https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-25-2026

Letters from an American
September 25, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson

I learned late this afternoon that, in addition to being Dolly Parton Day, today is National Lobster Day, honoring the cultural and economic history of the lobster industry. That industry thrives in Maine because of unique conditions in the water offshore where the cold Labrador Current and the warm Gulf Stream mix over the shallow continental shelf, creating one of the richest habitats for marine life on the planet.

Lobsters have been vital in the creation of Maine’s coastal communities, but the industry’s current place of pride is recent. Until the mid–twentieth century, lobster was considered poor man’s food. Before then, it was not lobster but fish that shaped society on the coast of New England.

Fish were central to the English settlement of the North American continent. In the 200 years between 1300 and 1500 CE, fish were a limited resource and brought sky-high prices in Europe. As the fish in the North Sea became scarcer in the late 1400s, fishermen and explorers began to push into the Atlantic. There, they found such a bonanza of fish in the nutrient-rich water that scholars have called its discovery and the trade it sparked the “Fish Revolution.” Cod, especially, but also haddock and hake, concentrated on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.

A member of the crew with Italian John Cabot, who was sailing for the English crown, noted in 1497 that there were so many cod on the Grand Banks that they “can be taken not only with nets but with fishing-baskets.” In 1502 the first recorded landing of Atlantic cod in Europe fetched £180, equivalent to about £1.2 million in 2016, with a buying power at the time of just shy of £76 million, close to $100 million today.

Fishing meant big money, and British fishermen were among those who tried their hand in the fog of the Grand Banks, making an annual trip to toss their hooks overboard. They beheaded and gutted their catch, splitting each fish in half like a book, salted the fish, and then dried them on shore. By 1600 they had moved into the Gulf of Maine, where they landed in places like Monhegan Island and Damariscove, where they dried the fish until they were hard before taking their catch back to Europe.

As European fishermen landed in North America, they brought with them European diseases for which the Indigenous populations had no immunities. The tribes were wiped out, so that when the Pilgrims arrived in 1620—on Cape Cod—they found a land so rich and yet depopulated that they believed God had prepared it for them.

The fish trade continued to be so important to New Englanders that almost two centuries later, when their new nation negotiated for its independence, the first thing leaders demanded after independence and national boundaries was continued access to the fisheries.

On September 3, 1783, negotiators signed the Treaty of Paris officially ending the Revolutionary War between Great Britain and the United States. The Preamble of the document promised that King George III and the United States of America would “forget all past misunderstandings and differences that have unhappily interrupted the good correspondence and friendship which they mutually wish to restore.”

The first article of the treaty contained the king’s acknowledgment that the thirteen states that made up the new United States were “free, sovereign, and independent.”

The second article established the boundaries of the new nation.

The third article, which came even before those protecting debts and calling for the return of confiscated property, protected the rights of American fishermen to “take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank, and on all the other banks of Newfoundland; also in the [gulf] of St. Lawrence, and at all other places in the sea, where the inhabitants of both countries used at any time heretofore to fish.”'

Notes:

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/treaty-of-paris

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/31/fish-stocks-nature-canada-editorial

Poul Holma, Francis Ludlowa, Cordula Scherera, Charles Travisa , Bernard Allairea, Cristina Britoa, Patrick W. Hayes, J. Al Matthews, Kieran J. Rankin, Richard J. Breen, Robert Legg, Kevin Lougheed, John Nicholls, The North Atlantic Fish Revolution (ca. AD 1500) (University of Washington, 2018).