Putting the ocean in atlantic history: Maritime communities and marine ecology in the northwest Atlantic, 1500-1800

American Historical Review

Volumn 113, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 19-47

  Bolster, W Jeffrey ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 40949132881     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.113.1.19     Document Type: Review

References (253)

1. The LME analyzed in this article is similar to the fisheries-based geographical unit explored by D. W. Meinig in The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1: Atlantic America, 1492-1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 55-58. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard described the same area, but from an economic and nationalistic vantage point, arguing that "The major fishing waters frequented by colonial fishermen stretched in a line from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, linking the whole of what we might call 'greater New England' in one grand economic region." My ecological and transnational stance emphasizes a different perspective. The term "greater New England" slights large areas of the northwest Atlantic, such as the Gulf of St. Lawrence during the seventeenth century, in which inhabitants of the United States' forerunner colonies had minor roles, and it downplays the crucial roles of people other than Americans.
2. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 114.
3. For an alternative marine geography that splits the region without regard to the coherence of the LME concept, see Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American Frontier: Spaces of Power in Early Modern British America (Hanover, N.H., 2005), 7.
4. On LMEs, see Kenneth Sherman and Barry D. Gold, "Large Marine Ecosystems," in Kenneth Sherman, Lewis M. Alexander, and Barry D. Gold, eds., Large Marine Ecosystems: Patterns, Processes, and Yields (Washington, D.C., 1990), vii-xi.
5. Genesis 49:25.
6. The Relation of Captaine Gosnols Voyage to the North part of Virginia, begunne the sixe and twentieth of March, Anno 42. Elizabethae Regirme 1602. and deliuered by Gabriel Archer, a Gentleman of the said Voyage, in David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, eds., The English New England Voyages, 1602-1608 (London, 1983), 115.
7. For the evolution of Atlantic history, see Alison Games, "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities," American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 741-757;
8. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (New York, 2002);
9. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass., 2005);
10. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore, Md., 2005);
11. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000 (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2007);
12. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
13. The most provocative recent Atlantic histories include Eliga H. Gould, "Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery," American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 764-786;
14. Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
15. James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford, 2007);
16. Marcy Norton, "Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics," American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 660-691;
17. Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
18. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006).
19. Recent ocean histories include Paul Butel, The Atlantic, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London, 1999);
20. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World, 1750-1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Berkeley, Calif., 1994);
21. David Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen, The Baltic and the North Seas (London, 2000);
22. Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500 (Oxford, 2001);
23. Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York, 2004);
24. "Forum: Beyond the Atlantic," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 63 (October 2006): 675-742;
25. Kenneth McPherson, The Indian Ocean: A History of People and the Sea (Delhi, 1998);
26. Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2006);
27. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Karen Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, 2007). Ocean history was given a boost by a special issue of Geographical Review; vol. 89 (April 1999)
28. dedicated to the theme "Oceans Connect," was inspired by Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, Calif., 1997).
29. For sea and ocean history as "more novel than it sounds," see Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, "The Mediterranean and 'the New Thalassology,' " American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 722-740.
30. Classic works include Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery from Its Earliest Inception to the Year 1876 (Waltham, Mass., 1878);
31. Raymond McFarland, A History of the New England Fisheries (New York, 1911);
32. Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto, 1940);
33. Edouard A. Stackpole, The Sea-Hunters: The New England Whalemen during Two Centuries, 1635-1835 (Philadelphia, 1953). The most sophisticated book on labor in the early modern fisheries did not address environmental concerns, although its author subsequently edited a volume of interdisciplinary research on fisheries history.
34. See Daniel Vickers, Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1850 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994);
35. Vickers, ed., Marine Resources and Human Societies in the North Atlantic since 1500: Papers Presented at the Conference Entitled "Marine Resources and Human Societies in the North Atlantic since 1500, " October 20-22, 1995 (St. John's, Newfoundland, 1997).
36. Journalists' accounts include Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York, 1997)
37. and Farley Mowat, Sea of Slaughter (Boston, 1984).
38. For environmentally informed scholarship, see Peter E. Pope, Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004);
39. Daniel Vickers, "Those Damned Shad: Would the River Fisheries of New England Have Survived in the Absence of Industrialization?" William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 61 (October 2004): 685-712;
40. David J. Starkey and James E. Candow, eds., The North Atlantic Fisheries: Supply, Marketing and Consumption, 1560-1990 (Hull, 2006), vol. 8 in the Studia Atlantica series. The North Atlantic Fisheries History Association has organized conferences and published papers in this series since 1995.
41. For a review of classic and contemporary literature in marine environmental history, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, "Opportunities in Marine Environmental History," Environmental History 11 (July 2006): 567-597. Collaborative work by historians and ecologists studying oceans past has been pioneered by the interdisciplinary History of Marine Animal Populations (HMAP) project, an arm of the international Census of Marine Life.
42. See http://www.hmapcoml.org/. Other interdisciplinary collaborative work includes Jeremy Jackson, Enrique Sala, and Karen Alexander, eds., Marine Biodiversity: Using the Past to Inform the Future (working title; Chicago, forthcoming 2008).
43. Exceptions include Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972);
44. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983);
45. Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender; and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989);
46. Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1990);
47. Mart A. Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Groe": Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, 1680-1920 (Athens, Ga., 1996);
48. Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995);
49. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004).
50. Cogent arguments for including nature in history can be found in Donald Worster et al., "A Roundtable: Environmental History," Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1990): 1087-1147;
51. William Cronon, "The Uses of Environmental History," Environmental History Review 17 (Fall 1993): 1-22;
52. Alfred W. Crosby, "The Past and Present of Environmental History," American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995): 1177-1189;
53. Ted Steinberg, "Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History," American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 798-820.
54. Highly regarded environmental histories that essentially ignore the marine environment include J. Donald Hughes, An Environmental History of the World: Humankind's Changing Role in the Community of Life (London, 2001);
55. John Opie, Nature's Nation: An Environmental History of the United States (Fort Worth, Tex., 1998);
56. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York, 2002);
57. and Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History (New York, 2002).
58. I. G. Simmons, Environmental History: A Concise Introduction (Oxford, 1993)
59. covers the entire ocean in three pages. The best treatment of marine topics is found in J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York, 2000)
60. which includes a section on "Whaling and Fishing." John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif., 2003), contains chapters on fishing and whaling, but they ignore nonhuman nature and ecological relationships, and come across as a variant of traditional fisheries history.
61. This point is made eloquently by Karen Wigen in her introduction to the AHR Forum "Oceans of History," American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 721.
62. For the "Atlantic paradigm," see Cãnizares-Esguerra and Seeman, The Atlantic in Global History, xxiii.
63. Individuals have always been puny in the face of the mighty sea, but collectively humankind has exerted profound influence on it. See Heike Lotze et al., "Depletion, Degradation, and Recovery Potential of Estuaries and Coastal Seas," Science 312 (June 23, 2006): 1806-1809;
64. Lotze, "Rise and Fall of Fishing and Marine Resource Use in the Wadden Sea, Southern North Sea," Fisheries Research 87 (November 2007): 208-218;
65. J. B. C. Jackson et al., "Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems," Science 293 (July 2001): 629-638.
66. Escalating European demands for fish are covered in Richard W. Unger, The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600 (Montreal, 1980);
67. E. M. Carrus Wilson, "The Iceland Trade," in Eileen Power and M. M. Postan, eds., Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century (New York, 1933), 155-183;
68. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge, 1984);
69. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850 (New York, 2000).
70. Michael S. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty's Navy (Chicago, forthcoming, 2008);
71. Corbin, The Lure of the Sea. For the origins of marine science
72. see Margaret Deacon, Scientists and the Sea, 1650-1900: A Study of Marine Science (London, 1971).
73. Land reclamation and the transformation of the Low Countries' coastal ecosystems are treated in J. A. van Houte, An Economic History of the Low Countries, 800-1800 (New York, 1977);
74. Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (Cambridge, 1997). Between 1680 and 1755, Nova Scotia's Acadian settlers built elaborate dikes to transform thousands of acres of tidal marsh meadows on the Bay of Fundy into extremely productive arable lands.
75. Their story is told in J. Sherman Bleakney, Sods, Soil, and Spades: The Acadians at Grand Pré and their Dykeland Legacy (Montreal, 2004).
76. In biogeography, "boreal" refers to ecosystems or species found in the sub-Arctic region of the Northern Hemisphere.
77. Large marine ecosystems are "characterized by unique bathymetry, hydrography, and productivity, within which marine populations have adapted reproductive, growth, and feeding strategies." The region between Cape Cod and Newfoundland is sometimes referred to as the Northeast Shelf LME, although oceanographers do not assume that the boundaries of such systems are precise. See Sherman and Gold, "Large Marine Ecosystems," vii-xi, quotation vii; Lewis M. Alexander, "Geographic Perspectives in the Management of Large Marine Ecosystems," in Sherman, Alexander, and Gold, Large Marine Ecosystems, 220-223.
78. The classic, though now outdated, work on northwest Atlantic cod fisheries in the contest of empires is Innis, The Cod Fisheries. More recent work includes D. B. Quinn, North America from Earliest Discovery to First Settlements: The Norse Voyages to 1612 (New York, 1977);
79. Quinn, ed., New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 vols. (New York, 1979), esp. vols. 1 and 4;
80. John Robert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985);
81. Laurier Turgeon, "Bordeaux and the Newfoundland Trade during the Sixteenth Century," International Journal of Maritime History 9, no. 2 (1997): 1-28;
82. Pope, Fish into Wine;
83. Peter E. Pope, "The Scale of the Early Modern Newfoundland Cod Fishery," in Starkey and Candow, The North Atlantic Fisheries, 9-28. On Native people in the region between the St. Lawrence River and Massachusetts
84. see Bruce J. Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine (Lincoln, Neb., 2001);
85. Colin G. Calloway, comp, and ed., Dawnland Encounters: Indians and Europeans in Northern New England (Hanover, N.H., 1991);
86. Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 (Norman, Okla., 1996);
87. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions;
88. Nicolas Denys, The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America (Acadia), trans. and ed. William F. Ganong (1672; repr., Toronto, 1908);
89. Marc Lescarbot, The History of New France, 3 vols. (1618; repr., Toronto, 1907-1914).
90. Edward Johnson, Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England (1654) and Good News From New England (1648), ed. Edward J. Gallagher (Delmar, N.Y., 1974), 173.
91. As this paragraph indicates, my approach has been influenced significantly by Cronon, Changes in the Land.
92. Oviedo's Natural History of the West Indies, available in London in English translation as early as 1555, introduced "manatee and murene and many other fishes which have no names in our language." See Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdês, The Natural History of the West Indies (1526), in John C. Pearson, ed., The Fish and Fisheries of Colonial North America: A Documentary History of the Fishery Resources of the United States and Canada, pt. 6:
93. The Gulf States and West Indies, NOAA Report No. 72040301 (Rockville, Md., 1972), 1103;
94. Christopher Columbus, The Log of Christopher Columbus, trans. Robert H. Fuson (Camden, Maine, 1987), 84.
95. Representative early accounts include Martin Pring, A Voyage set out from the Citie of Bristoll at the charge of the chiefest Merchants and Inhabitants of the said Citie with a small Ship and a Barke for the discouerie of the North part of Virginia, in theyeere 1603. Vnderthe command of me Martin Fringe, in Quinn and Quinn, The English New England Voyages, 226;
96. James Rosier, A True Relation of the most prosperous voyage made this present yeere 1605, by Captain George Waymouth, in the Discouery of the land of Virginia . . .
97. ibid., 287;
98. Lescarbot, The History of New France.
99. Benthic species live on the bottom of the sea. Pelagic species live in the water column, or are associated with the open sea, such as pelagic birds. Polychaetes are a class of segmented marine worms, including the sand worms often sold to anglers as bait. On primary productivity, see T. Laevastu, "Natural Bases of Fisheries in the Atlantic Ocean: Their Past and Present Characteristics and Possibilities for Future Expansion," in Georg Borgstrom and Arthur J. Heighway, eds., Atlantic Ocean Fisheries (London, 1961), 18-39, esp. 19-20;
100. Lotze et al., "Depletion, Degradation, and Recovery Potential," Table 1; Simon Jennings, Michael J. Kaiser, and John D. Reynolds, Marine Fisheries Ecology (Oxford, 2001), 21-38.
101. These chroniclers include, but are not limited to, Jacques Cartier (1534-1541), Anthony Parkhurst (1578), Charles Leigh (1597), Gabriel Archer (1602), John Brereton (1602), Martin Pring (1603), Samuel de Champlain (1603-1632), James Rosier (1605), Marc Lescarbot (1612), Captain John Smith (1614), William Bradford (1620-1650), Richard Whitbourne (1620), Francis Higginson (1630), John Winthrop (1630-1649), Thomas Morton (1632), William Hammond (1633), William Wood (1634), Roger Williams (1643), John Josselyn (1638-1671), Samuel Maverick (1660), Nicholas Denys (1672), and Chrestien LeClerq (1691).
102. Quotations from a survey of English fisheries, 1580, reproduced as Appendix 3.1 in Todd Gray, "Devon's Coastal and Overseas Fisheries and New England Migration, 1597-1642" (Ph.D. diss., University of Exeter, 1988), 357-358. For George Waymouth's fishing lineage, see ibid., 27, and David R. Ransome, "Waymouth, George (fl. 1587-1611)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/29155 (accessed December 5, 2007).
103. Lotze et al., "Depletion, Degradation, and Recovery Potential," 1806-1809; Richard C. Hoffman, "Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in Medieval Europe," American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (June 1996): 631-669;
104. James H. Barrett, Alison M. Locker, and Callum M. Roberts, "The Origins of Intensive Marine Fishing in Medieval Europe: The English Evidence," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 271 (2004): 2417-2421;
105. Inge Bødker Enghoff, "Fishing in the Southern North Sea Region from the 1st to the 16th Century AD: Evidence from Fish Bones," Archeofauna 9 (2000): 59-132.
106. Wendy Childs, "Fishing and Fisheries in the Middle Ages: The Eastern Fisheries," in David J. Starkey, Chris Reid, and Neil Ashcroft, eds., England's Sea Fisheries: The Commercial Sea Fisheries of England and Wales since 1300 (London, 2000), 19;
107. Richard W. Unger, "The Netherlands Herring Fishery in the Late Middle Ages: The False Legend of William Beukels of Biervliet," in Unger, Ships and Shipping in the North Sea and Atlantic, 1400-1800 (Aldershot, 1997), 335-356;
108. Hoffman, "Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems," 648. For the intensification of estuarine and coastal fisheries in the west country of England during the late Middle Ages, see Harold Fox, The Evolution of the Fishing Village: Landscape and Society along the South Devon Coast, 1086-1550 (Oxford, 2001).
109. Tim D. Smith, Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Effects of Fishing, 1855-1955 (Cambridge, 1994), 8-37, quotation 8;
110. Gray, "Devon's Coastal and Overseas Fisheries," 126-127;
111. Fagan, The Little Ice Age, 69-78;
112. Wilson, "The Iceland Trade," 155-183. For the complicated relationship between climate fluctuations and marine ecology, see Jean M. Grove, The Little Ice Age (London, 1988), 379-421;
113. Geir Ottersen, Jürgen Alheit, Ken Drinkwater, Kevin Friedland, Eberhard Hagen, and Nils Chr. Stenseth, "The Responses of Fish Populations to Ocean Climate Fluctuations," in Nils Chr. Stenseth, Geir Ottersen, James W. Hurrell, and Andrea Belgrano, eds., Marine Ecosystems and Climate Variation: The North Atlantic - A Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 2004), 73-94;
114. Holger Hovgård and Erik Buch, "Fluctuation in the Cod Biomass of the West Greenland Sea Ecosystem in Relation to Climate," in Sherman, Alexander, and Gold, Large Marine Ecosystems, 36-43.
115. Edward Sharpe, England's Royall Fishing Revived; or, A Computation as Well of the Charge of a Busse or Herring-Fishing Ship (London, 1630), E 3;
116. Jennings, Kaiser, and Reynolds, Marine Fisheries Ecology, 242-243;
117. Tony J. Pitcher, "Fisheries Managed to Rebuild Ecosystems? Reconstructing the Past to Salvage the Future," Ecological Applications 11, no. 2 (2001): 601-617.
118. John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), otherwise a magisterial work on early modern consumption, suspends attention to the environmental impact of globalization and consumer culture. For catch statistics, see Pope, Fish into Wine, 19-20;
119. Pope, "The Scale of the Early Modern Newfoundland Cod Fishery," 27-28. For improvements in shipping efficiency, see Gary Shepherd and James Walton, Shipping, Maritime Trade, and the Economic Development of Colonial North America (Cambridge, 1972), 3.
120. Richard C. Hoffman, "Frontier Foods for Late Medieval Consumers: Culture, Economy, Ecology," Environment and History 7 (May 2001): 131-167, quotation 133.
121. Mourt's Relation; or, Journall of the beginning and proceeding of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth in New England (London, 1622), 2.
122. Most scholars agree that William Bradford and Edward Winslow were the authors of this anonymous work. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1953), 68.
123. A. Rallo and Á. Borja, "Marine Research in the Basque Country: An Historical Perspective," in A. Borja and M. Collins, eds., Oceanography and Marine Environment of the Basque Country (Amsterdam, 2004), 3-26, esp. 5;
124. "Survey of Fisheries, 1580," reproduced as Appendix 3.1 in Gray, "Devon's Coastal and Overseas Fisheries," 357-358;
125. Alex Aguilar, "A Review of Old Basque Whaling and Its Effect on the Right Whales (Eubalaena glacialis) of the North Atlantic," Special Issue, Reports of the International Whaling Commission 10 (1986): 191-199, quotation 194;
126. Richard Mather, Journal of Richard Mather (Boston, 1850), quoted in Joe Roman and Stephen R. Palumbi, "Whales before Whaling in the North Atlantic," Science 301 (July 25, 2003): 508-510.
127. For an alternative but less convincing view that Basque whalers probably did not diminish stocks in the Bay of Biscay, see Jean-Pierre Proulx, Basque Whaling in Labrador in the 16th Century (Ottawa, 1993), 12-13;
128. Roger Collins, The Basques (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 234-235.
129. Scientists today are in the midst of a fractious dispute about just how many whales lived in the North Atlantic before widespread hunting began. Geneticists claim more than a million. Historically derived estimates are much smaller - nearly an order of magnitude smaller. But whether that population was closer to 100,000 or to a million, whales were prominent in the structure and function of the ecosystem. See Roman and Palumbi, "Whales before Whaling"; C. Scott Baker and Phillip J. Clapham, "Modelling the Past and Future of Whales and Whaling," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 19 (July 2004): 365-371.
130. Archaeologists point out that "the interpretation of data on . . . large whales [at Native sites is] poorly understood." See Arthur E. Spiess and Robert A. Lewis, The Turner Farm Fauna: 5000 Years of Hunting and Fishing in Penobscot Bay, Maine (Augusta, Maine, 2001), 141, 154, 157-159
131. quotation 141. Russel Lawrence Barsh, "Netukulimk Past and Present: Mikmaw Ethics and the Atlantic Fishery," Journal of Canadian Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 15-42;
132. Bernard Gilbert Hoffman, "The Historical Ethnography of the Micmac of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, 1955); Elizabeth A. Little and J. Clinton Andrews, "Drift Whales at Nantucket: The Kindness of Moshup," Man in the Northeast 23 (Spring 1982): 19;
133. Denys, The Description & Natural History of the Coasts of North America, 403. Marc Lescarbot and Chrestien LeClerq referred in passing to Mi'kmaq whaling from seagoing canoes during the seventeenth century. The single reference to Natives hunting whales in New England is found in Rosier's A True Relation, describing Maine in 1605.
134. For ongoing debates over the extent to which Native Americans affected their natural surroundings, and the contexts in which those changes occurred, see Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, Calif., 1978);
135. Shepard Krech III, ed., Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade (Athens, Ga., 1981);
136. Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, 1999);
137. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions. Natives' exploitation of marine resources has drawn less attention, although sophisticated work posed in light of climate change, boat technology, and marine resource abundance is currently being conducted for the prehistoric period by archaeologists.
138. See Arthur Spiess, Kristin Sobolik, Diana Grader, John Mosher, and Deborah Wilson, "Cod, Clams and Deer: The Food Remains from Indiantown Island," Archeology of Eastern North America 34 (2006): 141-187;
139. Spiess and Lewis, The Turner Farm Fauna.
140. Little and Andrews, "Drift Whales at Nantucket," 33-35, 21, 29;
141. John A. Strong, The Montaukett Indians of Eastern Long Island (Syracuse, N. Y., 2001), 25-26.
142. Mather quoted in Glover M. Allen, "The Whalebone Whales of New England," Memoirs of the Boston Society of Natural History 8 (1916): 105-322, quotation 154.
143. Some controversy exists about exactly when shore whaling began on Cape Cod and Long Island. It may have been as early as the 1650s, and certainly by the 1670s. On its origins, see Little and Andrews, "Drift Whales at Nantucket," 17-38;
144. Daniel Vickers, "The First Whalemen of Nantucket," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 40 (October 1983): 560-583;
145. Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery, 1-36;
146. Stackpole, The Sea-Hunters, 15-47. Charting the transition from shore whaling to deep-sea whaling, Stackpole ignored depletion of inshore stocks as the cause, and emphasized whalemen's pioneering spirit. For contemporaries' observations of depletion
147. see William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, of the First Planting, Progressive Improvements, and Present State of the British Settlements in North America, 2 vols. (Boston, 1755), 1: 58-62.
148. For a useful chronology of the decline of shore whaling, constructed from excerpts of eighteenth-century documents, see John Braginton-Smith and Duncan Oliver, Cape Cod Shore Whaling: America's First Whalemen (Yarmouth Port, Mass., 2004), 143-146. Hallet quoted ibid., 145.
149. For conservative estimates of whale kills, see Randall R. Reeves, Jeffrey M. Breiwick, and Edward D. Mitchell, "History of Whaling and Estimated Kill of Right Whales, Balaena glacialis, in the North-eastern United States, 1620-1924," Marine Fisheries Review 61 (1999): 1-36.
150. For more expansive estimates, see Spencer Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives on Marine Complexities: Searching for Systems in the Gulf of Maine (New York, 2002), 60-61.
151. Mellen quoted in Braginton-Smith and Oliver, Cape Cod Shore Whaling, 146.
152. For seventeenth-century Dutch and Basque whaling in the Arctic, see Laurier Turgeon, "Fluctuations in Cod and Whale Stocks in the North Atlantic during the Eighteenth Century," in Vickers, Marine Resources and Human Societies, 87-122:
153. Richards, The Unending Frontier, 584-589.
154. Braginton-Smith and Oliver, Cape Cod Shore Whaling, 145. Occasional references to shore whaling and whaleboats occur in Ipswich records as late as 1707, but not thereafter.
155. See Thomas Franklin Waters, Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony: A History of the Town from 1700 to 1917, 2 vols. (Ipswich, Mass., 1917), 2: 235-236.
156. For the abandonment of a Cape Cod whalers' tavern in Wellfleet, probably because of the failure of the inshore whale fishery, see Eric Ekholm and James Deetz, "Wellfleet Tavern," Natural History 80, no. 7 (August-September 1971): 48-56.
157. On Indian whalemen, see Vickers, "The First Whalemen of Nantucket"; Daniel Vickers, "Nantucket Whalemen in the Deep-Sea Fishery: The Changing Anatomy of an Early American Labor Force," Journal of American History 72 (September 1985): 277-296. As Vickers makes clear, white whalemen's ideas about labor control, credit, and race were essential to the social relations of whaling, including Natives' dispossession.
158. On whales as constraints in ecosystems, see Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives on Marine Complexities, 14-15, 53-71.
159. For a similar ripple effect from whaling in the Svalbard archipelago, see Louwrens Hacquebord, "The Hunting of the Greenland Right Whale in Svalbard, Its Interaction with Climate and Its Impact on the Marine Hcosystem," Polar Research 18 (1999): 375-382;
160. Hacquebord, "Three Centuries of Whaling and Walrus Hunting in Svalbard and Its Impact on the Arctic Ecosystem," Environment and History 7 (2001): 169-185.
161. Obed Macy, The History of Nantucket: Being a Compendious Account of the First Settlement of the Island by the English, Together with the Rise and Progress of the Whale Fishery; And Other Historical Facts Relative to Said Island and Its Inhabitants (Boston, 1835), 28;
162. Paul Dudley, "An Essay upon the Natural History of Whales, with a Particular Account of the Ambergris Found in the Sperma Ceti Whale," Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions 33 (1725): 256-269;
163. James G. Mead and Edward D. Mitchell, "Atlantic Gray Whales," in Mary Lou Jones, Steven L. Swartz, and Stephen Leatherwood, eds., The Gray Whale (Orlando, Fla., 1984), 33-53;
164. P. J. Bryant, "Dating Remains of Gray Whales from the Eastern North Atlantic," Journal of Mammalogy 76, no. 3 (1995): 857-861.
165. McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America, 108, 115. Walruses in the Gulf of St. Lawrence were hunted systematically from the middle of the sixteenth century. The great gregarious herds that formerly hauled out on beaches from Sable Island to Labrador were on the path to extermination by 1800. By the nineteenth century, remnant populations of walruses inhabited a much-reduced range, limited largely to the Arctic and immediate sub-Arctic.
166. E. W. Born, I. Gjertz, and R. Reeves, Population Assessment of Atlantic Walrus (Oslo, 1995), 7-8, 31-32.
167. Hoffman, "The Historical Ethnography of the Micmac," 151-171, 235; Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 44-50;
168. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England;
169. Harald E. L. Prins, The Mi'kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival (Belmont, Calif., 2002);
170. William Wood, New England's Prospect (1634; repr., Amherst, Mass., 1977), 107.
171. William Hammond to Sir Simonds D'Ewes, September 26, 1633, in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638 (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 111;
172. Spiess and Lewis, The Turner Farm Fauna, 135-136, 155;
173. Wood, New England's Prospect, 55, 107;
174. Henry B. Bigelow and William C. Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine (Washington, D.C., 1953), 82-83. Bigelow and Schroeder note that mature sturgeon up to 12 feet long and 600 pounds were occasionally landed in the Gulf of Maine during the early twentieth century, "but 18 feet, reported for New England many years ago, may not have been an exaggeration." For Natives' month names, see Hoffman, "The Historical Ethnography of the Micmac," 243-246.
175. Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of "Two Voyages to New England" (Hanover, N.H., 1988), 140;
176. York Deeds, 18 vols. (Portland, Maine, 1887), 1: f. 13.
177. Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (Amsterdam, 1637), 88.
178. For an identical mention of sturgeon as "regal," see Lindholdt, John Josselyn, 76.
179. Excavations in Gdansk, Poland, reveal a downward trend in sturgeon size from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. In the Low Countries, sturgeon size declined from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. See Hoffmann, "Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems," 649.
180. For more on settlers' exports of sturgeon, see Captain John Smith, Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Anywhere, in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986), 3: 294;
181. Edward Everett Hale, Jr., Note-book Kept by Thomas Lechford, Esq., Lawyer, in Boston, Massachusetts Bay, from June 27, 1638 to July 29, 1641 (1885; repr., Camden, Maine, 1988), 377;
182. A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston Containing the Aspinwall Notarial Records from 1644 to 1651 (Boston, 1903), 423-424;
183. Wood, New England's Prospect, 55.
184. For the sturgeon fishery that began on the Pejepscot River in Brunswick,
185. Lindholdt, John Josselyn, 100;
186. Faith Harrington, "Sea Tenure in Seventeenth-Century New Hampshire: Native Americans and Englishmen in the Sphere of Coastal Resources," Historical New Hampshire 40 (Spring/Summer 1985): 18-33.
187. Petition of William Thomas to the General Court, May 7, 1673, Massachusetts Archives, vol. 61:3, Massachusetts State Archives;
188. John J. Currier, History ofNewbury, Mass., 1635-1902 (Boston, 1902), 282;
189. Joshua Coffin,A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury (Boston, 1845), 113-114;
190. George W. Chase, The History of Haverhill, Massachusetts (Haverhill, Mass., 1861), 118-119;
191. Jack Noon, Fishing in New Hampshire: A History (Warner, N.H., 2003), 61-64, 152-154;
192. Matthew Patten, The Diary of Matthew Patten of Bedford, N.H. from Seventeen Hundred Fifty-Four to Seventeen Hundred Eighty-Eight (Concord, N.H., 1903), 96. An accomplished fisherman and diarist, Patten had neither caught a sturgeon nor noted anyone else catching one during the six years he had kept his diary. Yet as late as 1774, the Merrimac River was labeled "the Merrimak or Sturgeon R." on Thomas Jefferys's "Map of the most inhabited part of New England."
193. Currier, History of Newbury, Mass., 283;
194. Noon, Fishing in New Hampshire, 5-10, 61-64.
195. This is not to say that Atlantic sturgeon were extinct in New England's rivers, just that their populations had plummeted. Sturgeon were still being caught in rivers in Maine and New Brunswick occasionally at the end of the nineteenth century. See U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Report of the Commissioner for the Year Ending June 30, 1898 (Washington, D.C., 1899), clxvi-clxvii;
196. Theodore I. J. Smith, "The Fishery, Biology, and Management of Atlantic Sturgeon, Acipenser oxyrhynchus, in North America," Environmental Biology of Fishes 14 (1985): 61-72;
197. Inga Saffron, "Introduction: The Decline of the North American Species," in Greg T. O. LeBreton, F. William H. Beamish, and R. Scott McKinley, eds., Sturgeons and Paddlefish of North America (Dordrecht, 2004), 1-21.
198. Saffron unfortunately ignores the history of the northern New England fishery in her account. Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives on Marine Complexities, 46-51;
199. E. O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York, 2006), 32;
200. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 50-58.
201. William Hubbard, A General History ofNew England, from the Discovery to MDCLXXX(1815; repr., New York, 1972), 80;
202. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols. (Boston, 1853), 1: 258.
203. While striped bass can weigh more than 100 pounds, schooling fish are considerably smaller, averaging about 10 pounds. See Bigelow and Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, 390.
204. If Hubbard was correct, gaunt, half-starved Pilgrims were occasionally stop-seining 15,000 pounds of bass in a single set. Wood corroborated Hubbard's observations on bass landings, noting that "sometimes two or three thousand" bass were taken in one set of a net. Wood, New England's Prospect, 55;
205. Lindholdt, John Josselyn, 78.
206. For tension between Abenaki and settler fishers, see Bourque, Twelve Thousand Years, 157.
207. Laws of New Hampshire: Including Public and Private Acts and Resolves and the Royal Commissions and Instructions with Historical and Descriptive Notes, 10 vols. (Manchester, N.H., 1904-1922), 3: 537;
208. Jeremy Belknap, The History of New Hampshire, 3vols. (Boston, 1791-1792), 3:130-131;
209. Currier, History of Newbury, Mass., 283-284;
210. Judge Benjamin Chadbourne, "A Description of the Town and Village," c. 1797, ms. transcription, Old Berwick Historical Society, South Berwick, Maine.
211. Vickers, "Those Damned Shad"; Pitcher, "Fisheries Managed to Rebuild Ecosystems?" 604-605.
212. The Charters and General Laws of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay: Carefully Collected from the Public Records and Ancient Printed Books (Boston, 1814), chap. 46, sec. 4, 114-115. On cod shortages in Newfoundland, including "the very bad season of 1592," the scarcity of fish in 1621, and the "poor or bad years . . . frequently remarked" on between 1657 and 1675
213. see Peter Pope, "Early Estimates: Assessment of Catches in the Newfoundland Cod Fishery, 1660-1690," in Vickers, Marine Resources and Human Societies, 11-14;
214. Pope, Fish into Wine, 33-39.
215. The failure of the Dorchester Company to develop fisheries near Cape Ann may have been connected to a poor year-class of cod in 1621, although this is speculative. See Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 14.
216. After a thorough discussion of fishing licenses and the politics of access, framed in light of a possible downturn in fisheries, Bailyn notes that "It is impossible to measure the decline, if there was any, in the New England fisheries during the 1620's." Pope's work has raised the possibility that natural fluctuations in the cod population were a factor. Ibid., 200-201 n. 20. On cod shortages at Boston in 1651, see A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston, 390-391;
217. William B. Leavenworth, "Fishermen, Merchants and New England's Maritime Environment, 1630-1651," forth-coming, International Journal of Maritime History.
218. Jeffrey A. Hutchings, "Spatial and Temporal Variation in the Exploitation of Northern Cod, Gadus morhua: A Historical Perspective from 1500 to the Present," in Vickers, Marine Resources and Human Societies, 43-68, esp. 48, 53, 55;
219. Henry Lear, "History of the Fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic: The 500-Year Perspective," Journal of Northwest Atlantic Fishery Science 23 (1998): 41-73;
220. Jeffrey A. Hutchings and Ransome A. Myers, "The Biological Collapse of Atlantic Cod off Newfoundland and Labrador: An Exploration of Historical Changes in Exploitation, Harvesting Technology, and Management," in Ragnar Arnason and Lawrence Felt, eds., The North Atlantic Fisheries: Successes, Failures, and Challenges (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 1995), 37-92.
221. David Allen Sibley, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (New York, 2003);
222. Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives on Marine Complexities, 11-11.
223. For Natives' reliance on seabirds and their eggs, see Lescarbot, The History of New France, 3: 172, 231;
224. Pierre Biard, Relation de la Nouvelle France, in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland, 1896-1901), 3: 81.
225. Jacques Cartier, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, ed. Ramsay Cook (To ronto, 1993), 4-5, 13-14, 40, quotation 40;
226. Richard Whitbourne, A Discourse and Discovery of Newfound-land (London, 1620), 9.
227. "A letter written to M. Richard Hakluyt of the middle Temple, conteining a report of the true state and commodities of Newfoundland, by M. Anthonie Parkhurst Gentleman, 1578," in Ernest Rhys, ed., Hakluyt's Voyages, 8 vols. (London, 1907), 5: 347;
228. Jeremy Gaskell, Who Killed the Great Auk? (New York, 2000)," 39, 52-53.
229. John James Audubon, The Complete Audubon: A Precise Replica of the Complete Works of John James Audubon Comprising the Birds of America (1840-44) and the Quadrupeds of North America (1851-54) in Their Entirety, 5 vols. (Kent, 1979), 4: 245.
230. On the extermination of Great Auks, see Errol Fuller, The Great Auk (Southborough, Kent, 1999), 60-77;
231. Gaskell, Who Killed the Great Auk?
232. Anthony J. Gaston, Seabirds: A Natural History (New Haven, Conn., 2004). Seabirds killed for bait included shearwaters, gannets, murres, gulls, puffins, terns, guillemots, auks, and cormorants. While John James Audubon did not witness seabirds being slaughtered for bait until the 1830s, his vivid accounts of a long-standing practice illuminate its impact on the ecosystem.
233. See Audubon, The Complete Audubon, 4: 45-47, 156, 163-164, 176, 238-241;
234. Maria R. Audubon, Audubon and His Journals, 2 vols. (New York, 1897), 1: 361-362.
235. On egging, see ibid., 1: 374, 383; 2: 406-411, 423;
236. Philip W. Conkling, Islands in Time: A Natural and Cultural History of the Islands in the Gulf of Maine (Rockland, Maine, 1999), 134.
237. The quotation about killing petrels was by a nineteenth-century fisherman. See Captain J. W. Collins, "Notes on the Habits and Methods of Capture of Various Species of Sea Birds That Occur on the Fishing Banks off the Eastern Coast of North America, and Which Are Used as Bait for Catching Codfish by New England Fishermen," in United States Commission of Fish and Fisheries, Report of the Commissioner for 1882 (Washington, 1884), 311-335, quotation 334.
238. Morton, New English Canaan, 67-69;
239. Wood, New England's Prospect, 48-53
240. quotation 52-53. See also Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 90;
241. John Pory to the Earl of Southampton, January 16, 1622/1623, in Sydney V. James, Jr., ed., Three Visitors to Early Plymouth: Letters about the Pilgrim Settlement in New England during Its First Seven Years by John Pory, Emmanuel Altharn, and Issack De Rasieres (Plymouth, Mass., 1963), 10.
242. Yasuhide Kawashima and Ruth Tone, "Environmental Policy in Early America: A Survey of Colonial Statutes," Journal of Forest History 27 (October 1983): 176.
243. Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, 21 vols. (Boston, 1869-1922), 1: 667-669, quoted by Kawashima and Tone.
244. Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New England, with the Eastern Indians; or, A Narrative of Their Continued Perfidy and Cruelty, from the 10th of August, 1703. To the Peace Renewed 13th of July, 1713. And from the 25th of July, 1722. To their Submission 15th December, 1725. Which was Ratified August 5th, 1726 (1726; repr., Boston, 1924), 80-84;
245. George L. Hosmer, AnHistorical Sketch ofthe Town of Deer Isle, Maine, with Notices of Its Settlers and Early Inhabitants (Boston, 1886), 16-18;
246. Conkling, Islands in Time, 133-134.
247. On Indians slaughtering molting eider ducks in the Bay of Fundy, see Audubon, Audubon and His Journals, 434-435.
248. Rev. Jonathan Cogswell, "Topographical and Historical Sketch of Freeport, Maine," Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser., 4 (1816): 184-189.
249. Looking for gulls, guillemots, cormorants, and other species in the Gulf of Maine in August of 1832, John James Audubon wrote despondently to Dr. Richard Harlan from Eastport, Maine, "Birds are very, very few and far between." See Alexander B. Adams, John James Audubon: A Biography (New York, 1966), 400.
250. Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives on Marine Complexities, 71-77, quotations 76-71.
251. The impact on fish stocks of destroying seabird colonies is mentioned in Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 225.
252. Edmund Burke, "Speech on Conciliation with America," in Burke, The Beauties of the Late Right Hon. Edmund Burke, Selected from the Writings, &c. of that Extraordinary Man, 2 vols. (London, 1798), 1: 20.
253. Daniel Pauly, "Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries," Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10 (October 1995): 430.