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  • Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England by Christopher L. Pastore
  • Peter H. Wood
Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England. By Christopher L. Pastore (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2014) 312 pp. $35.00

Ecologists and anthropologists have long accepted the truism that life is particularly varied, complex, and dynamic in the broad tidal estuaries where earth and ocean meet. But scholars of colonial North America, slow to embrace environmental history, are only lately reaching the water’s edge—with record-rich New England, as usual, leading the way. More than thirty years ago, William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (New York, 1983) prompted deeper awareness of that region’s shifting colonial forests and fields. Then a new generation of deep-sea scholars, such as Bolster, began trolling in adjacent Atlantic waters.1 Now Pastore ventures onto the marshes and the mudflats between them, exploring New England’s largest estuary in a fascinating, detailed, and often lyrical study of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay and its watershed of more than 2,000 square miles.

Pastore’s fascination with the history and ecology of this island-studded bay began in childhood. He grew up where the Providence River enters the wide, saline estuary that stretches south more than two dozen miles from the city of Providence to Newport Harbor and the Atlantic. He writes clearly and perceptively about the ways in which inhabitants shaped, and were more shaped by, these tidal waters in the centuries after Giovanni da Verrazano’s admiring visit in 1524. Between Land and Sea begins by analyzing how the seventeenth-century traffic in wampum (strings of shell beads made by Native Americans from the bay’s abundant whelk and quahog shells) sustained an expansive colonial pelt trade that [End Page 291] decimated the beaver population, drying up countless beaver ponds and altering the region’s landscape. The book ends with a masterful account of an ill-fated effort by Rhode Island shipping merchants to extend their reach northward; they schemed to capture some of rival Boston’s commerce with the Massachusetts interior by financing a canal along the newly industrialized Blackstone River. Until defeated by the railroads and battles about water rights, the short-lived artery carried staves, shoes, and ship timbers to Providence, while whale oil, fish, cotton (and unwanted wharf rats) traveled north to Worcester.

Between these bookends, Pastore delves into cartography, boundary disputes, coastal warfare, and the gradual transition from an agricultural to an industrial coastline. Writing accessibly about New England’s smallest and least-studied colony, he shows that long before the area’s first lighthouse appeared in 1749, maritime settlers were harvesting fish and oysters from the clear, nutrient-rich bay (covering nearly 150 square miles) and raising sheep, horses, and cattle on the surrounding meadows. By 1700, Rhode Island had outstripped its neighbors in livestock production and was provisioning New England’s fishing and trading vessels. By 1730, the colony founded by Roger Williams had embraced the African trade, and domineering Narragansett planters with vast estates were forcing enslaved workers to construct the highest concentration of stone walls in New England.

Comparisons with Chesapeake Bay, Charleston Harbor, and Port Royal Sound, much less San Francisco Bay or Puget Sound, do not figure in Pastore’s book. But his well-crafted study should prompt researchers to look more closely at the subtle interplay of history and ecology in other major North American estuaries.

Peter H. Wood
Duke University

Footnotes

1. See, for example, Jeffrey Bolster, Cross-Grained and Wily Waters: A Guide to the Piscataqua Maritime Region (Portsmouth, N.H., 2002).

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