The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. W. Jeffrey Bolster.

Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012. xi and 416 pp., photos., illustrations, maps. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-674-04765-5).

In the scholarship on the fisheries of the northwest Atlantic, three names stand out: George Brown Goode (1884–1887) for his monumental multivolume study of the American fisheries, Harold Adams Innis (1954) for his magisterial account of the political economy of the cod fisheries, and, more recently, George A. Rose (2007) for his comprehensive ecological history of cod. With The Mortal Sea, a superb account of the destruction of the fisheries of the northwest Atlantic from the beginnings of the European encounter with North America to the end of the age of sail in the early twentieth century, historian Jeffrey Bolster now joins this distinguished list.

Combining years of practical knowledge of sailing and fishing in the Gulf of Maine with the historian's knowledge of the archive, Bolster set out to write an environmental history of the northwest Atlantic fisheries. He is a master of the complexities of the fisheries, ranging from the distinctive characteristics of different species and their varied undersea habitats to the varieties of fishing gear and demands of the market. But Bolster also wants to tell a story peopled with individuals who made rational decisions according to their circumstances. We are treated to a vast cast of characters, ranging from inshore fishermen and schooner captains to state and federal politicians and fishery scientists, such as George Brown Goode, who helped shape fishery policy. At the same time, Bolster, intrigued by issues of scale, wants to lift his story out of the particularities of fish and men, and set it in an appropriate time span, one that begins in the European Middle Ages and ends in the American age of industry. Although he ranges as far back in time as the Vikings, much of his account concentrates on the 400 years of Europeans in North America, “probably the longest history possible of Euro-Americans' interaction with any aspect of their natural environment” (p. x).

Employing the notion of “shifting baselines” developed by fishery scientist Daniel Pauly, Bolster begins his account with the state of the ocean at the time of European contact. He will have none of Stephen Greenblatt's claim that early European explorers were “liars,” greatly exaggerating the natural riches of the New World. Like Sauer in his study of the early Spanish Main, Bolster takes contemporary accounts seriously. Hard-bitten, experienced mariners, such as Cabot, Cartier, Champlain, and Smith, were in no doubt that the seas, rivers, and estuaries of northeastern North America teemed with fish. Although he does not refer to geographer William Denevan's “pristine myth,” Bolster argues that fish stocks of the northwest Atlantic were virtually untouched; Native fishers, limited by their technology, had scarcely made any impact on offshore fish and mammals. Moreover, the abundance of the northwest Atlantic stood in stark contrast to the depleted fisheries of European coastal waters. The riches of the northwest Atlantic were no myth.

After establishing his baseline, Bolster deftly accounts for the decline of the fisheries over succeeding centuries. By the end of the seventeenth century, river fisheries in New England and mackerel and cod fisheries in the Gulf of Maine were showing signs of depletion. Mammals at the top of the food chain, such as whales and walruses, had already been hunted out. A century later, fish stocks in Newfoundland and Labrador appeared to be suffering. So, too, were seabirds, hunted for food and bait. In the early nineteenth century, the flightless great auk, which had once ranged from Newfoundland to Maine, became extinct. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new technologies such as hooked long-lines and trawl nets further reduced fish stocks. In New England waters, cod, mackerel, halibut, and menhaden all went into steep decline, their depletion now measured in the statistical records of the U.S. federal government.

But as catches fell, prices rose, encouraging investment in ever more efficient fishing technologies, which, in turn, further depleted the resource. By the late nineteenth century, it was clear to many fishermen in New England, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland that the fisheries were in trouble. Yet the onslaught continued and even intensified as the fishery mechanized with steam trawlers and power winches. Although focused on the age of sail, Bolster, in an epilogue, tells the story of the great factory trawlers from Western and Eastern Europe that fished out much of what was left in the 1950s and 1960s. In an effort to exclude the Europeans, Canada and the United States extended their exclusive economic zones 200 miles from their coasts in 1977, but the measure only encouraged increased Canadian and American exploitation. By the late 1980s, cod, the most important fish of the northwest Atlantic, had been fished out. In 1992, after half a millennium of exploitation, the Canadian government closed down the Newfoundland fishery. Restrictions on the Nova Scotian and New England fisheries soon followed. Throughout the telling of this mortal tale, Bolster is careful to balance human depredation with natural oscillations in sea temperature, which affect fish reproduction. He is also alert, as far as evidence allows, to ecological perturbations as different species were depleted.

Bolster bases his account on deep reading in the archives and secondary sources. He has been through the accounts of the early navigators, legislative records of the New England colonies, federal commissions on the fisheries, and scientific reports from several national and international agencies. He also makes use of the interdisciplinary Gulf of Maine Cod Project that he cofounded at the University of New Hampshire. Drawing on the research of ecologists, statisticians, and fellow historians, Bolster provides new evidence on depletion of cod in the Gulf. Particularly impressive is his use of fishery logbooks to gain a sense of the fishing effort in the Gulf in the late nineteenth century. Like any good historian, Bolster stitches together the voluminous and disparate primary material, embeds it in the secondary literature, and then creates a readable and compelling narrative. The resulting book is a major achievement.

Well aware of Rose's impressive account of the Newfoundland cod fishery, Bolster focuses primarily on the New England fishery and the Gulf of Maine. He makes forays into Atlantic Canada for supporting evidence, but does not really get to grips with the region. Indeed, a striking omission is Head's (1976) study of eighteenth-century Newfoundland, in which he proposed estimates of fish depletion bay by bay, anticipating current interest in the environmental history of the fisheries by several decades. Even in his account of the New England fisheries, Bolster leaves surprising gaps. Although he pays much attention to the early canned lobster industry, he says nothing about sardine canning, which dominated much of the Maine inshore fishery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and most likely put juvenile herring populations under pressure. Even more significantly, Bolster does not clearly differentiate between inshore and offshore fisheries; they tend to be treated together in his narrative flow. Differences between the two fisheries were significant and arguably have become more so during the twentieth century. Whereas the story of the offshore fisheries can be explained as a “tragedy of the commons,” the inshore fishery has developed customary and legal restrictions on the exploitation of local fishing grounds. The massive growth of the Maine lobster industry, almost entirely inshore, over the course of the twentieth century results from a combination of ecological imbalance (removal of predators such as cod) and effective management of fishing territories. At least along the Maine coast, the tragedy of the commons has not played out. The success of the lobster fishery would have provided a useful counterpoint to Bolster's more general tale of depletion and extinction. These criticisms aside, Bolster has written a superb book, full of primary research, practical knowledge, subtle analysis, powerful argument, and evocative prose. It is not only the environmental history of the New England fishery that we have been waiting for, but also a major contribution to the growing field of environmental history.