What I Am Reading: "The Lobster Coast" by Colin Woodard

I found this author and book from an article in the Boston Globe, excoriating Massachusetts' imperial domination of our neighboring New England states. "Right on!" I said. "Boston's been getting away with this for far too long!" I'm not surprised that people from the rest of New England think of us all as suburbanite MetroWest residents, even though I'd say that, broadly, Central Massachusetts bears a lot of similarities to New Hampshire; and three of the Western Mass counties bear, each in a separate way, similarity to Vermont (and that Hampden County bears resemblance to Connecticut). In other words: I'm one of the good ones! Anyway, sarcasm aside, I am an enormous fan of coastal Maine, as anyone who talks to me or travels with me knows; and so I was drawn to this book after I looked up that article's author. I am always looking to expand my New England historical knowledge, especially of a region that holds enormous nostalgic and aesthetic appeal to me after a lifetime of vacations in Ogunquit.

From the first chapters I thought it was going to be an ethnography of people who live in coastal Maine. The middle two-thirds of the book, however, are indeed about the region's history. Europeans traded with the Wabanaki tribes since the early 1500s, and started to settle in the early 1600s. The story, as Woodard tells it, starts and continues as largely one of neglect or exploitation by outsiders, exploitation that continues to the time the book was published, in 2004.

Thus is the narrative: Mainers are hardy and downtrodden, and outsiders are rapacious. I am not disputing that narrative, but I do think that some more interesting and more nuanced historical stories are rushed through in the pursuit of it. Europeans first attempted to settle Maine as part of the same arrangement that settled Roanoke Colony in Virginia in the early 1600s. The Plymouth Company was chartered by some English nobles, including Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and was given title to the northern half of the North American coast; which, as is easy to forget, Maine sits at a rough mid-point of, once you factor in the Canadian Maritimes. The Plymouth Company's first efforts at permanent colonization were failures, and instead the Europeans who settled in the region were informal appendages of the fishing industry, who already had experience in navigating the region from a century of fishing off Newfoundland. Many traders and cartographers came to acquire fur from the Wabanaki. The tribes were already experiencing massive depopulation because of the diseases that the Europeans brought with them. Some of this trade was peaceable and profitable, but some stories of kidnapping or mistreatment by Europeans spread rapidly through the heavily-interconnected region, with Samuel de Champlain hearing about them within a couple of weeks, even, as he worked the West Coast of New England.

Gorges, a war hero with feudal pretentions, eventually reformed the Plymouth Company into the Council of New England, and hoped to settle royalists on the continent to re-form a manorial society from Philadelphia to the St. Lawrence River. With royal assent, this royally-chartered organization granted patents to just about anyone, including such dupes and schemers as the Plymouth-area Pilgrims of Thanksgiving fame, and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay colony. As the Puritans' utopian designs on the region became apparent, Gorges stepped up efforts in the 1630s to craft his own landholdings, the "Province of Maine," into a royalist bulwark.

This accounts for some of the differing geography of the built environment between the two states. The Puritans, largely middle class and from the Batavified (yes, I derived that word myself, it means "Dutch-Influenced") East Counties of England, built the New England towns that I am familiar with, with dense villages near green commons, towns sited close together with connecting roads (and a fear of the heathen untapped forest), and buildings in Saltbox and Cape Cod styles. The Mainers, largely peasants and Anglicans from poorer West Counties, strung their settlements out and were more likely to name them after geographic features rather than just home towns, and lived in either manor houses or long houses, on the manorial model of leased properties and communal farming. They were of course poorer, and were in the New World for economic reasons, not religious ones.

Eventually, in 1635, the Council of New England was dissolved entirely and Gorges was put in charge of the whole area, including the displeased Massachusetts Bay Puritans. He intended to rule Maine personally as his own feudal fiefdom, but his grandiose plans were belayed by the underdeveloped state of the land (especially after the massive reduction of the Wabanaki population). These plans never got off the ground as the colony languished during the English Civil War.

The war did not improve things for Maine, as their royalist side, of course, lost. The Puritans took control over the area and left a big cultural footprint, including the end of manorialism and the same enclosure of common farmlands as they had executed in England. This is described as the first era when the region fell heavily under the sway of Boston banks and businesses: with preferable political and economic treatment given to Massachusetts interlopers, who pumped money out of Maine to send home. Things didn't get much better after the end of the Republic, as Charles II allowed the French free reign in Acadia to the east, and Maine had to muddle along between two hostile states.

A big change came in 1675 with King Philip's War. Maine was mostly peaceful; while the European and European-descended settlers there weren't exactly antiracists, they mostly existed in uneasy peace with their remaining Native American neighbors, including through trade. However, as Massachusetts fought the Native American confederations in the south, they ordered guns seized from Native Americans in Maine. Though they acceded at first, the resulting tensions eventually came to conflict, and the Wabanaki and their allies swept the outlying and poorly-defended settlements clean of Europeans. They defeated tardy Massachusetts forces enough times that the war only ended with the Peace of Casco in 1768 when James II sent in troops to restore order. However, fighting and unrest started again within the decade, and continued intermittently over the next quarter century. This entire generation of brutal frontier war reduced the province to a wasteland, where everyone was starving because no crops could grow. Of the few dozen towns the Europeans had thrown up, only Kittery, Wells, and York remained continuously populated through this entire period. The remaining Wabanaki eventually fell victim to repeated famines, however, and by the mid-1720s they retreated into the region's interior.

Another ambitious British politician, David Dunbar, worked to reinvigorate the old royalist dream by reclaiming the Maine coast from Puritans and the French and the Native Americans by forming a new crown colony, Sagadahoc, in 1729. He populated the region with the Scots-Irish: poor Scots who had been settled in Ireland for their ferocity in fighting an essentially colonial war against Irish "savages" a few generations earlier, and were now being recruited and relocated to do the same across the Atlantic. This was the origin of an important cultural migration into Maine, but Sagadahoc itself only lasted until 1731, when it was dissolved by the Board of Trade at the behest of Boston merchants who owned old Gorges-era land shares and titles, who would come to be known as Great Proprietors. Sociologically, Woodard has a lot to say about how the tough, independent Scots-Irish, who always held their ground violently against outside control and authority, and who shaped Maine's independent culture and that of large swaths of the United States. They were brought for this toughness and survival instinct, to hold the land against England's enemies; and they needed it, as fighting broke out again in the 1740s and '50s with the French and Indian war.

When peace finally came in 1763, people from other parts of New England emigrated to Maine (as many had at the end of the frontier conflict era four decades earlier), in search of new farmland that was in scarce supply in other colonies. This kicked off an era of conflict between "squatters" and the Great Proprietors who owned and tried to remotely exert control over large portions of the region's acreage. Many settlers were subject to legal harassment and were driven off land that they had sometimes lived on for quite a while, another outside influence making life tough for the little people.

The Boston connection to their oppressors would have perhaps led one to think that the peasant- and royalist-descended Maine denizens would have backed their old ally the King against their old enemy the Puritan elite when the Revolutionary War came; but in fact Maine was largely mobilized for the American side due to royal edicts controlling their timber use (a lucrative industry that the Royal Navy needed to be able to outfit their ships) and due to the economic interdictions of Boston that had the effect of removing their main source of food supplies, as the rocky region did not support much large-scale agriculture. There were quite a number of Maine uprisings against British control, including seizure of some smaller Royal Navy ships and a couple of expeditions to invade Nova Scotia (or perhaps liberate, given the province's political orientation beyond the limits of Halifax). However, they did not receive much institutional support, and the middle and upper coast ("Down East," based on how the wind blows) of Maine was occupied as the British-controlled "New Ireland" from 1779 to 1784. When the British left, they resettled many loyalists right over the border in the future New Brunswick.

Despite the fact that many of the individual Great Proprietors were run out of town on a rail for their support of Britain, their claims remained, and many of them were bought up by a new generation, mainly Gen. Henry Knox, the country's first Secretary of War. Maine was still an exclave of Massachusetts at the time; but the tensions with the Boston establishment led the region to vote heavily for the new Democratic-Republican Party, in opposition to the Federalists. This is the part of the book where I think Woodard skips over what could have been some interesting historical and political nuance, because he describes how once the Dem-Reps came into power, they "only" negotiated for better land titles and a cessation of evictions; and not much detail is provided on these negotiations or why the deal was disappointing. Whatever: never pass up an opportunity to be mad at politicians, everyone knows that. The region did vote in an independence referendum in 1807, but it was unsuccessful, as the state was not wealthy enough to try to go it alone yet. Again, this is the sort of thing I would have loved more than a sentence-worth of detail on, but it isn't a story with villains or victims and so it receives little attention.

While the Boston establishment undermined the war effort and colluded with the enemy during the War of 1812, parts of the Maine coast were occupied by the British; and Madison could not raise an army to expel them, because Massachusetts banks only leant to the British side. I'm not sure how this situation was ever resolved, but presumably it came with the peace treaty that ended the war. This neglect and undermining led to a new push for independence, which the weary Federalists were willing to go along with this time, in the face of growing support for their political opponents. Maine became a state in 1820.

The fishing industry was always present in Maine: some of the first European settlements were year-round fishing encampments, and when successive waves of settlers found that farming was not a useful pursuit they often turned to the teeming ocean for sustenance. The Gulf of Maine is sheltered by underwater banks in such a way that makes it very "fertile," and at one time it was teeming with vast quantities of massive fish. The Maine fishing industry saw a brief boom from the 1830s to the Civil War, and boosted the rest of the state's economy as well, from timber for ship-building to trade using the same experienced crews. This boom came to an end after the Civil War, as the new Republican administrations enacted protectionist trade policies (including on the import of fishing-critical salt) and repealed subsidies to fisherman (previously justified based on their potential use as naval sailors). The nation's new commercial ventures ran east-to-west on new railroads, not north-to-south along the Atlantic coast. Furthermore, railroads largely couldn't penetrate Maine's ragged coastline in a cost- or engineering-effective way.

The lobster industry, which would eventually come to displace the fishing industry out of necessity, also first formed in the 19th century. Lobsters were once regarded as waste food, and in one anecdote a household's laborers sued to prevent their master from feeding them lobster more than thrice weekly. However the industry steadily gained steam after 1800, especially with the adoption of canning in the 1840s. Canneries were largely driven out of Maine by new regulations in the 1870s, after they made life too difficult for the state's fishing industry through over-consuption and pollution. The former was a problem for the entire fishing industry, however, and depopulation reduced the state's fishing intake for fifty years until it collapsed in the crash of 1929. The state belatedly discovered a conservation ethos after that, but it was still a losing battle, as one species after another became too depopulated to be profitable, and new technology such as draggers (nets dragged along the ocean floor) wiped out spawning opportunities.

Another change that came about after the Civil War was the arrival of "rusticators," tourists or summer residents who were drawn to the region's bucolic picturesqueness. The book describes several times that the coast was "discovered" by tourists, first in the 1870s and then again at the turn of the century. I am not sure if there was a lull in between, or if there was a difference in volume due to new technology, or what. Many seaside resort hotels sprung up in the 1870s, and Maine began its long dance with the tourism industry. The problem with tourists and wealthy residents is that they are drawn to the region's rural character, and once they are there they often fight efforts to change that character to something more modern, even if that is what is wanted by the original residents. In some cases, this was made literal by Gilded Age barons preventing their islands villages from bringing in automobiles or connecting to the mainland with bridges. This is a recurring theme in the book and in Maine sociology, as Woodard covers both the high-income condo developments of the 80s and their counterpart, the back-to-the-land hippies of the 70s. The former interested in the soulless suburbanization and sprawl that plagues Maine to this day and is a focus of the book's later chapters, and the later interested in preventing any growth.

Back on the water, the '50s and '60s brought competition from new European factory-freezer trawlers, who caught, froze, and processed vast quantities of fish, especially in the Gorges Bank area (if you are really taken with this subject, apparently the seminal history is Distant Waters by William Warner). To protect against encroaching overfishing, Congress passed the Magnuson Act in 1977, which extended the country's economic zone out to 200 miles offshore. However, the national-level fish conservation efforts were terribly managed, both in terms of scientific analysis and projections (fish were not evaluated as part of a larger ecosystem) and in terms of enforcement. Overfishing continued to the point where Canadians won an arbitration in The Hague to keep Americans out of their waters (not that the Canadians were wiser, having themselves overfished Newfoundland). Collapse of successive species and their corresponding markets drove the fishermen in-shore, compounding the overfishing problem and driving out small fishermen.

Into this gap scuttled the lobster. The industry saw an upswing a over the decades as lobsters became a luxury food all over the world, and the industry marketed itself well enough that Maine Lobsters were considered the standard. Despite repeated scientific predictions, lobster stocks were never overfished, and never crashed. The reason may have had to do with the way lobster eggs circulate with the currents, so that areas that are harvested are actually restocked by lobsters elsewhere; it may also have been because of how inefficient traps are, and that lobsters are thus actually being "ranched" with only a sustainable amount of their population being culled as a matter of course. Lobstering is what the first and last chapters of the book are about, spanning maybe a third of the total page count with Woodard's time living with lobstermen, and his admiration for their traditional way of life. The state has enacted sensible regulation and the lobstermen communities are self-regulating and function as small-scale societies; Woodard calls this a "triumph of the commons" and the survival of an inherently artisanal industry. The book is a paean to these people, as it is a paean to the ever-disappearing downscale coastal way of life, pushed out by the rich and suburban as Greater Boston extends itself up the seaboard. New seaside gentrifiers aren't even interested in the "Maine myth" as previous generations of rusticators and summer people had been, they are just interested in having their own piece of the ocean shore. Interspersed throughout the book, but especially these non-historical sections, are interviews with fishermen, clam-diggers, and others who come in to conflict or are subject to harassment by yuppies, using private property to block them from their traditional hunting grounds that they need to make a living as their ancestors did.

Does that make the book reactionary? Perhaps. It does get into the nuances of some conflicts whereby those opposing sprawl aren't those on the lower end of the income spectrum who would benefit from its jobs; or how mortgage giant MBNA has revitalized one town they chose to relocate in. It's a book, and one from over 15 years ago, trying to negotiate the changing landscape of blue collar America, and one specific much-beloved landscape in particular. Its an emotional if a bit one-sided account of the story from a Maine native. You know the story: Mainers are tough and independent, they make up their own minds, they are suspicious of outsiders, they say “ayuh” a lot, you can’t get there from here, etcetera. I think it's a good treatment of the subject, but I am definitely interested to read a retrospective or an update a few years on. Then again, maybe I am just in the “more information needed” camp because I’d like to live on the Maine coast myself, and don’t want to be told that I shouldn’t.