Cod-led Recovery?
McCoy was forced to pour cold water on the ambitions of a group of businessmen gathered to taste 'cod from the bay'. They had hoped to establish an industry in Melbourne to rival the Newfoundland cod fisheries, which had made generations of northern hemisphere financiers a fortune.
The ultimately disappointing fish they dined upon turned out to be the Bearded Rock Cod, a small and inferior fish that clearly did not match the entrepreneurial appetites of early Melbourne.
I was called upon soon after arriving in the colony to assist at a grand dinner in the old Criterion Hotel of 'merchants, bankers, and others,' who had been brought to gather to taste this fish, to satisfy themselves it was a real Newfoundland cod, a bank of which had been discovered in Victorian waters by fishermen-practical men-who proposed to give the assembled gentlemen and their friends the opportunity of subscribing so many thousands for a fleet of boats, so many thousands for curing establishments on land, so much to the discoverers, &c., and to form a cod fishing company.
The small size of the cooked fish and its inferior flavour was explained by the discoverers having been so ill provided that they could only catch a few very young ones.
The statistics of the Newfoundland cod fisheries were quoted to show the great profit which would arise from this investment, and all went well, until one of the guests, who shall be nameless1, earned great unpopularity by giving some reasons for believing that the samples 16 and 17 inches long, were not young, but adult; and referring to the title of Sam Slick's new book at the time, 'How many Fins has a Cod?' showed that, as the real cod had three dorsal fins and two anal ones, and that the Victorian fish in question had only two dorsal and one anal.
The project collapsed; and although none of the capitalists willing to invest in the matter then knew 'how many fins had a cod', the figure now given will settle the identity of our fish for the future.
1Presumably McCoy himself.