Jack Bouchard is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His new book, Terra Nova: Food, Water, and Work in an Early Atlantic World, offers a bottom-up story of one of the largest European colonies in the Atlantic Basin and its vast network of seasonal fisheries. For more information, visit Yale University Press.
Can you share a little bit about the history of Terra Nova and how you came across this terminology in your research?
In some ways, what I’m writing about is well-known (the Newfoundland fisheries are well-established in the historiography and popular culture), but in focusing on the name Terra Nova and the idea behind it I have tried to recover how people in the sixteenth century actually thought about the northwest Atlantic rather than how we do today. I ended up writing a history of Terra Nova by accident, and it was not my intention when I began this project years ago to focus so much on space and names. As I was reading through the archival records during grad school, I started to realize that my sources were using the phrase “Terra Nova” all the time, and that it seemed to mean something different to them than it does to us. It was so obvious and overwhelming as I spent time with these documents that I realized it had to be part of my story. The real clincher came when I saw the term “Terra Neuf” in the notarial archives of Amsterdam – the Dutch were latecomers to the fishery and should have had their own way of saying New Land, yet here they were borrowing the phrase wholesale from the French. That’s when I realized Terra Nova must have been the term that mariners themselves were using, and that it had spread across borders by word-of-mouth, to describe the floating world at the other end of the Atlantic Ocean.
What was one of the most interesting pieces of evidence that you found in the archives?
My favorite piece of evidence related to Terra Nova is a short text, just a pair of paragraphs, written at the end of a long, unnamed manuscript from the 1540s (catalogued as Ms.Fr. 24269) in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. I came across it by accident when I saw an offhand reference in an old book on Norman maritime history and was fortunate that the manuscript had been entirely digitized by the BnF. The two paragraphs are a personal note jotted down by a mariner labeled “for Terra Nova,” a kind of memory aid scribbled at the end of some blank paper. One paragraph describes how to tell when you’ve reached the fishery, including which birds to look for and when to drop your anchor. The other paragraph is a reminder of where the author left his fishing boats at Renews Harbour, and how he had marked them (with a bent iron nail) so he could find them the next season. This is the only description of the fishery from the perspective of a mariner written in their own hand for the height of the sixteenth-century fishery, and it offers a uniquely intimate view of what fishwork was like.
How does the book’s narrative help us rethink histories of colonialism, empire, and the broader Atlantic World?
Terra Nova began as a critique of Atlantic history, a field I love but think has serious flaws, while also being a demonstration of why an Atlantic framework is so important. I have tried to show that the formation of Terra Nova was always tied to the rest of the Atlantic world, that we can’t separate the fishery from what is happening in the Caribbean, mid-Atlantic islands, or even the high Arctic. In the book, I stress that Terra Nova lacked the things we associate with empire and colonialism in the Atlantic, including a lack of permanent settlement, imperial claims, or close interactions between Europeans and Indigenous communities. Yet it was, I argue, a colony. It was a permanent occupation of territory which provided resources (here, biological energy) for the European metropole. The story of Terra Nova therefore belongs to Atlantic history, while also showing how varied and messy different approaches to colonization could be.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book? What themes or ideas would you like to see other scholars build on? And how has this project shaped your future research interests?
My dream is that after reading my book, the next time someone teaches a course on the Atlantic/early Americas or writes about the early Atlantic, they actually mention Terra Nova. If that sounds simple or silly, it really is the whole point: I wrote my book because I was sick of people ignoring this massive floating colony at the center of the Atlantic world, and I want people to pay attention. I wrote this book to get people excited about Terra Nova, and to point to all the sources we have and potential for future research. I hope that Terra Nova offers some lessons about how much we can recover from the early sixteenth century, and how to write environmental histories of ocean spaces in the premodern period.
Now that the book is done, I am finding that Terra Nova is guiding my future research more than I had planned. I am working on two projects that come directly out of material I found while working on Terra Nova’s history. One is a history of the Río de Oro, a bay along the Saharan Coast of Africa, which was, like Terra Nova, a major fishery in the 15th-16th centuries. The other is a history of seabirds and island colonization in the 16th century Atlantic, inspired by my reading in animal history and the references to seabirds I found while researching fishing. In both cases, I hope to build off of the themes I developed in Terra Nova, while expanding out into new corners of the Atlantic basin.