The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail by W. Jeffrey Bolster (review)

The Western Ocean, the Atlantic, has shaped the lives of those who have depended on it for survival since the Middle Ages. However, as Jeffrey Bolster argues, we humans have also shaped these stormy, challenging waters. Bolster is both a historian and an ecologist, and someone with extensive maritime experience, which gives him unique qualifications for writing an environmental history of the human impact on some of the world’s richest fishing grounds. He documents a history of overfishing that is not just a phenomenon of modern industrial fisheries, but something that began with the first European exploration and settlement of the region between Newfoundland and Cape Cod.

The Mortal Sea is an intricate synthesis of data from all manner of sources—archaeology, historical records, ecological data and theory, fisheries research, and marine biology. In his Prologue, Bolster argues that such a synthesis provides a historical perspective on how the North Atlantic was an important player in an intricate historical drama, closely connected to human societies. In six carefully argued, long chapters and an Epilogue, he begins with the European discovery of the extraordinarily rich fisheries around Newfoundland. Much of his first chapter covers familiar historical territory, but what is new is the careful attention paid to changing marine ecosystems over time, to shifts in productivity, climate changes, and so on. He shows how fishermen accustomed to depleted European waters were captivated by the piscatory abundance on the other side of the Atlantic. Insatiable demand for fish of all kinds ensued, fanned in part by religious practices, to the point that some 200,000 tons of cod were leaving Newfoundland for Europe by the seventeenth century. Both Native Americans and newcomers plucked what Bolster calls the “low-hanging fruit” of the fisheries, readily accessible species, despite some efforts to impose restrictions on sea fishing out of concern for depleted stocks. During the eighteenth century, despite a common belief that fish stocks were a benefit to the “Publick”, populations of easily caught fish and sea mammals, among them whale, alewives, and sturgeon, fell steadily.

In Chapter 3, Bolster describes the impact of jigging for mackerel and the long-held belief in great sea serpents, which resulted in a greater empiricism in developing knowledge about sea creatures of all kinds. In the decades before the Civil War, beliefs that technology would solve the ocean’s mysteries and increase productivity were commonplace. Chapter 4 describes the period after 1850 when some fishermen became concerned about the future of marine resources. They did not, of course, use the word “sustainability”, at a time when fisheries science effectively did not exist. Bolster describes the long debates over declining fish stocks that culminated in the fishing revolution of the late nineteenth century, when new fishing gear, market expansion, and cultural acceptance of possessive individualism came into play—with serious ecological consequences. The transformation included the targeting of previously underutilized species, the use of nets that caught more fish, long-lining, bait fisheries, and massive capital investment in ships and processing plants. While scientists on land began to worry about the ecological impact of economic development, it was largely unlettered fishermen who argued that fish stocks were depleted for the future, where they hoped to keep fishing.

Chapters 5 and 6 bring the story up to modern times. “Waves in a Troubled Sea” chronicles developments during the nineteenth century, including the virtually simultaneous crash of halibut, lobster, mackerel, and menhaden fisheries. The latter alone had become an industrial colossus, but it was not the gear or boats that determined whether species were pushed to the limit, but the common assumption that nature existed separately from humans. Under this rubric, the immortal sea would protect itself somehow from humanly caused catastrophe. Bolster analyzes the innovations for more effective fishing, also the more sophisticated fisheries science of decades, and the efforts at assisting what the author calls “enfeebled nature.” “An...