This article explores, through the examination and analysis of anthropological, historical and documentary sources from various archives, the relationship between Puerto Rico and Newfoundland, as consumers and producers of salted fish, respectively. Cod was a cheap food used to support the enslaved and free workforce in the long Caribbean and transatlantic life. The development of capitalism, according to Jason Moore, has depended on the expansion of productive borders (areas where labour and resources are exploited) and on the extraction and consumption of cheap inputs. To this end, it has been dependent on the extraction of an ecological surplus based, in this case, on the ownership of unpaid work by women and children. Cod took place in conditions of exploitation and unpaid work of men, women and children in Newfoundland, feeding poor families in Puerto Rico. The main objective of this work is to implement these theoretical approaches by Moore, in the analysis of these two social formations, which have been colonies of imperial powers; both linked in an Ecology-World based on cod production and consumption; a process mediated by the commercial classes of both territories. Caribbean islands were linked to this transatlantic trade (including slaves, molasses, rums and wood) through exchanges with Newfoundland and New England since the 16th century. The 19th and 20th centuries, with the rise of sugar production in Puerto Rico, were decisive in establishing this consumption pattern and Newfoundland was one of the main producers and suppliers of this product to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, maintaining a strategy of expanding the productive border, leaving coastal fishing to fish in large banks, through a systematic process of capital accumulation and investment, based on innovations in fishing gear and vessels. This article suggests that the sum of imports by the Caribbean countries contributed to the eventual collapse of fishing supplies in Newfoundland. This work is a first step in analysing the deep relationship between capital and nature and a step in exploring how such transatlantic relations were shaping work and nature at two ends of the ocean. When writing the history of the Newfoundland fish stocks and fishing supplies, Puerto Rico will need to be involved and its role in the process of intensifying production, i.e. the expansion of the vertical border and the horizontal production boundary.