Chapter II.— THE AMERICAN LOBSTER: ITS ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE AND 



GENERAL HABITS. 



White men caught lobsters in Massachusetts Bay for the first time early in the 

 seventeenth century. The Pilgrims and EngUshmen who began to flock into the bay 

 colony about the year 1630 were well acquainted with the products of the sea in their old 

 home, and the coast of New England supplied their tables with essentially the same 

 kinds, only in far greater abundance. It is said, indeed, that the Pilgrims began at once 

 to pay their debts, due in England, out of the products of their fisheries. 



In the chronicles of those early days the lobster is honored with frequent mention, 

 and the early colonists must have enjoyed to the full both the new and the familiar 

 kinds of American fish, lobsters, crabs, and clams, so big, so palatable, so abundant, and 

 so cheap everywhere along that coast. Indeed, one would think there was no need of 

 starvation, with lobsters and the other forms of sea food to be had on every shore. To 

 quote from Mrs. Earle {80) , the minister, Higginson, writing of Salem lobsters, said that 

 many weighed 25 pounds apiece, and that "the least boy in the plantation may catch 

 and eat what he will of them." Again, in 1623, when the ship Anne brought over many 

 of the families of the earlier Pilgrims, the only feast of welcome which the latter had to 

 offer was "a lobster, or a piece of fish, without bread or anything else but a cup of spring 

 water." 



The Pilgrim lobsters "five or six feet long," ascribed to New York Bay, take us 

 back one hundred years further, to the time of Olaus Magnus. In a tabulated list of 

 some fourteen of the biggest lobsters ever captured on the Atlantic coast (no. 9, table 

 I, p. 195) for which authentic weights or measurements have been preserved, the giant 

 among them all weighed 3j.^ounds, and measured exactly 23^ ii^Shss from spine to tail. 

 No doubt the Pilgrims would measure a lobster as some fishermen do now, with the big 

 claws stretched to their fullest extent in front of the head. In this condition the actual 

 length of the animal is about doubled, so that the length of the New Jersey record 

 breaker, when distended in this way, would reach nearly 4 feet, and the Pilgrim 6-foot 

 lobsters have probably been stretched nearly a yard. (Compare fig. i.) 



In an account of marketing in Boston in 1740, " oysters and lobsters " are mentioned, 

 "in course the latter in large size at 3 half -pence each," and this abundance continued 

 for over one hundred years. 



To revert at once to modern times, many no doubt remember when lobsters were 

 sold by the piece, and at a few pennies at that. Five years ago, with a market price of 

 25 cents per pound, a lobster weighing 3 pounds g]4 ounces, at an inland market in New 

 Hampshire, cost 90 cents. The clear meat of the claws and tail of this animal, 

 which had a fairly hard shell, were found to constitute but 27 per cent of the whole. 

 (See table 3, p. 214) This would bring the cost of such meat to 90 cents per pound. 



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