Overfishing or Ecological Regime Shifts? Gulf of Maine Mackerel and Menhaden Fisheries, 1850-1900, and the Challenges of Marine Environmental History

Relying on state Fish Commission reports, landings data, and legislative petitions, this paper reconstructs the meteoric rise-and-fall of the late nineteenth-century mackerel and menhaden fisheries, paying equal attention to the fortunes of fish and fishermen. While colonial New Englanders harvested mackerel for local consumption, a systematic commercial fishery did not begin until the 1820s. Menhaden, even less popular, were generally ignored until the 1850s. Around midcentury, however, fish oil became sufficiently valuable to prompt the construction of expensive menhaden rendering plants in New England, and to trigger vertical integration of the industry by large-scale capitalists. In 1860 the purse seine revolutionized both fisheries, permitting much larger catches. In the blink-of-an-eye, Gulf of Maine fisheries changed dramatically. Fishermen capitalized mackerel schooners and mackereling became more lucrative than codfishing. Meanwhile other fishermen petitioned the Maine legislature to stop a practice “very destructive to said fish,” fearing it would materially injure “the codfishing interests of this state.” A right-of-access discourse and a preservation discourse split towns.            Preservationists may have been right. After 1879 menhaden essentially disappeared from the Gulf of Maine, bankrupting factory owners and fishermen. The mackerel fishery collapsed in 1886, perhaps because fishermen landed 134,000 metric tons in 1880 – almost twice as much as late 20^th-century harvests by modern ships. Fishing communities took staggering financial blows. Seeking to explain a historic change in the sea, the paper explores the coastal ocean as a variable environment, and raises questions about the baselines from which marine environmental historians often proceed. It argues that fishing pressure occurred not only in the context of changing legal frameworks and cultural norms, but in light of fluctuating environmental conditions and regime shifts. The paper illuminates how nineteenth-century fishermen knew the sea, used the sea, and changed the sea; and how those changes affected coastal communities.