Fishwork Is for the Birds: Humans and Birds in the Sixteenth-Century Northwest Atlantic (2024)
The history of the northwest Atlantic in the sixteenth century is often a story of people searching for sea life: the quest for cod, the hunt for whales, the conquest of the waters of what European mariners called Terra Nova. But while historians and archaeologists have focused on the water’s surface and what lay below, it is striking how much mariners cared about what flew above. Birds of all kinds appear early and consistently in European accounts of Terra Nova, treated with rapturous attention by visitors and distant geographers alike. This essay argues for a three-dimensional Terra Nova that takes into account the central role played by birds in shaping the early European fishery and European interactions with First Nations. Far from ancillary characters, birds propelled human behavior. This article considers the broad range of evidence to argue that a complete environmental history of the northwest Atlantic must put the interactions between birds and humans at the center of our analysis.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Hubbard, Jennifer;
(2013)
Mediating the North Atlantic Environment: Fisheries Biologists, Technology, and Marine Spaces
Article
K.J. Rankin;
Poul Holm;
(2019)
Cartographical Perspectives on the Evolution of Fisheries in Newfoundland’s Grand Banks Area and Adjacent North Atlantic Waters in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Chapter
Stefano Pittaluga;
(2015)
Concerti in giardino e cataloghi ornitologici
Article
Szabo, Vicki Ellen;
(2005)
“Bad to the bone”? The Unnatural History of Monstrous Medieval Whales
Article
Thomas Blake Earle;
(October 2018)
Transatlantic Diplomacy, North Atlantic Environments, and the Fisheries Dispute of 1852
Book
Rose, George;
(2007)
Cod: The Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries
Article
Grasso, Glenn M.;
(2008)
What Appeared Limitless Plenty: The Rise and Fall of the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Halibut Fishery
Book
Bolster, W. Jeffrey;
(2012)
The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
Book
Payne, Brian J.;
(2010)
Fishing a Borderless Sea: Environmental Territorialism in the North Atlantic, 1818--1910
Book
Thomas Blake Earle;
(2023)
The Liberty to Take Fish: Atlantic Fisheries and Federal Power in Nineteenth-Century America
Book
Bo Poulsen;
(2016)
Global Marine Science and Carlsberg - The Golden Connections of Johannes Schmidt (1877-1933)
Article
Samuel P. Iglésias;
Jérôme Fournier-Sowinski;
(2024)
An account of the natural history and exploitation of the great auk (Pinguinus impennis) in ‘Histoire des pesches’, an illustrated eighteenth-century manuscript
Article
DeLucia, Christine;
(January 2018)
An “Indian Fishing Weir” at Musketaquid: Marking Northeastern Indigenous Homelands and Colonial Memoryscapes
Article
Peter S. Alagona;
(2016)
Species Complex: Classification and Conservation in American Environmental History
Book
Marzano, Annalisa;
(2013)
Harvesting the Sea: The Exploitation of Marine Resources in the Roman Mediterranean
Article
Merrill Baker-Médard;
(2022)
Of Whales and Dugongs: Examining the Rise of Colonial Conservation as Development in Madagascar's Marine History
Article
Knight, William;
(2007)
Samuel Wilmot, Fish Culture, and Recreational Fisheries in Late 19th-Century Ontario
Book
Susanne Köstering;
(2018)
Ein Museum für Weltnatur: Die Geschichte des Naturhistorischen Museums in Hamburg
Article
Toshihiro Higuchi;
(2015)
The Strange Career of Dr. Fish: Yoshio Hiyama, Radioactive Fallout, and Nuclear Fear Management in Japan, 1954‒1958
Book
Benson, Keith R.;
Rehbock, Philip F.;
(2002)
Oceanographic History: The Pacific and Beyond
Archives of Natural History
Environment and History
Historia Scientiarum: International Journal of the History of Science Society of Japan
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Scientia Canadensis: Journal of the History of Canadian Science, Technology, and Medicine
Be the first to comment!