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Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
Harvard University Press
October 2012
On Sale: October 8, 2012
416 pages
ISBN: 0674047656
EAN: 9780674047655
Kindle: B00AELEF2E
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic
has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for
survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the
Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency,
W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer,
takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of
our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the
world. While overfishing is often thought of
as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were
transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned
fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial
enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks,
stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted
fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows
the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European
origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American
waters at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a
remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to
scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a
story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an
environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created
a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself.
Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship
humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that
live within it, can be restored for future generations.
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