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The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world.
While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations.
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The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world.
While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations.
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The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world.
While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations.
W. Jeffrey Bolster is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 3: The Sea Serpent and the Mackerel Jig
As the human race has extended over the surface of the earth, man has more or less modified the animal population of different regions, either by exterminating certain species, or introducing others. Louis Agassiz and Augustus M. Gould, Principles of Zoölogy (1848)
Sometime around 1815 in a Cape Ann fishing station called Pigeon Cove—named for the abundant passenger pigeons that once roosted on near-by Pigeon Hill—Abraham Lurvey experimented casting molten lead and pewter around the shank of a mackerel hook. Decades later a few old-timers gave credit for the jig to others, but the actual inventor had considerably less significance than the invention itself. Mackerel hooks were relatively small. Being iron, they rusted. Lurvey sensed that a bit of dried sharkskin or other sandpaper could shine the pewter sleeve, attracting mackerel in lieu of bait. As far back as anyone could remember, fishermen always had baited mackerel hooks with pieces of pork “as big as a four-pence ha’penny,” or more typically with bait from the sea. But bait had costs, and baiting took time. Mackerel hit shiny jigs faster than they ever had baited hooks. And though Lurvey and the men with whom he fished tried to keep their jigs secret, word spread.
Dexterous jiggers could twitch a mackerel from the sea into a barrel on deck; jerk it from the hook with a technique they called “slatting,” then flick the jig back into the water without touching fish or hook: no baiting, no handling, no wasted motion. Ground chum dumped over the rail attracted the fish, and if they bit slowly the men stuck morsels of bait on their hooks for better results. But when the fish bit relentlessly no need for baiting existed, and a skilled man could land several hundred pounds of mackerel an hour, considerably more than with the older methods. Quintessential Yankee tinkering, simple as it seemed, had produced gear with more fishing power. And nineteenth-century America’s growing infatuation with mackerel, and later with menhaden and other species, would rely on increasingly efficient gear.
Cast pewter mackerel jigs created quite a buzz on the waterfront during the next few summers, but nothing comparable to the sea stories coming out of near-by Gloucester in August of 1817. The Essex Register on August 16th noted “an unusual fish or serpent .º.º. discovered by the fishermen” in Gloucester harbor, “quick in its motions,” very long, and extremely evasive. According to the editor, “All attempts to take the fish had been ineffectual.” Some people claimed to have seen two of the serpents, and a letter-writer to the newspaper worried openly that “our small craft are fearful of venturing out a fishing.” One eyewitness explained the serpent appeared “in joints like the wooden buoys on a net rope .º.º. like a string of gallon kegs 100 feet long.” The “head of it, eight feet out of water, was as large as the head of a horse.” Later that month a broadside published in Boston stoked the excitement with assertions that “A Monstrous Sea Serpent: The largest ever seen in America” hovered in the vicinity of Gloucester. Initially “believed to be a creature of the imagination,” as the broadside’s author put it, the monster “has since come within the harbor of Gloucester, and has been seen by hundreds of people.”
