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Courtesy of National Archives, Waltham, Massachusetts |
Sea captains' logbooks reveal secrets of New England's fishing culture
Researcher Bill Leavenworth collects logs from the mid-1800s, which offer clues about yesterday's – and today's – cod stocks.
from the February 1, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
At other talks, fishermen have come back to Leavenworth with their third great-great-great-grandfather's logs, occasionally bearing water stains from a Civil War era storm. Volunteer staff at historical societies in tiny Maine ports have helped him hook others hidden in storage rooms.
The Gulf of Maine Cod Project – which Leavenworth's work contributes to – is one of many efforts around the world that bring maritime historians and fishery scientists together to reconstruct the past and to answer the question: What was marine life like before the 20th century?
Danish researchers have been looking at monastery records, which tabulated tithes from fishing activities, while a British team is trying to reconstruct medieval cod and herring fisheries through discarded fish bones.
New Englanders' logbooks are believed to be especially accurate, because fishermen had no incentive to over- or underreport their catches. Individual fishermen were paid according to the number of fish they caught, while at the dock, the captain was paid by the weight of the catch. Combined with log entries showing where the boats fished, this data allowed researchers to calculate the distribution of fish stocks and the average size of the fish caught.
Such reconstructions of past populations can be enormously important today for fisheries managers, which is what led Andrew Rosenberg to help create the UNH project. A former deputy director of the National Marine Fisheries Service and a member of the US Commission on Ocean Policy, Mr. Rosenberg had a front row-seat during the collapse of many of New England's commercial fish populations during the 1980s and 1990s.
"An awful lot of my work ... was focused on rebuilding fisheries, and we were stuck in this box where rebuilding targets were based on the levels of the 1980s, because there was more then than there is now," recalls Mr. Rosenberg, who is now at UNH. "But we know that overfishing has occurred for a much longer period of time, and that even in the 1980s, the stock was producing nowhere near what it could."
Leavenworth's haul of logbooks shows just how far back you have to go to understand the current fishery crisis – and the true extent of the ecological damage.
In 1855, just 43 schooners out of Beverly, Mass., were catching considerably more cod in the waters south of Nova Scotia in a season than their modern counterparts can catch today. Crews fishing over the side with baited hand lines caught 7,800 metric tons of cod – about three times what fishermen caught in that area in 2006. And they did it within sight of land in coastal waters where today cod are virtually nonexistent.
Likewise, in 1861, fishermen from a handful of Maine fishing hamlets using small sailboats and baited hand lines were able to catch more cod than were caught in the entire Gulf of Maine between 1996 and 1999 by the entire US fleet, with their powerful engines, enormous bottom trawling nets, high-tech fish finders, and satellite navigation systems.
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