The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail

A stupendous book. Of course, growing up in the age of Mrs. Paul's fish sticks and TV ads for Gortons of Gloucester, and Captains Courageous and The Perfect Storm, I've been aware of fish and fishing. Add to that the health industry's not very helpful back-and-forth of "fish is bad for you, it has mercury in it" and "fish is good for you, it has omega 3 oils." But since I moved to the New Hampshire seacoast (fourteen years ago yesterday, Feb 02, 2013) my curiosity has been piqued. The news about the fishing industry is constant. And government opinions and scientists' opinions in the local and national news, are constantly counter balanced (and what a balance it is, with at least three armies battling for the high ground) with the fishermen and their families who are my ubiquitous neighbors.I bought this book after it was reviewed and the author interviewed in the Portsmouth (NH) local paper, THE WiRE. At last, a book that attempts to make it all clear for the reader: what is the problem, how did it become the problem, what is the solution. But, as with all good stories, nothing about fishing is that simple. So the author begins with the Vikings in the New World and covers the history of fishing the northwest Atlantic until about 1930's, and the last cry of the age of sails. It's a tremendous story, full of rich detail, and every actor in it has contradictory motives.It is also, I must warn, an extremely erudite book. This was a hard read, on a Masters or Doctorate level. Extremely rich, complex vocabulary and compound-complex sentence structure that had me re-reading pages on many occasions. But I don't get the impression that it is showiness for the sake of showiness. (Grammar usually goes hay-wire when an author is substituting ego-driven logorrhea for sense.) The author has a complex subject and there is simply no way to cover it, fairly (and let me emphasize, all voices are represented here), without resorting to all the devices available to him in the rhetorical arsenal at his command.That said, the book is generous, each chapters has an introduction and a conclusion that helps clarify what you are about to read and have just read. There are many illustrations, helpful graphs, and a (rather incomplete, but all the same, useful) glossary. And, as expected, I learned a lot about history, geography, politics, "those who go down to the sea in ships," and the implicit catastrophe when people who believe a resource is unlimited clash with people who know it isn't. If you want further encouragement to read this book, imagine this. Imagine the amount of research and good story telling that brings you to this point, on pp. 278-279:"It is not as if one constituency--whether fishermen, or scientists, or politicians--ever spoke with consistency on the issue. They did not. There is plenty of blame to go around; and some accolades, too. At certain times well-informed, moral, or farsighted individuals, including fishermen, scientists, and politicians, spoke openly about how their friends and neighbors (along with others, sometimes no so friendly or neighborly) were destroying the resource base on which a great business rested, not to mention food and jobs for the future. If there is any lesson in this saga, it is not that the fishermen were (or are) to blame, or that the scientists were (or are) to blame, or that the politicians were (or are) to blame. The interlocked system was (and is) to blame. That system, with its checks and balances, its desire for prosperity and security, its willingness to honor a multiplicity of voices, its changing sense of "normal," and its shifting ecological baselines, was (and is) insufficiently nimble to stop the desecration of commonly held resources on which the long-term good of everyone depended (and depends)."A stupendous book.

It’s a solid book, well researched. It is repetitive at times, after the point has clearly been made and re-iterated. The focus is exclusively on the Western Atlantic (US and Can), and I think it would help to tie this story in with other continents historical over-fishing data. Tie it together globally. It’s not a light read, but it’s a good one.

This is a very important read that gets down to the facts surrounding one of humanities greatest failures in the area of conservation. The Mortal Sea acts as a cautionary tale for the future ripe with cutting examples of our ignorance and binging of resources. Well written and concise enough, though it may be quite thorough for someone not entirely used to historical writings. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in broadening their understanding of the tidal waves of human consumption that have ravaged our planet and what pitfalls we may be able to avoid in the future.

I bought this book because it looked like it would have some interesting tales of shipping on the Atlantic.However it gives an incredibly detailed history of how successive generations have been destroying the fisheries of the Atlantic ocean. The book makes it clear how as far back as the first generations to migrate to America, the oceans have been deteriorating. Each generation has looked back at its early years as a baseline and lamented the destruction of the oceans. But the cumulative effect of generation upon generation of losses is unimaginable.I found the book heavy going. It tends to go on and on about the same point. But still, it makes a very important point about the degradation of marine environments and makes clear the need to do more to improve the state of our oceans.

We usually think that we humans have the capacity to learn from mistakes and look forward to set up better living conditions at long term timescales. This book shows us that we overrate ourselves. Fishing management is a classical example of mismanagement and conflicts between science and politics, where short term interests, maximizing profits, are always more important than provide limits to exploitation of resources former known as renewables.Unfortunetly this is not a book that makes hopes arise. Well funded in historical statistics and strong evidences of collective blindness, it confirms a tendency to oceans' death in few decades.Can we humans learn from history?

An interesting book that seeks to show how humanity changed the atlantic during the early modern/Colonial Period of American History via overfishing. The book was read for a class on Early American History, and was one of my favorites. Bolster makes a compelling argument that is supported by his evidence and sources.

excellent historical peer reviewed text concerning the North Atlantic Fisheries (actually a landmark must-have book on this topic) It is an easy read and details the 1700s to 1850s as well as extensive narrative on the changes and developments policitcally, environmentally and economiclly during the 1900s to 2000, including the European factory ships, effects of trawling, small net mesh and the economics and management of a renewable resource and the changes in its commodification. Well done!!!

In this remarkable history of the New England fisheries, Jeffery Bolster give us candid insider views of the rapid and incremental destruction of the rich biological resource that was the northwest Atlantic. This is a very detailed portrayal of ecosystem collapse and how the rising arrogance of science and science based management, combined with human avarice and developing technology have resulted in the empty seas we have today. I particularly like the specific details of the individual fisheries and how they contribute to this collapse. A good lesson here for the Alaskan fisheries which are sliding that way.

This book is a detailed history of fishing in the north atlantic from an american perspective and although it sounds a bit dry I found it to be quite a page-turner in places. However it does get a bit boring sometimes because the same problems happen over and over again to different species of fish!It only covers the period up to around the turn of the 20th century which I didn't realise but should have read the title! I would have preferred a few more pictures as I think this would have brought it to life.

Thank you very much for sending. The book has given me good readings.

I hoped for much from a book about a little-studied subject. There is much of interest mainly from the American side of the North Atlantic. But the bigger, more varied, diverse and older European fisheries are given fragmentary attention. I look forward to a more comprehensive second edition. Sidney Holt.