As for history, both Columbus and John Cabot were almost undoubtedly aware of the Grand Banks. If fishermen weren't fishermen, with an intuitive need to not reveal their honey holes, the planet might have been explored earlier. In a way, that fact alone tells us how many fish were in those 16th-century seas. By the late 1700's, codfish lifted New England from a distant colony of starving settlers to an international commercial power. Today, the cod stock off the Massachusetts coast, once the most abundant and meatiest of all, is in trouble.
Fishermen say it's coming back.