Outport Trade

The fishery-based commerce of colonial New England and Newfoundland’s small coastal settlements (the ‘outports’), centered on salt cod. Migratory and resident fishermen split, salted, and dried cod on shore stages; merchants shipped the dried fish to southern Europe and the West Indies, returning salt, wine, molasses, and rum, the West Country and triangular trades. Newfoundland’s outport economy ran on this fishery-and-credit system into the twentieth century, before resettlement programs concentrated the population.