42 CONFERENCE OF GOVERNORS. 



this race decline, until the goal of commercial extinction, not far 

 remote in the future, seems to await the entire fishery. What is 

 the matter with the lobster? 



Let us glance very briefly into economic and zoological history, 

 before tryiag to find the right answer. The lobster has attracted 

 many naturalists and other observers, both in this country and in 

 Europe, especially during the past fifteen years, until it has become 

 the focus of a wide literature, and few marine animals are now 

 so well known. The main biological facts concerning this classi- 

 cal type are well ia hand, and excuse can no longer be offered on the 

 ground of ignorance. 



White men caught lobsters in Massachusetts Bay for the first 

 time early in the seventeenth century. The Pilgrims and English- 

 men 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 essen- 

 tially 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 this 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,^ the 

 minister, Higginson, writing of Salem lobsters, said that many 

 weighed twenty-five 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 farther, to the time 

 of Olaus Magnus, who wrote that in the Orkneys and the Hebrides 

 these animals were so huge that they could catch a strong swimmer 

 and squeeze him to death in their claws. At this point it will be 

 interesting to observe that in a tabulated list of some fourteen of 

 the biggest lobsters ever captured on the Atlantic coast, and for 

 which authentic weights or measurements have been preserved, the 



' Earle, Alice Motse : " Home Life in Colonial Days," p. 117. New York, 1898. 



