The Atlantic Fishing Revolution: Overfishing and Ecological Impact

The Atlantic economy was not just about connecting Europe and the Americas via ships and submarine cables. It also increasingly depended on the exploitation of the ocean environment. Already by the early Atlantic expansion period, European fishing supplies dwindled, forcing fishermen to extend their radius from the North Sea to the North Atlantic. There, these European fishing fleets met with fishermen from North America, who were responsible for the fishing revolution that occurred in the area from Cape Cod to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland during the second half of the nineteenth century.

This revolution, which had a deep economic and ecological impact, consisted of a number of innovations. First, earlier neglected species such as halibut, lobster, menhaden, and swordfish were now increasingly targeted. Second, this period saw the expansion of net- and hook-fishing methods. Hook fishing required the use of clams and baitfish, which expanded the targeting of these new resources. Finally, new marketing strategies brought fish to more consumers, which in turn triggered increasing exhaustion of fishing grounds. Shipping these goods packed in ice and the utilization of the ever-expanding railroad network provided access to seafood even in distant areas. Furthermore, new sailing vessels such as sharpshooters or the clipper schooners and later the steam trawler brought more power to the fishing grounds. For example, overfishing and depletion caused a shortage of mackerel supplies and a steep rise in prices.

The exploitation of fisheries in the Atlantic went one step further with the introduction of bottom trawling. Towing a net along the bottom not only increased the catch and landed cheap groundfish on the market but also resulted in bycatch: the incidental capture of nontargeted or infant fish that were more often than not killed. Although the reports of the Bureau of Fisheries warned about the consequences of overfishing early in the twentieth century, it was only the Second World War that allowed fishing stocks to rebound, because trawlers had been requisitioned and German submarines kept the fishing fleets in port. It was to be only a temporary respite, however, as new factory-equipped freezer steam trawlers expanded fishing yields.

In 1996, the US Congress passed the Sustainable Fisheries Act to rebuild North Atlantic fish populations, although populations continued to decline. As with other oceans discussed in this volume, overfishing and pollution are major problems affecting the Atlantic in the twenty-first century. Michael North.

FURTHER READING:
Abulafia, David. 2002. “Neolithic Meets Medieval: First Encounters in the Canary Islands.”
In Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices, edited by David Abulafia and Nora Berend. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 255-78.

Armitage, David and Michael J. Braddick, eds. 2009. The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Houndmills: Palgrave.

Bell, Caryn Cosse. 1997. Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press

Berger Hochstrasser, Julie. 2010. “The Butterfly Effect. Embodied Cognition and Perceptual Knowledge in Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium.” In The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks, edited by Siegfried Huigen, Jan de Jong, and Elmar Kolfin. Leiden, the Netherlands/Boston: Brill, 59-101.

Bolster, W Jeffrey. 2014. The Mortal Sea. Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Cambridge, MA/ London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Boxer, Charles R. 1957. The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654. Oxford, UK/Hamden, CT: Archon Books.

Burkholder, Mark A. and Lyman L. Johnson. 2012. Colonial Latin America. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Canny, Nicholas and Nicholas Morgan, eds. 2011. The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Carney, Judith A. 2013. “African Plant and Animal Species in 18th-Century Tropical America.” In Cultural Exchange and Consumption Patterns in the Age of Enlightenment. Europe and the Atlantic World (The Eighteenth Century and the Habsburg Monarchy, International Series, Vol. 6), edited by Veronika Hyden-Hanscho, Renate Pieper, and Werner Stangl. Bochum Germany: Winkler Verlag, 97-116.