B O O K   R E V I E W

The Mortal Sea
Fishing the Atlantic in the
Age of Sail
By W. Jeffery Bolster
Belknap Press
378 pages; 2012

“Today’s fishermen are the descendants of the oldest continually operated business enterprise in the New World, one predicated on renewable resources, and one with a centuries old history of conversations about conservation.” So writes W. Jeffery Bolster in the epilogue to The Mortal Sea. In this sweeping history of fishing in the Northwest Atlantic, Bolster illuminates many of the overlooked facts, history and realities of commercial fishing from the Gulf of Maine to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland; from the earliest Europeans to fish there to the first decade of the 21st century.

The sustainability and overfishing buzz words so easily tossed around today are just that.

Bolster reveals the hard reality that the current condition of groundfish stocks in the Northwest Atlantic require that much be considered—more than buzz words. While the mainstream press, broadcast news and fisheries managers would have us believe the small-boat fleet is to blame, The Mortal Sea reveals more.

The ancestors of contemporary fishermen opposed changes brought on by fisheries managers and the scientists who worked for those managers. Early 20th century decisions and science that wildly inflated the volume of fish that could sustainably be taken from the ocean has had the most significant single impact on fish stocks since that first European hook and line went over the side in the Northwest Atlantic.

The Holy Grail of “efficiency”—superceding common sense, animal husbandry, and the warnings of elder fishermen at every leap of technological efficiency—says a lot about how the fisheries have come to this place in their multi-million-year history. Mixed in among the like is another common thread woven of ignorance, arrogance and disregard. In May of 1664 “the whole town of Taunton (Massachusetts) complained of great wrong” when the owner of a sawmill straddling the herring river in Taunton refused “to leave a sufficient passage for the herrings or alewives.” At the same time in 1660 the Commissioners of the United Colonies of New England passed legislation to protect mackerel stocks. The fisheries history of the Northwest Atlantic is one of this kind of push and pull between blindness and insight.

Bolster traces the declining resource back to early changes in some fish stocks. He writes of the often quoted European explorers who recorded catching large cod with hook and line at the rate of one per minute. He spares the reader the routine references to stocks so dense a man could walk across a bay on the backs of giant cod. Instead he has produced a comprehensive, well-researched work. A book from, which it may be concluded that those closest to the resource are most likely to manage it intelligently.

It is not the first time that much of what Bolster has written has appeared in print. But he has filled in a lot of blanks in a comprehensive volume. Anyone who makes their living fishing, especially fishing the Northwest Atlantic, would find The Mortal Sea an informative read. In a number of places,

Bolster points to maximum extraction policies led by investors wreaking havoc, not fishermen who are from a longer tradition with a broader ecological understanding of this natural resource.

Technology and expanding markets have had a negative impact, as they have in other natural resources in the past. But it was not the only outcome option then and it need not be the only option now.