Grand Banks
Shallow fishing grounds in the Atlantic off Newfoundland. In Captains Courageous (Rudyard Kipling) they are where Harvey Cheyne is rescued and learns to fish.
At a glance
| Source | Author | Role | In one line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Captains Courageous | Rudyard Kipling | setting | Fog-bound cod grounds where Harvey falls from a liner and spends a season fishing in dories. |
| Cod | Mark Kurlansky | subject | The great cod grounds: the Basques’ secret, worked by fleets for 500 years until the 1992 moratorium. |
Sub-places
Captains Courageous — Rudyard Kipling (1897)
Source: Original · Readwise highlight
But Disko’s board was the Grand Bank—a triangle two hundred and fifty miles on each side
- Role: setting
- In the book: Harvey falls from a liner into the fog-bound fleet and is picked up by Manuel. Most of the book is spent on the Banks aboard the We’re Here, fishing cod and halibut from dories, anchoring berth after berth on Disko Troop’s reckoning, finding the bottomless Whale-deep and dodging liners and icebergs.
- Why it matters: The Banks are the book’s world; the boy is remade by the work there.
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World — Mark Kurlansky (1997)
Source: Cod · Original · Readwise highlight
Depths as great as eighty fathoms are found there, but also areas of fifteen or twenty fathoms and less.
- Role: subject
- In the book: Kurlansky explains how the meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current feeds a food chain ending in cod, making the Banks richer than any European ground. Fleets from St.-Malo, Portugal, Gloucester and Lunenburg work their fog, ice and shallows; Canada later shuts out foreign fleets, closes the cod fishery in 1992 and later arrests the Spanish trawler Estai in the international section.
- Why it matters: The central fishing ground of the book, and of its collapse.