Vol. 2, No. 4 Contents Headline Back Issues Fall 1998
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Essay: A Gulf and its People Ph.D. Candidate, Maritime History, University of New Hampshire Take yourself out of the present for a moment. Rather than pushing paper from one side of your desk to another, imagine yourself gutting and tonguing a pile of cod on your left, and putting the cleaned fish into a barrel on your right. Replace your desk in the warm office with a running sea on the quarter, rain squalls, and a 35-foot/11-meter Chebacco plodding its way toward the southern Nova Scotia coastline beneath a lead gray sky hanging over a dark gray sea. If you are able to envision this, you are half way towards understanding the Gulf of Maine during the first few hundred years of European habitation, before political boundaries split the Gulf's resources in two. What does exist is a ring of hills ranging from Cape Cod to the White Mountains, and continuing almost up to the Saint Lawrence River, squeaking north of the Bay of Fundy and stretching down to Cape Sable, Nova Scotia. All of the rivers running out of these hills and mountains enter the Gulf of Maine, whose waters unite the people of the Northwest Atlantic. For the most part, the Gulf of Maine was a basin for fish, and the resource that unified people around the Gulf was fish. Europeans first came to the Gulf to chase fish. Native American people continued fishing the coastal waters and hunting whales beached in the shallow waters off Nantucket. While working these waters, people met with strangers, friends and in-laws, who by horse lived hundreds of miles from one another, but by boat, perhaps only a few hours away. Fishermen's wives worked at home managing a house and business that depended upon her far-flung family ties across the Gulf that helped her husband sell his catch and line up credit for the next season. This was a Gulf stitched together by ties between people dependent on the watershed and the sea for their existence. Today, we see things differently. Politics has scratched lines in the water, and has put fences up on the land. Lines on the road maps divide us, where the Gulf used to unite us, as the ferry route from Portland dots off the map to a Nova Scotia somewhere past the edge of the map's margin. The highway heading south past Calais, Maine enters an area with a distinctly different color, as if to signify "here be dragons." Nevertheless, the Bay of Fundy that surrounds Grand Manan and fills St. Mary's Bay is the same water that carries that ferry from Portland to "nowhere." What earlier people of the Gulf had over us today was a more realistic vision of this body of water. Today's political boundaries ignore environmental and oceanographic realities that still unite the people of eastern New England and the Canadian Maritimes. Whether we realize it or not, we are still closely tied to the Gulf, as much as the fisherman who gutted fish in the Chebacco boat two hundred years ago. We still go to the Gulf to find life, to escape life, and for a shrinking number of us, to make our lives. As we strive to manage and protect this common resource, we would benefit from remembering how people perceived the Gulf before the dividing lines were drawn. Perhaps the best way to remember is to pull out a chart of the Gulf of Maine, and think like a fish. |
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