large as cod. Some sturgeon were twelve feet long. The works
of Captain John Smith, Rolfe's _Relation_, and other books of early
travellers, all tell of the enormous amount of fish in Virginia.

The New York rivers were also full of fish, and the bays; their plenty
in New Netherland inspired the first poet of that colony to rhyming
enumeration of the various kinds of fish found there; among them were
sturgeon--beloved of the Indians and despised of Christians; and
terrapin--not despised by any one. "Some persons," wrote the Dutch
traveller, Van der Donck, in 1656, "prepare delicious dishes from the
water terrapin, which is luscious food." The Middle and Southern states
paid equally warm but more tardy tribute to the terrapin's reputation as
luscious food.

While other fish were used everywhere for food, cod was the great staple
of the fishing industry. By the year 1633 Dorchester and Marblehead had
started in the fisheries for trading purposes. Sturgeon also was caught
at a little later date, and bass and alewives.

Morton, in his _New England Canaan_, written in 1636, says, "I myself at
the turning of the tyde have seen such multitudes of sea bass that it
seemed to me that one might goe over their backs dri-shod."

The regulation of fish-weirs soon became an important matter in all
towns where streams let alewives up from the sea. The New England
ministers took a hand in promoting and encouraging the fisheries, as
they did all positive social movements and commercial benefits. Rev.
Hugh Peter in Salem gave the fisheries a specially good turn. Fishermen
were excused from military training, and portions of the common stock of
corn were assigned to them. The General Court of Massachusetts exempted
"vessels and stock" from "country charges" (which were taxes) for seven
years. Seashore towns assigned free lands to each boat to be used for
stays and flakes for drying. As early as 1640 three hundred thousand
dried codfish were sent to market from New England.

Codfish consisted of three sorts, "marchantable, middling, and refuse."
The first grade was sold chiefly to Roman Catholic Europe, to supply the
constant demands of the fast-days of that religion, and also those of
the Church of England; the second was consumed at home or in the
merchant vessels of New England; the third went to the negroes of the
West Indies, and was often called Jamaica fish. The dun-fish or
dumb-fish, as the word was sometimes written, were the b