The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. By Bolster W. Jeffrey (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012, xi plus 416 pp. $29.95)

The Western Ocean, the Atlantic, has shaped the lives of those who have depended on it for survival since the Middle Ages. However, as Jeffrey Bolster argues, we humans have also shaped these stormy, challenging waters. Bolster is both a historian and an ecologist, and someone with extensive maritime experience, which gives him unique qualifications for writing an environmental history of the human impact on some of the world's richest fishing grounds. He documents a history of overfishing that is not just a phenomenon of modern industrial fisheries, but something that began with the first European exploration and settlement of the region between Newfoundland and Cape Cod. The Mortal Sea is an intricate synthesis of data from all manner of sources—archaeology, historical records, ecological data and theory, fisheries research, and marine biology. In his Prologue, Bolster argues that such a synthesis provides a historical perspective on how the North Atlantic was an important player in an intricate historical drama, closely connected to human societies. In six carefully argued, long chapters and an Epilogue, he begins with the European discovery of the extraordinarily rich fisheries around Newfoundland. Much of his first chapter covers familiar historical territory, but what is new is the careful attention paid to changing marine ecosystems over time, to shifts in productivity, climate changes, and so on. He shows how fishermen accustomed to depleted European waters were captivated by the piscatory abundance on the other side of the Atlantic. Insatiable demand for fish of all kinds ensued, fanned in part by religious practices, to the point that some 200,000 tons of cod were leaving Newfoundland for Europe by the seventeenth century. Both Native Americans and newcomers plucked what Bolster calls the “low-hanging fruit” of the fisheries, readily accessible species, despite some efforts to impose restrictions on sea fishing out of concern for depleted stocks. During the eighteenth century, despite a common belief that fish stocks were a benefit to the “Publick”, populations of easily caught fish and sea mammals, among them whale, alewives, and sturgeon, fell steadily.

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