Clearing the Coastline: The Nineteenth-Century Ecological & Cultural Transformations of Cape Cod

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments No book sees the light of day without the help of numerous friends, family members, colleagues, and professionals whose attention and support give as much life to a book as the author himself. This work is no exception. Throughout the six years I spent researching, conceptualizing, writing, and polishing this study, I have piled up debt upon debt to an army of people whose assistance and guidance proved essential in bringing this work about. In addition, as this project’s interdisciplinary approach took me well out of my formal training—sending me to ecologists, fisheries policy professionals , and art historians—I owe even more than had I kept this book’s scope within traditional historical fields. Far from a liability, however, these debts bring me the greatest pleasure to publicly thank those who helped me. To the extent this book is any good, it is because of their assistance; its weaknesses, errors, and other shortcomings are mine alone. The germ of this project came from my involvement with the History of Marine Animal Population (HMAP) project’s 2002 International Summer School hosted by the University of New Hampshire and supported by the Census of Marine Life (CoML) and the Sloane Foundation. Working with marine ecologists from around the globe, who derived very different conclusions from the same sources I was working with, I learned the importance of seeing historical records from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. I continued these studies during a brief collaboration with the Gulf of Maine Cod Project at the University of New Hampshire in 2003. There, conversations with Andy Rosenberg, Jeff Bolster, Andy Cooper, Karen Alexander, Stefan Claesson,and Bill Leavenworth got me thinking about the importance of detailed understandings of marine ecology in interpreting the maritime xii Acknowledgments past. These interests received further nurturing from my involvement with HMAP’s World Whaling Project directed by Tim Smith,and through friendships with others from HMAP: Rene Poulsen, Bo Poulsen, and Loren McClenachan . More immediately, however, it was the opportunity Catherine Marzin and Stefan Claesson extended to me to hunt down southern New England fisheries records for the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary ’s Marine Historical Ecology source survey (noaa Contract/Grant No. NA04NO54290190) in 2004 and 2005 that allowed me to see the wealth of material detailing the southern New England inshore fisheries. The Sea Education Association (SEA) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the many friends I gained there also helped bring this project along.SEA allowed me, as maritime studies faculty, to work my passage to the 2004 Three Societies’Meeting in Halifax,Nova Scotia.SEA supported trips to the 2004 American Society for Environmental History annual meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, and, along with the University of New Hampshire, to HMAP’s 2004 Oceans Past meeting in Kolding, Denmark. SEA also allowed me the opportunity to visit Cape Cod’s many local archives and present findings at the Cape Cod Natural History conference in March 2005 and at the Wellfleet Bay State of the Harbor meeting in the fall of 2006. Most importantly, SEA encouraged me to bring my research into their unique, motivating, and inspiring classrooms on shore. In addition, Paul Joyce,SEA’s academic dean,saw the value of sending me and my work to sea, where trips with Captains Virginia Land-McGuire, Chris McGuire, Steve Tarrant, Beth Doxsee, and Elliot Rappaport taught me much, including the fact that tall-ship sailing, even in a modern context, was work that most professional mariners preferred not to discuss on shore. During these voyages I was fortunate to work alongside Dr.Gary Jarasolow and Dr.Chuck Lea (who have spent more time at sea performing oceanographic research than I think any other oceanographers living or dead). I also had the pleasure to sail, twice, with Dr. Jeff Schell. Standing at the science-deck rail of the ssv Corwith Cramer on the Scotian Shelf, and that of the Robert C. Seamans in the Pacific Northwest, he challenged to me to situate my historical findings within a larger marine ecological context. He loaned me lab copies of marine ecology textbooks and took time to explain— to a historian—the different ways of measuring biodiversity, and the value of linking marine animals to one another and to different fishermen through trophic studies. I shared with him literary explorations of the sea, and of Acknowledgments xiii Jack Kerouac, and on...