Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800

Extract

No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries.

Edmund Burke, 1775

Few places have been as thoroughly examined by historians as colonial New England, an anomalous corner of the northwest Atlantic. Settled by an extraordinarily literate people and long privileged by the American history establishment, colonial New England's every square inch has been seriously scrutinized. Or so the conventional wisdom has it. Consider this: Scholars have missed only 100,000 square miles, more or less, of terrain known intimately to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century villagers—the coastal ocean and its seafloor. The irony is superb, for the area seaward of the shore was the first part of the northwest Atlantic reconnoitered by Europeans, whether near Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or New England. Now known by oceanographers as the Northeast Shelf large marine ecosystem (LME), this undersea territory, which overlaps parts of New England and Atlantic Canada, was crucial to the evolution of the Atlantic world. From the perspective of fishermen, the familiar continental shelf on which they plied their trade extended west-southwest from Newfoundland toward Cape Cod as a maze of shallow banks, named basins, submerged ledges, and deep gullies, the jumbled signature of a retreating glacier.1 It was an underwater landscape whose physical features were not unlike those ashore, a place at once dangerous and tempting, a place, as the Scriptures said, that in its seasons revealed “the blessings of the deep that lieth under.”2