Fishing much cheaper then

The wooden “sacred cod’’ hangs over the House of Representatives chamber in the Massachusetts State House as a reminder of the species’ importance in the development of the state.

“By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer - the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the Twentieth Century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.”

― Mark Kurlansky, in Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World