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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 3 of 3
"Ask yourself: what were [the cod] eating?" suggests W. Jeffrey Bolster, the UNH maritime historian who is part of the project. "When you think about the copepods and krill, all the way up to the alewives and mackerel that had to be present in the inshore area to feed them, it's flabbergasting. It was a totally different world out there."
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If nature's bounty is not timeless, there may be a small consolation in knowing human nature is.
Part of the problem today, says Rosenberg, is in restraining younger fishermen who are too young to remember what fishing was like in the 1960s or 1970s. One of his colleagues was once accosted by a fishermen in his 20s who was angry that bluefin tuna quotas were going to be lowered.
"He was screaming that there were more tuna out there than he'd ever seen in his life," Rosenberg recalled. "My friend listened for a while and said, 'Well, you're not very old.' "
But even in the 1850s, older fishermen were concerned that their sons and grandsons were unaware of the extent to which the fish populations had declined.
"There were petitions from fishermen – we have zillions of them – lamenting what was happening and demanding regulations," says Mr. Bolster. "We have people from each generation saying, basically, these young guys now don't know what fishing was like when it was good."
And even back then, fishermen's warnings about the destructive power of new technology went unheeded. In the 1850s, Swampscott, Mass., hand-line fishermen begged state legislators to outlaw new long lines that used hundreds of hooks rather than one or two. They warned that otherwise cod and haddock would become as "scarce as salmon."
For researchers like Leavenworth, such stories make the hunt for logbooks more than an academic enterprise. Understanding fish population trends is important, but so is telling the vivid tales found in these aging books.
"You just tell these stories to someone and they immediately get the picture," says historian Karen Alexander, who coordinates the project. "They get in their minds what real abundance looks like and what these ecosystems can really do – and then they want that."
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