, and to how they spoke about space.
Mental Maps and Spatial Histories
The words our historical subjects used to describe space matter, and the choices record-keepers made in writing down descriptions of the northwest Atlantic can tell us much about how they thought about those places. The phrase Terra Nova appears most regularly in what might be termed bureaucratic writings, including notarial records, port registers, court cases, municipal council records, government interrogations, and royal edicts. Here, sailors or fishworkers stood before a notary to declare their intentions and experiences, creating textual records which were mediated but nonetheless reveal significant truths. When Juan de Betanços traveled to the city of Pontevedra to sign up for a fishing voyage in 1517, the notary who wrote out his contract had to record his destination as somewhere called “la Tierra Nueva,” proving that Galician ships had joined the growing fishery in the northwest Atlantic.Footnote 10 When in 1543 English corsairs raided the port of Le Havre in Normandy, and the brave ship Catherine sallied forth alone to drive them away, city officials had to reimburse its crew after they admitted that their plans to outfit a voyage to “terre nefve” were ruined by the attack.Footnote 11 In both cases, the deployment of Terra Nova reflects important choices made by these crews: to exploit the geographic vagueness of the term in order to hide their precise destinations, to invoke a well-known mariners’ world and thereby make clear their intention to harvest fish, and to explicitly espouse a mental map shaped not by imperial claims of possession but by the open, common experience of fishwork.
Place-names exist not to describe space but to create it. Paul Carter and Yi-Fu Tuan have drawn attention to the importance of names in the construction of place.Footnote 12 Names and descriptions reflect human activity and interactions with an environment, such that, in the words of Tim Ingold, “places do not have locations but histories.”Footnote 13 This is especially true of places like the northwest Atlantic, which were visited year after year by Europeans from the very first decades of the sixteenth century, building a history of thought and action that was manifested in the term Terra Nova. Hieu Phung has recently shown that bodies of water in particular can possess shifting names, identities, and geographies according to changing political, economic, and social contexts, and thereby serve as important lenses through which to view those changes.Footnote 14 Historians of these places must therefore be careful in the words we choose, and consider whether or not they match the concepts of space deployed at a particular moment by a particular community.
To study space in the northwest Atlantic we must thus try to resurrect the perspective of those who worked the waves in the early sixteenth century, using the occasional glimpses afforded in the surviving records. Practical information about work at sea, from how to sail a ship to how to bait a line for cod, was transferred from generation to generation via word-of-mouth and hands-on experience. But practical information can itself be exceedingly complex.Footnote 15 Charles O. Frake has made clear that medieval European seafarers were able to hold multiple, complex maps of time and space in their minds as they moved over the water. This was essential for navigation and survival at sea, even if it was rarely written down.Footnote 16 It is also an indication that mariners were capable of crafting and articulating nuanced, multi-layered understandings of space, which they revealed only when compelled by adverse circumstances. Transmitted between generations and between groups of mariners, these abstract ideas about maritime space and the shape of the Atlantic were essential for the development of an Atlantic world. The use of a single appellation like Terra Nova across multiple languages suggests that maritime communities shared information and histories of place regardless of their geographic origin. Many mariners likely learned of Terra Nova from other fishworkers or sailors before they themselves had ever crossed the Atlantic. The widespread use of Terra Nova therefore indicates that these vernacular industries had an essential trans-communal, or transnational, dimension.
We can see the relationship between word use and mental maps in the masses of legal sources produced through fishwork. However, points of contention and alternative names emerge when we compare these texts to other written and cartographic evidence. The bulk of documentary sources on sixteenth-century Terra Nova share certain important features. They were typically produced in a handful of coastal cities in the kingdoms of France, Spain, Portugal, and England, and in general directly related to business practices and legal agreements; they were usually produced right at the start or end of a voyage by an official scribe recording the words of mariners and merchants. The majority consist of notarial contracts and city-council deliberations held in municipal archives, and court cases preserved in regional and national archives.Footnote 17 Though it is tempting to take such sources at face value, they are notoriously tricky and subject to the biases and opaque practices of sixteenth-century notaries.Footnote 18 If used judiciously, however, they provide something other sources do not: a breadth of information that extends across time, space, and social status.
These urban business records are supplemented by four broad groups of sources. The first are sixteenth-century maps, predominantly produced in Portugal, Spain, Italy, and northern France. The second are the printed writings of European navigators, geographers, colonial promoters, and natural scientists, including well-known authors and editors such as André Thevet, Jacques Cartier, Stephen Parmenius, Richard Hakluyt, and Giovanni Battista Ramusio. The third are archaeological reports by modern scholars working in eastern Canada, and the fourth what might be termed miscellaneous textual references: handwritten notes, drawings, letters, and the like preserved in archives scattered throughout Europe. No one group of sources can give us a complete insight into the mental world of sixteenth-century European mariners. Instead, it is through a broad, comparative approach that we can tease out patterns of thought and experience. The notarial records, for instance, offer a chance to see patterns in language use across a wide breadth of time and space, from Lisbon in 1506 to Amsterdam in the 1590s. It is telling that business documents are very consistent in their use of variations of Terra Nova. Yet we can learn much from moments when elite authors or navigators felt the need to explain terms like Terra Nova, Newfoundland, or Bacalaos (the Spanish/Portuguese term for salt-cod, frequently used as a geographic label) to their audiences. We can also glean information from maps that use place-names (Corte-Real Land, Norumbega) that rarely if ever show up in business contracts and court cases. Most tantalizing of all are snippets of thought—about birds, about festivities, about space—that shine through in the miscellaneous accounts and notes that have come down to us. Through these patterns and comparisons, we may arrive at a better understanding of how mariners talked and thought about space and work in the sixteenth century.
The Origins of Terra Nova
In 1510 the vessel Jacquette, from the small Breton port of Dahouët, was sailing down the Seine when a serious altercation took place. A mariner, Guillaume Dobel, pushed a shipmate into the river, killing him. In 1513 a petition in Dobel’s defense was submitted by his friends to a court in Nantes, recounting that the event took place in Normandy as the crew was “coming from the city of Rouen, where the aforenamed [ship owners] had sold the fish which they had sought and fished in the region of la Terre-Neusfve.”Footnote 19 This Terre-Neusfve was the standard French variation of the phrase Terra Nova, here used to describe a place (“the region”) linked to harvesting fish (“fished in … la Terre-Neusfve”). The petitioners gave no other details, perhaps assuming the meaning was clear to their fellow Bretons.
The use of Terre-Neusfve by the crew of the Jacquette is an early surviving occurrence of the phrase Terra Nova to describe space in the northwest Atlantic. By definition Terra Nova could not be mapped neatly onto a coordinate chart, but it is nonetheless illuminating to try to visualize the scope and scale of this maritime space. In a broad sense, Terra Nova seems to have encompassed what is today the Grand Banks, the coast of the island of Newfoundland, southern Labrador, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It certainly included the whaling and cod-fishing grounds of southern Labrador and the Strait of Belle-Isle, known to Basques as La Gran Baya.Footnote 20 By the end of the sixteenth century, Basque whalers going to Terra Nova may have ventured into the St. Lawrence River as far as the mouth of the Saguenay.Footnote 21 And from the late sixteenth century, some notaries in Biscay and Normandy clarified where fishworkers were headed with an important precision, “Terra Nova on the Bank” (terre neufve sur le banc),Footnote 22 indicating that the space included the vast offshore fishing grounds of the Grand Banks. In the early seventeenth century some contracts went even further, specifying that fishing would take place “on the Bank, Banquereau, or Sable Island” (sur le banc, banquerau ou lisle de sable).Footnote 23 Sable Island is a small, sandy islet 170 kilometers east of what is today Nova Scotia, while the Banquereau is an offshore coastal shelf near Cape Breton.Footnote 24 This implies that the concept of Terra Nova eventually stretched south and southeast to include a large part of the maritime provinces of modern Canada. Altogether, at its greatest extent Terra Nova could reach perhaps 2,000 kilometers west to east, and another 1,500 kilometers north to south. The distance from the easternmost tip of the Grand Banks to the Saguenay River (2,000 kilometers) was only slightly less than the distance from the outer Grand Banks to western Ireland (2,200 kilometers). This made Terra Nova a potentially vast region encompassing a substantial portion of the Atlantic basin, even if its boundaries fluctuated from year to year (fig. 2).
Figure 2 Terra Nova in the mid-sixteenth century, places mentioned in the article
This is apparent in hindsight and when we look at our modern maps, but in 1513, when the crew of the Jacquette filed their petition, it was far from clear to most Europeans what the northwest Atlantic looked like. Between Zuan Caboto’s voyage of encounter in 1497 and the expeditions of Miguel Corte-Real and various Bristol-Azoreans around 1500, European navigators established that something, some combination of land and fish-rich sea, existed well to the west of the British Isles and Iceland.Footnote 25 To become a place, this agglomeration of experiences and sightings would need a name. A place can have many names over time, and many names at the same time. The northwest Atlantic could have been Terra Nova, or New Found Island, or Newfoundland, or Bacalaos, or Norumbega, or Corte-Real Land. At some point it was each of these things to someone, especially to various mapmakers who had never even visited. A well-off Londoner in 1502 would have sworn that he could invest in voyages to a place called “the New Found Ile Land,” not Newfoundland, while in the mid-sixteenth century Mediterranean cartographers seemed confused as to whether Bacalaos was just a small island or the entire coast of the northwest Atlantic.Footnote 26 We tend to erase such complexity when we use Newfoundland as a term for this space, for it was not self-evident in the early sixteenth century that Newfoundland island would be the central point to describe the fishery. Indeed, for much of the sixteenth century it was unclear to Europeans whether Newfoundland was a single island or an archipelago. Many maps, like that of the Venetian Giacomo Gastaldi printed in the 1540s, showed the northwest Atlantic as a series of island clusters (fig. 3). Produced in Italy at a moment when fishing activity was expanding, this map reflects the conflicting reports filtering back to cartographers in the Mediterranean. To hedge their bets, some record-keepers pluralized Terra Nova to give terres-neufves or a different variant, sometimes even using several forms within the same text.Footnote 27 But mariners had little interaction with Newfoundland island itself beyond the shoreline, and most of the island’s interior remained terra incognita until the nineteenth century.Footnote 28
Figure 3 Map of the northwest Atlantic included in an Italian edition of Ptolemy, showing Newfoundland island as an archipelago (1548)
Understanding the genesis and lineage of the phrase Terra Nova is an important step towards recognizing its distinct meaning and usage in the sixteenth century, as well as the key role played by mariners in defining and using this watery space. Terra Nova, written noun-adjective, appears in slightly different forms in a number of European languages. In the early sixteenth century many of these languages were still in flux, and spelling variations were rampant. Yet in this case the terminology is consistent enough to trace through the notarial archives. French terre-neuve (often spelled terre neufve or terre neusfve), Spanish tierra nueva or more commonly terranova, Gascon terre nabe, and Italian terra nuova were all current in the sixteenth century, and most are still used today. As they are all modified versions of the same phrase and etymologically identical, I treat them as interchangeable: terre-neufve is tierra nueva is terra nova. The fact that the term occurs with only slight variations across multiple languages is itself interesting and suggests that it spread rapidly from a common source. An alternate phrasing, Nova Terra, appears extremely infrequently in surviving records, and only at the start of the sixteenth century.Footnote 29
The earliest documented voyages to the northwest Atlantic were by English and Portuguese mariners (including Azoreans), with Normans joining them briefly around 1506–1509.Footnote 30 At some point before 1505, the term Terra Nova began to gain ground with mariners and notaries. Although Terra Nova could be both Latin and Portuguese (the forms are identical when written), there is circumstantial reason to believe it originated in Portugal. Between 1500 and 1502 the Azorean brothers Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real explored the region, bringing useful information back to Lisbon, then a hub of geographic knowledge.Footnote 31 The earliest known document to use the phrase Terra Nova was written in Portugal just after the turn of the sixteenth century, when in 1502 the Crown confirmed the discoveries made by Gaspar Corte-Real, describing them as “Terra Nova.”Footnote 32 The term seems to have been in regular use soon after: in 1506 a Portuguese decree relating to the taxation of fish evoked “the fisheries of Terra Nova.”Footnote 33 In general, Terra Nova appears more frequently in Portuguese than in Latin, and there was a clear connection between the northwest Atlantic and Portuguese mercantile activity during this crucial formative period. The phrase Terra Nova may have subsequently permeated across the porous inter-linguistic borders of western Europe.Footnote 34 Terre neufve appears in 1508 in the records of a Norman court case, and the same year Terra Nova appears on a map made by a northern European cartographer working in Rome.Footnote 35 We find Tierra Nova in a 1511 Aragonese document, quickly followed by Terre Neufve in Breton records dated 1513–1514.Footnote 36 Basques were talking about Terres Nabes in 1512, soon joined by Galicians sailing for Terra Nueva in 1517.Footnote 37 In the following decade even English sources often replaced the familiar “New-found-land” with “Newland,” a direct translation of Terra Nova, and from as early as 1520 preserved cod was widely known as “Newland fish” in England.Footnote 38 It is possible that mariners from Brittany were the main vector for the term’s adoption across northwest Europe. In 1511 the Aragonese Crown even made clear that if one wanted to travel to Tierra Nueva, it was best to have Bretons on board as pilots.Footnote 39 They may have learned the phrase from Portuguese mariners and then adopted it in the first decade of the sixteenth century as they themselves became the preeminent fishworkers.Footnote 40 However it spread, from the 1520s Terra Nova was the most common way to describe the northwest Atlantic in all the surviving records. Even in Bristol, whose seafarers are credited with “discovering” what they called the “New-found-islands,” port records from 1516–1517 record two fish-carrying ships (one Breton, one Norman) arriving not from Newfoundland but from “Terra Nova.”Footnote 41
Why a New Land? Variants of New Island and New Land were used in the earliest records to describe Europeans’ encounters with land in the northwest Atlantic.Footnote 42 The original meaning was aspirational, and in royal documents it is used to designate new islands and lands, both recently discovered and as yet unexplored, which might be seized and exploited. Perhaps intended as a placeholder until more sense could be made of the northwest Atlantic, New Land stuck. As Stephanie Pettigrew and Elizabeth Mancke have pointed out, variants of New Land would occasionally appear elsewhere in the Atlantic in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, including Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic.Footnote 43 In none of these places, however, did it become entrenched in the way it did in the northwest Atlantic. Nor was it applied to maritime spaces, but rather to islands or continents. It is possible (though we are unlikely to ever know for sure) that New Land was even meant ironically in the northwest Atlantic context: once a shorthand phrase to mark the landlocked dreams of explorers, it was subsequently appropriated by mariners to describe familiar waters.
Because modern scholars take the meaning of Terra Nova at face value, with the stress on nova, they tend to over-emphasize the newness of this maritime space in the minds of European mariners. For decades historians have latched onto the extravagant descriptions of a handful of (mostly English) colonists, explorers, and promoters who portrayed the novelty and abundance of these territories.Footnote 44 In so doing, they consciously or unconsciously foreground the new—new world, new riches, new opportunities, new-found-lands.Footnote 45 In truth, most mariners were less than impressed with Terra Nova. It was a cold and dangerous place to be briefly visited during the warm months and then left for the rest of the year. The English, who were the first to report on the abundance of fish and to bring back catches, were in fact the last community to engage systematically with the sixteenth-century fishery. Much to the frustration of advocates like Anthony Parkhurst, the English fishing fleet did not grow beyond a few dozen ships to become a serious competitor in Terra Nova until after the 1570s.Footnote 46 The gran capitano who wrote about visiting the fishery in Ramusio’s famous collection of navigational essays gave a dry, practical description of Terra Nova which offered no image of novelty or abundance.Footnote 47 The navigator and author Jean Alfonse compared the region to Spain rather than Eden, commenting only that it had “many fisheries” (force pescheries).Footnote 48 The waters of the northwest Atlantic held vast stores of fish, it is true. But so did those around Iceland, the North Sea, and countless other corners of the ocean.Footnote 49 Off the Rio do Ouro in Saharan Africa, according to one Portuguese mariner, one could catch enough fish to fill a ship in only four hours of handlining.Footnote 50 In his travelogue, the Venetian merchant Alessandro Magno marveled at how much fish was to be had along the coast of Spain in the 1560s, describing it in the glowing terms we normally associate with Newfoundland.Footnote 51 The North Sea’s herring fishery was known as the “Golden Mountain” to the Dutch by the 1570s.Footnote 52 The northwest Atlantic was not always as nova as modern historians assume.
Once it was adopted by mariners, Terra Nova was used consistently throughout the first century of the fishery. One of the earliest records to cite a ship sailing to the northwest Atlantic, a 1508 court case from Normandy involving a ship from Brittany, described a voyage “to Terra Nova” (a la terre neufve).Footnote 53 This was remarkably similar to how it would be used nearly a century later in the 1590s, when the formulation “a Terra Nova voyage” (un voyage de la terre neufve) was employed by notaries in La Rochelle and Honfleur.Footnote 54 In between we find thousands of cases in loan contracts, charter parties, court cases, sales agreements, tax records, and the like. Such texts reflect official statements made by merchants and seafarers regarding their operations in the Atlantic. The term was used, for instance, in the testimonies of Basque mariners during two official inquiries carried out in Guipúzcoa in 1542 and 1554. During the 1542 inquiry, the mariner Robert Lefant could confidently tell a scribe that he had been hired to “go to Terra Nova (para Terra Noba) to fish for cod.”Footnote 55 In 1554 notaries recorded the deposition of Martin de Hua of San Sebastian, who admitted attacking Breton fishworkers somewhere “in a port of Terra Nova (de Tierrenueva) … in the North part of Terra Nova (de la Parte de Norte de Tierrenueva).”Footnote 56 It is telling that it is only in the 1590s, as Dutch merchants and mariners began to engage with the northwest Atlantic fish trade, that references to the region start to appear in Amsterdam’s notarial records. The Dutch were latecomers to the trade, jumping into a fishery that was almost a century old. When Amsterdam notaries had to record the name of the place where fishworkers were headed, in a city many leagues from Lisbon and at a moment far removed from the geographic confusion of the early sixteenth century, the scribes used the phrase terre neufve to describe the northwest Atlantic—the French name was sometimes reproduced verbatim.Footnote 57 This may indicate that Dutch merchants were learning of the region from French-speaking mariners, who of course used the term with which they were most familiar, Terra Nova.
Two records provide further evidence that the phrase Terra Nova was used not just by scribes but by the fishworkers themselves. In the 1540s an anonymous Norman mariner recorded a brief memorandum on the last page of a manuscript navigation guide.Footnote 58 In two short paragraphs, scratched out in a hasty script, the seafarer left himself a note “for Terra Nova” (pour la terre-neufve), recording the best ways to identify the offshore coastal shelf known then, as now, as the Grand Banks (look for the birds) and where he had left his ships from the last season (sunk underwater for safekeeping in Renews Harbor). A decade later, in 1559, an unnamed Breton merchant jotted down in a small notebook reserved for his accounts “the names of the mariners for my ship for Terra Nova (terre neuffve).”Footnote 59 Both of these documents were made by mariners familiar with the fishery and were meant for their own use, hastily-made notes that happen to have survived rather than official records.
Such uses may have prompted the explorer and geographer Thevet to describe in one of his many works “the country vulgarly known as Terra Nova (Terre Neuuve), which from the time of its discovery until today has borne and still bears this name.”Footnote 60 Thevet frequently insisted that his own writing was based on interviews with mariners, especially Bretons, and his use of “vulgarly” reflects mid-sixteenth-century ways of describing popular modes of speech and thought. In the 1570s Parkhurst described the fishery to his patron Richard Hakluyt as “the sundry navies that come to Newfoundland, or Terra nova, for fish,” implying that while geographers such as Hakluyt might know it as Newfoundland, most others would be more familiar with the term Terra Nova.Footnote 61
While textual records suggest the consistent use of Terra Nova by mariners, sixteenth-century cartographers did not employ the concept in the same way. The term appears on only a handful of maps, mainly by the Venetian mapmaker Gastaldi, with alternative labels and configurations of the space being the norm. Cartographers and geographers at that time generally organized and labeled the northwest Atlantic in one of two ways. The first was to designate different parts of the region with titles bestowed by officially sanctioned navigators, in particular to denote possession. In such cases, names were used to stake claims and circumscribe space within European zones of control—or at least to aspire to such claims and control. The voyages of Jacques Cartier and Giovanni da Verrazzano thus gave rise to two different place-names: New France would soon become fixed in the St. Lawrence valley, while the geography of the quasi-mythical realm of Norumbega was always much vaguer.Footnote 62 The earliest maps of what is today Newfoundland label it variously as the “Land Discovered by the English,” the “Land of the King of Portugal,” or the “Land of Labrador.”Footnote 63 In contrast to the popularity of the phrase Terra Nova, the term Newfoundland, or indeed the use of the island itself as a marker for the fishery, was unknown outside of a few English writings and maps. Nor was the island always known under this name. Geographers, cartographers, and others made frequent references to the “Island of Cod,” the “Island of Bacalaos,” and even the mysterious “Island of Demons” well into the later parts of the century.Footnote 64 For much of the sixteenth century Europeans were uncertain whether Newfoundland was a single island or an archipelago.Footnote 65
These conflicting ways of portraying space could sometimes appear on the same map. In 1511 the celebrated Genoese cartographer Visconte Maggiolo completed a portolan atlas that encompassed the entire globe.Footnote 66 Drafted in Naples but based on his experience in Genoa, a city at the forefront of contemporary cartographic science, the map incorporated the latest information about the south Atlantic and the Americas.Footnote 67 In the northwest corner of the Atlantic, Maggiolo drew his viewer’s attention to the “Land of the English,” the “Land of Labrador of the King of Portugal,” the “Land of Corte-Real of the King of Portugal,” and the “Land of Fishery” (fig. 4). Four terms to describe what around the same time the shipmates of the Breton mariner Dobel would sum up in the phrase “Terre-Neusfve.” The descriptors used by Maggiolo were typical of how Mediterranean, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and French mapmakers came to identify land in the northwest Atlantic in the sixteenth century: a combination of names derived from exploration, royal territorial claims, and commodity production.Footnote 68
Figure 4 Detail of a 1511 map by Visconte Maggiolo, showing the northwest Atlantic
The second approach, increasingly common as the century wore on, was simply to label the entirety of the northwest Atlantic according to its chief export, codfish. Most popular was the word bacalaos or bacalhau, the Spanish and Portuguese term for dry salt-cod, meaning that for many European and Mediterranean consumers, codfish came, quite literally, from a place called salt-cod on their maps. The name appears as early as 1508 on a map made by Johannes Ruysch, though later sources credited Sebastian Caboto, Zuan Caboto’s son, with bestowing the name on the region around the same time.Footnote 69 Bacalaos originally designated an island, but for Spanish, Portuguese, and Mediterranean geographers it sometimes meant the entire coast of the northwest Atlantic, and sometimes a smaller part of the region.Footnote 70 The atlas-maker Alonso de Santa Cruz, for instance, labeled the whole coast of the northwest Atlantic as “Tierra de Bacallaos” in his mid-sixteenth-century survey of islands (fig. 5).Footnote 71 Naming such a large region after a single commodity may find a parallel only in Brazil, so called by the Portuguese after the dyewood. The term Bacalaos lived a kind of parallel life to Terra Nova, appearing on maps throughout the sixteenth century before fading from use in the seventeenth. Yet it was never as consistently used, nor as widely embraced. In any case, it was not clear whether Bacalaos described a coherent space in the way that Terra Nova did—cartographers and geographers tended to apply it haphazardly to different coasts and islands, and mainly to land rather than water. Importantly, the term rarely appeared in written accounts related to mariners, and it seems that few fishworkers thought of themselves as catching cod in Bacalaos. This is further evidence of the competing ways of thinking about new spaces that coexisted in the sixteenth century.Footnote 72
Figure 5 Map of “Tierra de Bacallaos” by Alonso de Santa Cruz
Beyond the world of mapmakers, few of these alternative names seem to have had the purchase achieved by Terra Nova. I would argue that this is because Terra Nova was not just a different way of naming the northwest Atlantic; it represented a different idea about what that space was. Cartographers wanted to assign labels to lands and islands, places that could be claimed, seized, and exploited. Mariners appear to have preferred a term that was malleable enough to apply to the kind of mobile, floating work they did in the northwest Atlantic. Terra Nova was a place for fishwork, not a fixed piece of land to be claimed, and this made it useful for mariners and less so for cartographers.
Terra Nova as Action and Experience
What did it mean to visit Terra Nova? The anonymous Norman mariner, writing in the 1540s, tells us that birds were the first sign one was nearing the region. As a ship approached the northwest Atlantic, after a month or more of sailing, the experienced seafarer should look for “great flocks of faulqnetz and also great flocks of a small bird called marmyons, then you are forty leagues from the bank.” When the birds disappeared, he advised, the ship had at last reached the Grand Banks and could drop a line to take soundings.Footnote 73 Parmenius, the Hungarian poet sent to Terra Nova in 1583 to record Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s voyage, likewise associated the region with animals, weather, and climate. You had reached Terra Nova when you found endless fog, rain, and fierce winds, when your fish scorched in the sun if you left it out too long to dry, and when you saw your first icebergs, even in May.Footnote 74 “Some of our company have reported,” he advised his English audience, “that in the month of May they were stuck for sixteen whole days on end in so much ice that some of the icebergs were sixty fathoms thick; and when their sides facing the sun melted, the entire mass was turned over, as it were on a sort of pivot, in such a way that what had previously been facing upwards was then facing down, to the great danger of any people at hand, as you can well imagine.”Footnote 75 But even as he complained about the weather and risks of the fishery, Parmenius summed up what made it all worthwhile: you had reached Terra Nova when you found “piscium inexhausta copia,” an inexhaustible supply of fish.
For other mariners it was the people who made Terra Nova. Alayn Moyne, a Breton pilot hired to guide the English adventurer Richard Hore’s ships to Terra Nova in 1536, knew he had arrived when he found himself once more amongst his fellow countrymen. While the English crew spent their days in small boats offshore catching fish, Moyne left them to wander the beaches, where he “went on lande emongest the Bryttons his country men and made mery with them a day or ii.”Footnote 76 Breton mariners could be found in Terra Nova every year from May to August without fail, a comfort to Moyne that nonetheless proved costly when he was charged with dereliction of duty back in London. Clemente de Odeliça, a Spanish Basque mariner who was in Terra Nova in 1542, and who testified before the inquiry in Guipúzcoa that same year, knew that he and his crew had arrived when they encountered Indigenous communities (likely the Innu of southern Labrador), for he reported “that many Indians came to his ship in Grand Bay (Gran Baya), and they ate and drank together, and were very friendly, and the Indians gave them deer and wolf skins in exchange for axes and knives and other trifles.”Footnote 77 Lefant, testifying before the same court of inquiry, remarked casually that in Terra Nova “the people trade in marten skins and other skins, and those who go there take all kinds of ironware. And … the Indians understand any language, French, English, and Gascon, and their own tongue.”Footnote 78 After nearly four decades of European mariners visiting the region every summer, Terra Nova sounded a lot like home to Lefant. It was a place that mariners understood not just as a point on a map but as a series of experiences: certain birds, particularly unpleasant weather, one’s fellow countrymen, and an ever-present Indigenous community. These experiences in turn shaped what could and could not be part of Terra Nova.
In the early sixteenth century, Terra Nova was something artificial, a space made through human actions and tied to the behavior of mariners. That is, after all, what a place is—an idea about space and spatial relationships that we create through our actions and words.Footnote 79 Terra Nova had to be made and imposed on the world, but in so doing fishworkers had created a reality which was useful and intelligible to other mariners. People, birds, coasts, fog, sea ice, memories, and experiences: these were the constituent elements by which Europeans constructed a sense of place. For Terra Nova was definitely a place, a discrete space on the mental map of many Europeans. It was a destination that could be visited, a fishery distinct from Iceland or Ireland or countless others. But places are subjective, shifting things. Terra Nova was not fixed, not a point or carefully bounded area on a coordinate map, but a term malleable enough to signify a vast swathe of the northwest Atlantic.
Even this does not fully account for how Terra Nova functioned, but with the aid of the scholarship on space we can take our interpretation further. The ways in which sixteenth-century mariners thought about Terra Nova correspond more broadly to how anthropologists and archaeologists understand the making of space and place by humans. A place is a thing to be created, and we create by doing—actions produce knowledge, which produces place. The unifying elements were movement and work. As Ingold has put it, “we know as we go, from place to place … people’s knowledge of the environment undergoes continuous formation in the very course of their moving about in it.”Footnote 80 Alfred Gell has deftly explored the differences between navigating by mental map and navigating by lived experience. He has also made clear that the two are inseparable: though we may generate navigable routes through experience, we must also be able to plot our position on mental maps as we move.Footnote 81 We use our experiences, our memories of movement, to create concepts of place, and mental maps to navigate between and within those places. Sometimes these mental maps survive in written or cartographic form, but sometimes not. As Ricardo Padrón has shown, this experiential and itinerary-based approach to mapping and navigation was essential to how the Spanish understood colonial spaces in the Americas.Footnote 82 It can also, I would argue, help explain how Terra Nova functioned, as a mental map inseparable from what Gell has called the “image-based practical mastery” of mariners working the northwest Atlantic.Footnote 83
These mental images, forged by movement and actions, become a place. But how does movement become space which can then be articulated as a mental map? Here we can draw on theories of landscape, which can also be applied to watery spaces. Maria N. Zedeño has compellingly argued for seeing the world as landscapes composed of landmarks, the latter being particular points of human-natural interaction (trees, roads, beaches, mines, etc.). Landmarks are “the ‘pages’ in the history of land and resource use,” such that “Landscape may be defined as the web of interactions between people and landmarks.”Footnote 84 Although Zedeño’s language is terrestrial—landscape—the process she describes is that of experience (landmarks) shaping an image of space from which we in turn form our mental maps. This certainly reflects how Terra Nova functioned: as a maritime landscape composed of experiences, of landmarks like the beach at Caprouge or the birds of the Grand Banks. Zedeño’s work complements Christer Westerdahl’s pioneering proposal to understand maritime space as a “maritime cultural landscape” which “signifies human utilization (economy) of maritime space by boat: settlement, fishing, hunting, shipping and its attendant subcultures.”Footnote 85 In synthesizing material and cultural evidence into a comprehensive tool for archaeologists, especially underwater archaeologists, this concept offers a way to understand the spaces they study as an analogue and contrast to terrestrial landscapes. Like Zedeño’s landscape, Westerdahl’s maritime cultural landscape is composed of landmarks and memories, each tied to a maritime action. We may go one step further and suggest that such a landscape—a collection of maritime landmarks—was the foundation for the mental maps formed by sixteenth-century mariners in the northwest Atlantic.
The sites and experiences which comprised Terra Nova were all tied to fishwork. They were the harbors and banks, the shoals and islands, the beaches and cliffs, the birds’ nests and freshwater streams observed and used by European mariners each summer. These sites were formed in many ways, for fishwork constituted many kinds of labor that required many kinds of space. Rocky areas were used to sun-dry salted cod, beaches were used to launch fishing boats, and camps were set up beyond the shoreline. For those who worked the Grand Banks in pursuit of morue verte (wet-salted cod made on board ships) the sea itself was the main site of fishwork, and crews might never set foot on shore.Footnote 86 Because of this close association between fishwork and the northwest Atlantic, throughout the sixteenth century the phrase Terra Nova was often paired with a variation of the verb “to fish.” The most usual formulation in notarial records from French-speaking ports, for instance, invoked a journey “to Terra Nova to fish” (voyage de terre neufve a la pesche), “to Terra Nova in the fishery” (aux terres neufves en la pescherie), or some variant thereof.Footnote 87 As early as 1506, Portuguese records were referring to “the fisheries of Terra Nova” (das pesquerias da Terra Nova).Footnote 88 To declare “I am going to Terra Nova” was functionally equivalent to “I am going fishing.” This linguistic pattern reflects an understanding that space could be mutable and determined by the ability to perform a certain action. Where there were fish that could be caught, there was Terra Nova. A harbor might become part of Terra Nova not because of where it was located, but because it was used for fishing.
Terra Nova, then, was created by going to the northwest Atlantic and doing fishwork. Elements of this process have been identified before—not least by Peter Pope, who has drawn on both Westerdahl and Zedeño to argue that “between 1500 and 1800 European fishermen created distinct maritime cultural landscapes in Newfoundland and the Gulf of St Lawrence.”Footnote 89 Yet Pope’s approach falls short in ways which are important for understanding Terra Nova. He portrays a relative continuity from 1500 to 1800, whereas I would argue that the sixteenth century was distinct. He further suggests the fishing room (a shore-based fishing station) as the key constitutive element of the maritime cultural landscape in the northwest Atlantic. While the fishing room was a fixture of the seventeenth-century fishery, we have far less physical or written evidence for its use in the sixteenth, and it was only one of the landmarks through which Europeans interacted with the landscape. Focusing on the fishing room also emphasizes the shore over the water. Pope’s conception of the maritime cultural landscape of Newfoundland is thus ultimately bound to land, to specific spots on the map, both by his emphasis on these structures and by his use of the modern place-name Newfoundland. What of fishworkers who did not use rooms—such as the Normans who spent their summers on the Grand Banks, bobbing offshore and making morue verte without ever setting foot on the beach? What of the open seas where Basque whalers ran down their prey? What of the bird colonies European mariners raided for food, itself a kind of work necessary to the fishery’s basic functions? What about the bays and harbors and beaches where Innu, Mi’kmaq, and Inuit met to trade with fishworkers? It is necessary to think of sites of exploitation more broadly, on shore and at sea, as the landmarks that made up the cultural landscape, and ultimately the mental map, of Terra Nova. Fishing stages, whaling stations, offshore banks, bird colonies, ice flows, canoes, chalupas, ships great and small—all were part of how mariners understood the space. It was action, not a structure resembling a booth, that made landmarks and landscapes in the sixteenth-century northwest Atlantic.
Such a conception of space, so rooted in experience and work, could only be created by the European mariners who ventured to the northwest Atlantic every summer. Most fishworkers served in Terra Nova for multiple seasons, and entire families or even port towns could become tied to the seasonal fishery, allowing them to develop intimate understandings of the maritime spaces in which their relatives and neighbors worked. These were not yet the motley crews of proletarianized mariners we would later see in the Atlantic world.Footnote 90 Fishing crews tended to be small, recruited locally and sometimes via family ties within coastal communities.Footnote 91 It was common for fishing ships to sail with a complement of grumetes, younger boys serving as apprentices to the older men already familiar with life at sea (most of whom were in their twenties to forties). These young boys may have served with fishworkers who had spent decades gaining an intimate knowledge of the coasts and seas of Terra Nova, which they could then pass on. In 1610 Samuel de Champlain encountered “old mariners” (vieux mariniers) at Tadoussac on the St. Lawrence River who marveled at weather conditions that “had not been seen for sixty years.”Footnote 92 Through such hands-on training, word-of-mouth, and the circulation of information within port towns, mariners could cultivate, transfer, and preserve knowledge of work and place in the northwest Atlantic.
Ecologist Fikret Berkes has argued that the kind of localized, detailed knowledge which comes from spending so much time working in a particular landscape forms a “sacred ecology” that allows communities to more effectively manage natural resources.Footnote 93 For European seafarers in the northwest Atlantic, this relationship was sometimes more than nominally sacred—as Miren Egaña Goya has shown, from the mid-sixteenth century Basque fishworkers were given the last rites and buried along the coasts of Terra Nova.Footnote 94 Such processes of familiarization, both ecological and sacral, were essential to the history of Terra Nova. In 1521 the Drapers’ guild in London stressed the importance of consulting mariners “having experience, and excercised in and abowt the forsaid Iland, aswele in knowlege of the land, the due courses of the seey, thiderward & homeward, as in knowlege of the havenes, roodes, poortes, crekes, dayngers & sholdes there uppon that coste and there abowtes being.”Footnote 95 This was an appeal to minds that knew the subtle difference between a haven, a port, a road, and a creek, and could hold detailed information on the many rocky shoals and dangers of the northwest Atlantic. One such mind was that of the anonymous Norman mariner who in the 1540s wrote about the boats he had left in Terra Nova, specifying that they were in “the harbor of Jean Denys called Rangoust.”Footnote 96 The same mariner recorded leaving some boats in a “cul-de-sac” and others in an “anse-a-main” of the river which flowed into the harbor, both used to mean particular kinds of bends in the waterway. In his testimony at Guipúzcoa, Lefant stated confidently that he and other Basque sailors had visited Brest, a harbor on the south coast of Labrador, and Caprouge in the north of Newfoundland island, describing from memory the shoreline and harbors for the Castilian authorities.Footnote 97 Work brought familiarity, and familiarity shaped conceptions of space.
If it was created from experience and observation, Terra Nova was nonetheless entirely a product of European perspectives. The sites of fishwork it comprised were all places where Basque, Breton, Norman, Portuguese, and other mariners from across the sea labored. Instead of being at the center of how Europeans interacted with space, as was and would be the case in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, North America, Brazil, and elsewhere, Indigenous communities in Terra Nova remained at the periphery of the European experience. The relationship was a complex one in which both parties carefully balanced a mutual interest in the exchange of goods (typically metalwork for furs) with the maintenance of a deliberate distance.Footnote 98 In general, First Nations (and later Inuit) appear haphazardly and often nebulously in our documents, while recent archaeological work has primarily focused on the period after 1580 (if sites can be dated at all).Footnote 99 Some Basque mariners spoke of open fraternization with Innu communities along La Gran Baya, while Bretons and Basques probably ran into Mi’kmaq seafarers on the islands between Cape Breton and Newfoundland every year.Footnote 100 Only towards the end of the sixteenth century would these informal relations begin to shift towards a fur trade in the full sense, drawing Mi’kmaq and Innu into the European commercial orbit while pushing away the Beothuk.Footnote 101
The geographic knowledge and territorial claims of the Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit were all erased through the imposition of the worldview of European mariners. Even so, Zoe Todd has persuasively argued that Indigenous conceptions of space were fundamentally different from those employed by Europeans. If European mariners saw space as constructed through fishwork (human harvesting of a passive nature) and its landmarks, then Indigenous peoples tended to see “land and place as sets of relationships between human and nonhuman beings, co-constituting one another.”Footnote 102 Constructed in a different way, Indigenous mental maps gave rise to different names and geographies. In a rightfully scathing essay, Susan Manning has drawn attention to how seventeenth-century settler colonialism on Newfoundland island has utterly erased Indigenous place-names and concepts of place.Footnote 103 We can see the origins of this in the sixteenth century and the process by which mariners imposed the idea of Terra Nova on the region. If there could be no New France in Terra Nova, then neither could there be Ktaqmkuk or Akami-assi. The very language that First Nations and Inuit used to describe and label the northwest Atlantic was often lost or misrecorded, and relatively few place-names of Algonkian origin survive along the coast of present-day Newfoundland and Labrador.Footnote 104 Even as it competed with cartographic conceptions of the northwest Atlantic, the mariners’ Terra Nova thus denied Indigenous conceptions of space.
The mariner’s world of Terra Nova shaped the development of a permanent European presence in the northwest Atlantic and defined European mental maps for much of the sixteenth century. In the long run, however, Terra Nova would be subsumed by alternative ways of viewing space. Significant structural changes to the fishery after 1580 brought a slow but steady flow of problems that undermined the key to Terra Nova: a shared experience of fishwork.Footnote 105 The scale and intensity of the fishery increased rapidly, even as English and Dutch ships drove out Spanish and Portuguese competitors while pioneering a new carrying trade to southern Europe and the Caribbean. Competition between fishworkers increased, violence and piracy became endemic, and divisions between communities hardened into separate fishing grounds. The Breton Petit Nord, Norman Grand Banks, and English Shore replaced a shared Terra Nova. At the same time, the growing appetite for furs shifted economic incentives away from the water towards trade and the mainland. Most importantly, a renewed push by the English and French Crowns to explore and settle the northwest Atlantic revived the idea of permanently inhabiting and controlling the region. Newfoundland island became an English colony, and a site of inter-imperial rivalry. As these economic and imperial shifts developed, the older ways in which mariners had described the northwest Atlantic faded from use and even from memory.
But this was long after the fishery was first established and should not be projected backward. We need to treat the sixteenth century as its own tumultuous and formative period, rather than subordinating it to an imperial and cartographic vision that was in fact only fitfully imposed at a later date. What I have suggested here is that the term Terra Nova reflected the nature of mobile, multi-communal fishwork detached from specific points on land and unique to the early sixteenth century. This can help to overcome the fractured way that historians have tended to study the early fishery, allowing us to think in terms of mental maps created through shared experience rather than bits of land and islands arbitrarily assigned to particular empires and nations.
More than anything, thinking with Terra Nova encourages us to move away from rigid conceptions of geography and to embrace more nebulous and dynamic (if confusing) frameworks that better reflect the lived experience of humans in the premodern world. The use of Terra Nova as an extension of fishwork allowed sixteenth-century mariners to connect the open ocean, coasts, and harbors into a single space through their actions. In certain ways, Terra Nova resembles the flexible, “aqueous” Greater Caribbean Ernesto Bassi has described for the eighteenth century, or the maritime Caribbean Sharika Crawford has traced in the twentieth.Footnote 106 Yet Terra Nova was never defined by ports and routes—that is, by internal trade and movement—alone, nor was it an inter-imperial space like the Caribbean. Rather than being defined simply by physical spaces or the distinction between land and sea, Terra Nova was shaped by a complex tripartite relationship between the sea, marine life, and humans, and by the labor of maritime workers. It is also a strong reminder that European ideas about water in the sixteenth century were more complex than historians often acknowledge, for oceans could be more than just highways for those who drew their livelihoods from the depths of the sea.
Terra Nova itself was never static. It moved and changed with the seasons and years, an essential reality that highlights the importance of climate and ecology in shaping the early fishery. A cold summer season might mean a smaller Terra Nova, as ice and shrinking fish stocks constrained fishing boats, while a warmer one could expand their reach. By the late sixteenth century, whalers were hunting in the waters of the St. Lawrence River, whereas in the 1540s they had been concentrated off the south coast of Labrador. By the turn of the seventeenth century, more and more ships were operating on the Grand Banks, which had become a new center of gravity in Terra Nova. The crew of a fishing boat might visit different parts of the region in a single voyage, shifting from offshore “wet” fishing to drying their catch on a different stretch of beach, or visiting Indigenous communities in one or more harbors. Terra Nova was thus a region with highly fluid boundaries that could expand or contract according to the season, a given mariner’s perspective, relations with particular Indigenous communities, or the depletion of local fish stocks.
This instability, this vagueness, was ultimately an asset to mariners, enabling them to control access to and knowledge about space in the Atlantic basin. As Terra Nova was a nebulous term whose complexities were probably only understood by those who had actually visited, it could be useful when deployed in bureaucratic documents. In cases where mariners reported they were traveling to Terra Nova, they were often (though not always) careful to avoid describing exactly where they were going. This was quite deliberate, and reflects the practical considerations of fishwork. Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians have long sought to come to grips with what some have called the “secrecy” of fishworkers, historically vague, dissembling, or reticent when describing their activity to others. To outsiders this can appear as caginess bordering on obsessive secrecy, but the key point is that control of information is essential to fishwork. As Thorolfur Thorlindsson has noted, “a skipper is in many ways like a researcher looking for patterns which may help him understand his environment and make him more successful in catching fish.”Footnote 107 To preserve an advantage, given the finite amount of marine biomass in any one fishery, that information can be withheld—from competitors, but also from state actors who would seek to tax and control fishwork. Global fishworkers have long practiced the art of concealing information about fishing grounds, much to the chagrin of historians wishing to reconstruct their voyages. To this might be added the tendency of most sixteenth-century European coastal populations to evade state inquiry and deliberately obscure their activities. One early record from 1514 involves an abbey in northern Brittany complaining about local fishworkers (called “wicked men,” or homes malles) visiting “la Terre-Neuffve” without paying their taxes.Footnote 108 The authorities at the abbey were clearly troubled not just by the fact that the voyages were taking place, but that they were so unregulated and unknowable. A phrase like Terra Nova was a useful tool in this careful dance between fishworkers and the state. It was descriptive enough to denote a real destination in the Atlantic basin, but vague enough to avoid giving away too much information.
As tempting as it may be to view the practical, malleable vision of space inherent in Terra Nova as a kind of also-ran in the long history of an Atlantic world, this is to minimize and overlook its success. In a century in which there was no shortage of opportunities for enterprising merchants, settlers, and state actors, the difficulty of establishing a permanent settlement in a place where marine life could be harvested for free made such an effort uncompelling. Terra Nova captures the impermanent, open, and watery world where fishworkers performed their labor. This was their kingdom, where they exploited nature’s resources in pursuit of sustenance and profit. An understanding of the contemporary uses of the term Terra Nova highlights the expansive sense of place possessed by mariners in the northwest Atlantic. Ultimately, it gives credit to their capacity, in the sixteenth century, to define their own world and to challenge the assumptions of cartographers and explorers concerning spaces in the Atlantic and North America. Such an understanding of the earliest years of the fishery helps us better grasp not only the difficulties faced by mariners but also the degree to which their actions drove change in the Atlantic basin. This in turn reframes the boundaries of the early Atlantic, showing it to be a much more expansive, contested, and dynamic space than many historians have assumed.
