Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 234

an English army captain remarked, a gun could not be fired into the
water without hitting some of them.
Oysters formed reefs across the bays and rivermouths that pre-
sented a hazard to shipping. The colonists, one source claims, picked
twenty-pound lobsters out of the rockpools - and could think of
nothing to do with them except use them as bait or feed them to the
pigs. 8 Fathom-long halibut were caught only for their heads and fins;
the flesh was discarded as inferior to that of other species that thronged
the coasts. 9
There is no reason to believe that the volume of fish and shellfish
would, in an undisturbed system, have been any lower in Europe. We
are less aware of what went before only because humans reached Eur-
ope earlier, their later technologies were more intrusive and their
harvests more intensive than those of the Native Americans. The
decline of the great herds of the rivers and seas began, in many cases,
long before it could be recorded in writing.
But early documents hint at what there once was. Shoals of migra-
tory fish whose existence in Britain we have all but forgotten jammed
the rivers: shad, lamprey and sturgeon, jostling with hordes of salmon
and sea trout. Until the eleventh century, when the diet shifted to mar-
ine fish, probably as a result of the depletion of freshwater species,
they helped to feed much of Britain. By the thirteenth century stur-
geon were so rare that only the king was permitted to eat them. But
the marine ecosystem, when large-scale exploitation began, must still
have been close to the opulent state early travellers later encountered
in the New World. Roberts reports that Viking settlements in the
north of Scotland were characterized by a mass of remains of cod,
pollock and ling much bigger than any caught in inshore waters there
today.
Everywhere the animals that lived in the sea were both more numer-
ous and bigger than they are today. Cod commonly reached five or six
feet in length. Even the great white shark is not as great as it once was.
Roberts tells us that 'today, the maximum length of a great white
shark is listed in guidebooks as 6 metres, but reports in the eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century literature, too numerous and detailed to be
dismissed, suggest sizes of 8 or 9 metres were not uncommon.
Accounts at the time compare them in size with whales.' Haddock