Cod helped build New England

“The Sacred Cod” hangs above the Massachusetts House of Representatives chamber as a symbol of the fish’s historical importance to the prosperity of the state.

“By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer - the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.”

― From Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky

Showing embedded in light green the collapse of the northwest Atlantic cod fishery

In the 19th Century, banks dories were carried aboard larger fishing schooners, and used for handlining cod on the Grand Banks and Georges Bank.