Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England by Christopher L. Pastore (review)

Joyce E. Chaplin has observed that our present climatic and environmental crisis puts into bold relief the importance of comprehending ways of life that existed before industrialization and widespread reliance on fossil fuels. Early America itself, she argues, can be defined primarily as a preindustrial era, and “America’s material origins” ought to be a central focus for professional historians.¹ The natural world should not recede from the picture but should stay in the foreground of our narratives. Rhode Island, as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, seems like a fitting test case for such a history of what came before. Christopher L. Pastore’s history of Narragansett Bay delivers a vivid sense of human and nonhuman life where saltwater met freshwater prior to textile mills and long before interstate highways revolutionized the Ocean State.

One way to introduce Narragansett Bay as it existed in centuries past is to make some back-of-the-envelope calculations. If you only counted the “saline portion” (22), the bay ran 28 miles from south to north and became as wide as 11 miles, with a total surface area of 147 square miles and a mean depth of 27 feet. But nine rivers also emptied into the bay, and “if one added this vast network of rivers to the tidewater, the Narragansett Bay watershed covered more than 2,000 square miles.” Pastore aims to evoke just how thoroughly “moving water defined this coastal space.” Accordingly, he computes that “as tidal water from the ocean flooded Narragansett Bay from the south, roughly 260 million cubic feet of water per day rolled down its rivers into the upper estuary” (22). Other reviews will no doubt note Pastore’s artful prose and nuanced attention to changing mentalities in early Rhode Island, but he is a materialist too, deploying modern scientific findings and imaginatively using basic arithmetic throughout the book to acquaint the reader with large, complex, living systems. There are advantages to historicizing landscapes and waterscapes at a medium scale, as this book does. Narragansett Bay is not so small that its study must be justified by how it illuminates larger processes and trends. The bay is not so big that its local ecologies must be obscured or its local communities lumped together, either. As Peter C. Mancall has written, “the task facing the next generation” of early American environmental historians “is to pose questions about particular attitudes, places, peoples, and local landscapes.”² In a real way, this book is about the history of Narragansett Bay for its own sake. Pastore situates the bay within the regional contexts of New England and the Atlantic world because Rhode Island’s connections over land and sea to larger systems dynamically shaped the bay’s biology and cultures over time.

Pastore is at his best describing the Anglo-American sense of place in Narragansett Bay. Interdisciplinary scholars such as John R. Gillis and John R. Stilgoe have developed critical vocabularies for writing about people and coasts, and Pastore enriches the store, examining “brackish borderlands” (2–3), “littoral space” (9), “soggy landscape[s]” (85), and “watery frontier[s]” (229). Like his predecessors, Pastore recovers people’s distinct ways of inhabiting, accessing, and thinking about coasts, estuaries, coves, and islands—the “amphibious existence” (3) of a “littoral people” (52). Of Rhode Island colonists, he writes, “For farmers who mowed salt hay by daylight and speared eels by torchlight, every facet of quotidian life straddled—sometimes deftly and at other times with noticeable hesitation—the psychological and material boundaries between land and sea” (52). Newcomers to the bay had a “shifting or even ambivalent relationship with nature” (53). Whatever degree of mastery they attained, they retained a respect and even awe for the power of the sea: “Every twelve hours, the rhythmic renewal of the tide reminded the littoral people living there that they, too, were subject...