In his book The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery Under Henry VII, author James A. Williamson, makes it clear there was an abundance of fish in the waters of the Atlantic as Cabot approached the shores of Newfoundland. But whether the fish were so thick that they slowed his ship the Matthew, and whether they were Cod, are another matter.

Williamson's book notes that in a letter to the Duke of Milan on Dec. 18, 1497, Milanese Ambassador to England Raimondo di Soncino wrote: "The area is swarming with fish which can be taken not only with baskets but in baskets let down with a stone so that it sinks in the water."

Di Soncino also wrote that the fish were so abundant that they could "render the English demand (for fish) independent of Iceland."

Other more recent writings, including a May 1997 article in the Canadian Airlines in-flight magazine, said fish were so thick that they showed Cabot's ship.

However, Dr. Leslie Harris, chair of a Canadian government panel which in 1989-90 reviewed the decline of Northern Cod stocks, dismisses both claims as "exaggerations not uncommon in travellers' tales....typical examples of hyperbole."

Dr. Harris notes that none of those who wrote about the fish seen on Cabot's voyage were on the ship and also that documents of the day weren't definitive about the kind of fish seen by Cabot's crew.

If the fish were Cod it is quite possible they could be brought into a ship in baskets, says Dr. Harris, because as a youngster back in the 1930s he used to do just that near Placentia Bay on the south coast of Newfoundland. "If you put bait in the basket, in five minutes you could bring up a basket full of Cod," says Dr. Harris, former president of Memorial University in St. John's Newfoundland. "But to dip baskets in the water and fill them with fish, I don't think that was possible (in Cabot's day)."

To impede a ship, Dr. Harris said cod fish would have to be "top to bottom" and that simply has not ever happened. In his opinion, if fish slowed Cabot's boat or were pulled from the sea in copious quantities in baskets, they were likely caplin, a bait fish that even today can fill the seas in some places from top to bottom. "At the right time in June, in spawning season, they do fill the sea from bottom to the surface and that could impede a boat...and there could be some cod mixed in with them," he says, noting that caplin are an important commercial fish bought by the Japanese for their eggs.