Winner of the Bancroft Prize A sweeping environmental history of the North Atlantic, The Mortal Sea reveals how centuries of fishing turned a rich ocean into an “exhausted sea” and offers a powerful cautionary tale about our precarious relationship with the natural world. Since the Viking ascendancy in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic has shaped the lives of people who depend upon it for survival. And just as surely, people have shaped the Atlantic. In his innovative account of this interdependency, W. Jeffrey Bolster, a historian and professional seafarer, takes us through a millennium-long environmental history of our impact on one of the largest ecosystems in the world. While overfishing is often thought of as a contemporary problem, Bolster reveals that humans were transforming the sea long before factory trawlers turned fishing from a handliner's art into an industrial enterprise. The western Atlantic's legendary fishing banks, stretching from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, have attracted fishermen for more than five hundred years. Bolster follows the effects of this siren's song from its medieval European origins to the advent of industrialized fishing in American waters at the beginning of the twentieth century. Blending marine biology, ecological insight, and a remarkable cast of characters, from notable explorers to scientists to an army of unknown fishermen, Bolster tells a story that is both ecological and human: the prelude to an environmental disaster. Over generations, harvesters created a quiet catastrophe as the sea could no longer renew itself. Bolster writes in the hope that the intimate relationship humans have long had with the ocean, and the species that live within it, can be restored for future generations. “ The Mortal Sea chronicles the history of the fishing industry in the North West Atlantic over the past 500 years. Based on a comprehensive set of original sources, it charts the fascinating and ultimately disastrous story of how successive waves of European seafarers arrived to take advantage of the fishing opportunities that had become distant memories in their own more circumscribed and heavily exploited home waters… Such is the complexity of marine ecosystems that the recovery of severely depleted cod populations is taking decades longer than simple theory would suggest. The Mortal Sea is a beautifully written chronicle of what lay before this latest catastrophe and much earlier dire outcomes of poorly regulated fishing. As an authoritatively written natural history of the developing fishing communities of the North West Atlantic, it makes an important contribution to fishery science as well as to social history.” ― Richard Shelton , Times Literary Supplement “ The Mortal Sea is highly pertinent to urgent matters before us now. If in the late 1800s the men who worked the sea for their livelihoods could see that creatures were being fished to extinction, while scientists in the employ of business interests argued that the seas were endlessly replenishable, today it is the other way around. Scientists argue that human activity has placed the planet in uncertain but potentially calamitous peril, while ordinary people shrug at the evidence and go on misusing the Earth’s resources, abetted by governments too cowardly and businesses too self-interested to take that evidence seriously… The Mortal Sea should be read as a cautionary tale… Anyone who thinks…this book is only about fish is living in a fool’s paradise.” ― Jonathan Yardley , Washington Post “Historian and seafarer Jeffrey Bolster ‘writes the ocean into history,’ tracing the currents leading to today’s serious fish-stock depletion. Focusing on the North Atlantic from Cape Cod to Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, he shows how one species after another―halibut, lobster, cod―has been exploited for centuries, long before industrialization. Bolster braids marine biology into a narrative driven by courageous chancers, such as fifteenth-century explorer John Cabot and unnamed hordes of fishermen, to argue that the precautionary approach is key to heading off collapse.” ― Nature “[A] well-documented and fascinating chronicle of New England’s interdependence with the sea from the 16th century to the World War I era. In The Mortal Sea , Bolster skillfully weaves material from historical documents and newspaper and scientific reports with tales of fishermen to demonstrate how the activities of individuals have affected the northwest Atlantic, for better and worse.” ― Michael Kenney , Boston Globe “ The Mortal Sea is a fascinating look back at the last millennium of fishing―and overfishing―the North Atlantic, from Cape Cod to Cape Breton.” ― Lauren Daly , Cape Cod Times “Bolster has mined evidence from a wide range of contemporary sources that convincingly demonstrates the widespread overfishing and sequential depletion of bird, fish, and marine mammal stocks before the advent of steamships and modern trawlers… Essent