P ro lo g ue

The Historic Ocean

He [mankind] cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.
Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951)

On clear, dry days in the age of sail, with fish coming over the rail, the coast of
northern New England and Atlantic Canada could charm the most hardened fisherman. Green-capped islands and barren dark rocks, each girt round by waterline stripes of living white barnacles and fringed with mustard-hued bladder wrack, protruded from waters teeming with life. Offshore, dainty petrels skimmed the surface plucking tiny invertebrates from the sea, while white gannets with six-foot wingspans plunged into the schools of baitfish on which cod thrived. Vast armies of porpoises, the horsemen of the sea, arced across the surface like cavalry rolling across a plain. And every cod yanked unceremoniously from the hook had, as fishermen said, a coin in its mouth. Still, when the wind veered to the northeast and the sky closed with the sea, the stunning productivity of that ecosystem came with a price. Half-tide ledges lurked for the unwary in those fish-rich seas. In that fickle environment, where a rapidly falling barometer brought gale-force winds and ship-killing waves, fog could reduce a skippers world within minutes to a

PROLOGUE

hazy circle only three waves wide. Hercules Hunking, a Cornish immigrant to New England, knew that gray sea in its moods during the 1650s as he handlined near New Hampshires Isles of Shoals from a stoutly planked shallop. The captains of graceful Fredonia schooners, such as the Effie M. Morrissey, who dory-trawled for cod on the offshore banks around 1900, and unloaded their salted fares at Bostons T Wharf, knew it intimately as well. For centuries the constancy of the threats meant that time-tested routines guided those who dared to wrest a living from the tempestuous North Atlantic. Tradition determined the appropriate beam for a boat of a certain length. Tradition influenced how a man set his gear, and which jigs he picked for handlining on a given bank in a specific season. Sometimes those traditions kept fishermen alive in their dangerous calling. Tradition wore other faces along the coast. For centuries, from Cape Cod to Newfoundland the return of fish, birds, and marine mammalseach in their seasonsparked quiet rejoicing in fishing towns and outport villages. Many of those communities had few economic alternatives to harvesting the sea, and fishing folk chose to believe that the sea would provide forever. That belief dovetailed with the attitude of naturalists and scientists, who often insisted, at least until the mid-twentieth century, that the sea was eternal and unchanging, even though almost every generation of harvesters noted evidence to the contrary and raised disturbing questions about the perpetuity of the stocks on which they relied. Beginning in the nineteenth century, however, fishermens hard-won knowledge all too often disappeared as new technologies increased catches. Bumper catches obliterated memories of how the same number of men, with the same gear, fishing in the same place, had been catching fewer fish as time passedan indicator that stocks were diminishing. Shoreside naturalists insistence that the sea was eternal and fishermens periodic loss of vernacular knowledge that stocks were declining reinforced each other. Combined, they camouflaged one of the northwest Atlantics great untold sea stories, a true tale of changes in the sea. An irony sharp as a sculpins spines pervades that story. No profession has ever placed more emphasis on avoiding disaster than seafaring. Mariners instinctively anticipated danger, maintained a sharp lookout, and constantly scanned their surroundings for indication of the slightest problem. To relax vigilance was to court catastrophe. Yet disaster struck for both fish and fishermen, periodically in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, then universally at the end of the twentieth century, in part because neither

PROLOGUE

fishers nor scientists nor policymakers chose to believe that what they were seeing was happening. The sea was not immortal. Now, at the beginning of a new millennium, reams of evidence document the living oceans deep predicament and the implications for the rest of our planet. Following publication in the journal Nature of an essay estimating that large predatory fish had declined worldwide by 90 percent, Newsweeks cover story on July 14, 2003, asked, Are the oceans dying? In its Global Environmental Outlook released in 2007, the United Nations Environmental Programme noted that the number of fish stocks classified as collapsed had doubled over the past twenty years, to 30 percent, and it warned of a global collapse of all fished species by 2050 if fishing around the world continued at its current pace. The speed with which this crisis got the attention of ecologists, fisheries managers, and conservationists is head-turning. As Tony J. Pitcher, a respected scientist, noted in 2005, Ten years ago most fisheries scientists would have reacted to news of a global crisis in fisheries with disbelief. Today few dispute the matter.1

A historical approach puts this crisis in perspective. How might our understanding of the past change if the North Atlantic, rather than simply serving the narrative purpose of separating the Old World from the New, was enlisted instead as a player in the historical drama, one that influenced people and was influenced by them? Such an approach would require a new geography of the early modern world to include oceanic regions, a rereading of mariners canonical narratives, a commitment to marine biology as an essential component of Atlantic history, and a view of the ocean and its harvesters over the longue dure. It would be a sea story on a heretofore unimaginable scale. During the Age of the Ocean, circa 1500 to 1800, Europeans not only crossed oceans, and used them to stitch together empires of commerce and meaning, but relied on ocean products and ser vices as never before. The salient connections were not only across oceans, but between people and the sea. It has long been known that western Europeans adaptation to the late medieval and early modern commercial revolution included searches for distant sources of whale oil and merchantable fish.2 Other relationships between people and the sea have received far less attention. Tides in the Thames River and elsewhere, for instance, were harnessed to make possible enclosed docks for ships. That riparian engineering affected not only the flow and siltation of estuarine rivers, but

PROLOGUE

their tidal range, biological productivity, and ultimately the magnitude of flooding endured by coastal residents. At about the same time, the seaside was recast psychologically (at least for people in the western tradition), from the terrifying edge of the abyss to a sublime and inviting space. The impact on European and colonial littoral resources was immediate and profound as human populations oriented themselves to the shore. 3 During the seventeenth century, as naturalists began to study the ocean systematically for the first time, coastal lands were being reclaimed from the sea in the Low Countries, in Acadia, and in South Carolina and Georgia. Meanwhile colonists and slaves were diving for pearls in Latin American waters, hunting monk seals and sea turtles in the Caribbean, and fishing in the Chesapeake and other corners of the Atlantic world. Europeans imperial and colonial expansion was not simply a maritime phenomenon limited to the surface of the sea, but a marine phenomenon whose long reach was refashioning the supposedly eternal ocean. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the lush marine ecosystem of the northwest Atlantic.4 Despite the recent flowering of Atlantic history, the story of environmental consequences associated with the formation of the Atlantic world remains veiled, as do the ways in which a changing natural world affected Europeans, colonists, and Natives. Retelling the story of North American discovery and colonization with close attention to the coastal oceanat once a workplace, treasure house, complicated ecological system, and source of unending mystery shifts the essence of the narrative considerably. This new story centers upon changes in the sea, a deeply historical process well under way in the Mediterranean during the Roman Empire, a process already notable in northern European estuaries and coastal seas by the late Middle Ages. The process accelerated with the evolution of an integrated Atlantic economy, and was both cause and effect of European voyages to America. Those changes were neither simply natural phenomena nor localized depletions caused by humans, but a complicated dynamic between natural events and human impacts on the marine environment. Telling that tale, with its consequences for people, requires a much deeper look into the European past than is often the norm in American histories, for the scale of this tale, like the sea changes it reveals, is immense. But the payoffs are palpable. Connecting ocean time scales to human time scales and writing the ocean into history is not the least of those rewards. Preposterous as it seems, the perspectives of the first generation of explorers in coastal North

PROLOGUE

America have never been fully understood because their accounts have not been presented in light of what was normal in European coastal seas during the sixteenth century. This dimension of the transatlantic sea story and its implications may ultimately be as consequential for human history as the European settlement of North America and the creation of nations there. Yet it is just coming into view.

Proceeding from medieval Europe, this book focuses most intensively on the territory between Cape Cod and Newfoundland, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became an Atlantic crossroads, a critical site of interactions among Natives, itinerant Europeans, and settlers in search of marine resources. Known for some time by oceanographers as the northeast continental shelf large marine ecosystem (LME), this underwater region and its adjacent shore supported the most storied fisheries in North America.5 That continental shelf and its adjoining coastline is an ideal place to examine how humans interacted with the marine environment in the preindustrial age, which for most northwest Atlantic fisheries lasted until the early twentieth century. Documented in detail by legions of explorers, settlers, and fishermen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it was virtually a pristine ecosystem; then settled by literate, commercial people who kept illuminating records of their activities; and later prominent as one of the birthplaces of modern marine science, the northwest Atlantic has the experience and the evidence that allow us to write the ocean into history. The story recounted here begins before itinerant European fishermen arrived in the northwest Atlantic, and runs to the era of World War I, when the advent of steam- and gasoline-powered draggers made it clear that largescale industrialization had come to the fisheries. Long before late-twentiethcentury factory trawlers with polyester nets and fish-finding sonar transformed fish-killing from a handliners art into an efficient industrial enterprise, human hands were remaking the sea. Focusing on the era of iron men and wooden ships (a premechanized age characterized by sails, oars, hooks, and handheld harpoons), this history reveals the hidden origins of todays unnatural ocean.6 Scale matters a great deal in this tale, in both time and space. Each chapter intentionally covers a shorter span of time, from a millennium in the first, to several centuries in the second, to just twenty years in the final one. Yet the pace of ecological change accelerates as the time scale contracts.