10 
BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 
V. 
Although the lobster bus a place in the literature of the Old World, it is seldom 
mentioned by American writers. Rathbun, who was the first to give a history of the 
American lobster fisheries, says that the great abundance and rare flavor of the 
lobster “are not infrequently mentioned in the early annals of Sew England, and it 
probably formed an important element in the food-supply of the seacoast inhabitants 
of colonial times. As a separate industry, however, the lobster fishery does not date 
back much, if any, beyond the beginning of the present century, and it appears to 
have been first developed on the Massachusetts coast, in the region of Cape Cod and 
Boston, although some fishing was done as early as 1810 among the Elizabeth Islands 
and on the coast of Connecticut. Strangely enough this industry was not extended 
to the coast of Maine, where it subsequently attained its greatest proportions, until 
about 1840.” ( 156 .) 
In an account of marketing in Boston in 1740, among various kinds of meats and 
game, “oysters and lobsters” are mentioned “in course, the latter in large size at 
3 half-pence each.” ( 200 , vol. ii, p. 540.) 
Kalin, the Swedish traveler, writing in 1771, thus speaks of the abundance of sea 
food on the shores of Long Island: 
The soil of the southern part of the island is very poor; hut this deficiency is made up by avast 
quantity of oysters, lobsters, crabs, several kinds of fish, and numbers of water fowl, all of which are 
there far more abundant than on the northern shores of the island. Therefore the Indians formerly 
chose the southern part to live in, because they subsisted on oysters and other productions of the sea. 
{ 108 , vol. 2, pp. 226-227.) 
The older writers had little to say of the sea and its products in New England, 
yet many interesting facts could probably be gathered by a careful examination of all 
-available sources. 
VI. 
Lobsters are caught in pots or traps made of laths, nailed to a wooden frame, 
with a funnel-shaped opening at each end. The traps are commonly 4 feet long, 3 feet 
wide, and 18 inches high. The funnels are usually netted out of manila twine. The 
pots are weighted with stones or bricks, and set either in single warps or in trawls of 
from 8 to 40 pots each. Each pot has a buoy line to which a wooden spindle-shaped 
buoy is attached. The latter bears the owner’s mark or stamp, and shows the position 
of the trap. The traps are baited with fish, such as herrings, sculpins, or founders, 
and the lobster, when once induced to come inside the pot, seldom escapes, unless small 
enough to crawl between the slats. It has been estimated that half a million lobster 
traps have been in use in the Maritime Provinces during a single year. 
The old-fashioned hoop nets formerly in use consisted of a single iron ring or hoop 
to which a net with cord was attached. When baited they had to be closely watched 
and pulled up from time to time, in order to secure the lobster before he could get out 
of the net. 
The lobster fishery is conducted chiefly in the spring and summer months. The 
pots are tended from small boats, and the catch is kept in floating cars moored in 
some protected spot near the shore. Welled fishing smacks, or more rarely welled 
steamers, gather up the lobsters from the fishermen and carry them to the canneries 
and to the markets in the large distributing centers, such as Portland, Boston, and 
New York. Lobsters are shipped alive in barrels, with ice in summer, to many parts of 
