Vanishing Fish, Erased Fishermen: Cultural Celebration and Ecological Decline on the Cape Cod Shore, 1840–90

The expansion of marine environmental history as a discipline has not helped the reputation of fishermen and their occupational forbearers.  Since Arthur McEvoy’s The Fishermen’s Problem (1986), researchers almost exclusively have blamed fishermen for the human destruction of marine animal communities.  Yet such a perspective isolates fish, fishermen, and ecological change from their larger cultural contexts.  In so doing, these studies leave unexamined the responsibility for environmental destruction carried by the rest of society.             This paper examines the responsibility held by artists and writers in the celebration, expansion, and subsequent decline of fishing along Cape Cod’s shores in the nineteenth century.  Artists such as Fitz Hugh Lane and John Frederick Kensett, and authors such as Henry David Thoreau and lesser-known travel writers, celebrated  the expansion of Cape Cod’s shore fishing as another example of how nature nurtured the new American nation.  Yet testimonials by regional fishermen found in US Fish Commission records, and archival catch data examined with modern marine ecological analyses, reveal a decline in local fish stocks as early as the 1870s and 1880s.  Despite the economic dislocation and political controversy fomented by that decline, writers and painters chose to whitewash the consequences of expanded fishing by consciously erasing evidence of ecological decline from their canvases and pages.  Sometimes they erased commercial fishing altogether. Instead, they portrayed the region as a pristine “wilderness” far more appealing to growing numbers of middle-class seaside tourists.            By tracing the changing cultural images of fishing, this paper expands our understanding of environmental degradation beyond mere economic pursuits.  Cape Cod’s fishermen did not work in isolation.  They served and existed within a larger community whose cultural visions of environmental resource use caused, almost as much as the fishermen themselves, the destruction of marine resources on which all relied.