This is going to be a bit of a stretch. Back when I taught cartography to college students, I told my students that, in our class, we would work on making maps that:

1. Speak the truth
2. Tell an interesting story
3. Are beautiful.

Ignoring number one and three for the moment, map making is a form of story telling. Specifically, it's a way of telling stories about places. The material that follows is also about telling stories about places, but using a different set of tools: block prints and a bit of text.

Eastport, Lubec, and the sardine industry

For much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American sardine industry was centered in the small Maine towns of Eastport and Lubec. However, there was one big problem: there are no sardines in the western North Atlantic Ocean. So the domestic sardine industry caught the plentiful local herring, put the small ones in cans and called them sardines, then smoked the larger fish and sold them in boxes as smoked herring. This block print illustrates the story of the industry, with the same fish carrying two separate names.

The industry, incidentally, brought great prosperity to several towns along the coast of Maine. Eastport and Lubec enjoyed much of that prosperity, with dozens of canneries as well as associated industries such as can-making plants, cat food factories, mustard mills, and even cosmetics factories that used the tiny glistening herring scales to give makeup a sparkle. The industry collapsed in the decades following the second world war as access to refrigeration made it easier for people to consume fresh fish and as tastes shifted away from stong-tasting fish like herring to mild fish like cod and pollack.

For more of the story of Eastport and the sardine industry, see this article from Historical Geography.

Working skiffs of eastern Maine

As the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean warm, the lobster industry of the east coast is declining. The fishery has contracted substantially off Long Island and the Massachusetts coast. However, in eastern Maine, it continues to thrive, though harvest levels have varied dramatically from year to year. Lobsters are trapped from coastal workboats, typically of between 30 and 50 feet, crewed by two or three people. Those crew use small skiffs to ferry themselves to and from their boats.

These prints show two typical skiffs. One is flat bottomed so it is easy to pull up on a float or to just leave on a tide flat when not in use. It is also convenient for transporting a bunch of supplies, because the load can rest of a flat surface. The construction technique is simple: a flat bottom of plywood or planks, then wooden planks for the sides, meeting at a sharp angle. That angle is the chine; when the angle is sharp, it's called a hard chine. The other has a rounded bottom, so it is more difficult to build with hand tools and a bit less convenient for transporting supplies. As fiberglass and molded plastic displaced wood as a construction material, inexpensive soft chine skiffs have become common tenders.

The skiffs are small and many lobstermen are big, so one person per skiff is a comfortable load. Once, however, I saw two big lobstermen paddling a skiff, backwards, in the harbor at Corea, Maine, as shown in this print. Backwards rowing is a technique that has been used for many decades. Photographs dating back to at least the 1940s show individual lobstermen using this technique. Drawings by Harlan Hubbard, who explored the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in a home-built shantyboat, show Ohio River boatmen using the stand-up technique in 1946.

Junk Rig, from the Pacific to the Atlantic

The junk rig is a sail generally associated with China and southeast Asia. It's characterized by a sail that extends in front of the mast, with stiffeners, called battens, that run the full width of the sail. The intricacies are well documented by the sailing community. See, for more detail, the Junk Rig Association. The junk rig has been adopted by recreational sailors, who admire the inherent safety of such a sail. It is very easy to reef, or to reduce the area of the sail when increasing winds make a large sail unsafe. The junk is also safer than many other rigs in a jibe, when the stern of a sailboat is pointed toward the wind and the sail quickly shifts from one side of the boat to the other.

These images are from a small bay in eastern Maine, where junk rig aficionados from across the eastern half of the United States meet annually. Both boats were originally built with more conventional rigs, then converted to the junk sail. The boat on the left is an American design intended for overnight cruising. The one on the right is a Mirror Dinghy, a British design intended for day trips, and designed to be easy for inexperienced boat builders to assemble from plywood.

Rowing to work in eastern Maine

In eastern Maine, lobster boats typically are kept at moorings, not piers, when not in use. That means that the crews need to travel to their boats in small skiffs. Some crews use outboard motors to propel those skiffs, particularly in harbors that are open to strong winds. In sheltered harbors, however, crews typically paddle out to their boats. Instead of using a a traditional rowing position, in which the rower is seated facing the back of the boat to propel it forward, these lobster boat crew members typically stand near the bow of the boat and use a full-sized oar as a paddle to propel the boat stern first.

The skiffs are small and many lobstermen are big, so one person per skiff is a comfortable load. Once, however, I saw two big lobstermen paddling a skiff, backwards in the harbor at Corea, Maine, as shown in this print.

Backwards rowing is a technique that has been used for many decades. Photographs dating back to at least the 1940s show individual lobstermen using this technique. Drawings by Harlan Hubbard, who explored the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in a home-built shantyboat, show Ohio River boatmen using the stand-up technique in 1946.

Lobster Pounds

Lobsters are fragile creatures once pulled from the water. Heat and exposure to the air will kill them, and their meat spoils quickly once the lobster is dead. The lobster pound, an impounded bay or cove, was developed to store lobsters after they were caught but before they were ready to be consumed. A pound was traditionally built by constructing a rudimentary dam across the mouth of creek or a bay.

Lobsters could be stored in water at pounds until they were ready for sale.

Coastal Maine is dotted with abandoned pounds like the one shown in this print. The dam has been allowed to deteriorate and the wharf that formerly provided access to the pound is now used for recreational craft. Footings and pilings are all that remain of the rest of the wall that enclosed the storage pool. A small building overlooks the pool. At the same time that small pounds like this were closing, a smaller number of pounds have grown quite large, often adding access for very large trucks and processing facilities to prepare lobster for international shipping.

The rise and fall of the lobster pound follows changes in how lobsters are consumed. In the early 19th century, lobsters were typically consumed close to where they were caught, due to the costs of transport and the decline in quality as lobsters were transported. In the middle of the 19th century, canning technology improved, making the processing and canning of lobster meat a less-costly alternative to live lobsters. Then, as tourism to lobster-fishing areas prospered, demand for live lobsters increased, particularly during the summer months when seaside restaurants were crowded. This, in turn, created a need for storage facilities that could hold lobsters until the peak of summer tourist season. Finally, in the 21st century, global demand for lobster as a luxury food increased, and, increasingly, lobsters are processed for sale to Asia.

As the traditional lobster pound declined, the name was adopted by restaurants that serve lobster. Some are associated with lobster pounds or are on the site of former pounds; some just adopt the name "lobster pound" to add an air of authenticity to the restaurant enterprise.

Working boats of Homer, Alaska

Homer, Alaska is home to a huge fishing fleet. It's an interesting harbor in that it serves a wide variety of fishing boats. In this respect it is very different from the commercial harbors of eastern Maine, for example, that primarily serve lobsterboats with only tiny number of other commercial vessels such as scallop draggers or urchin dive boats. The harbor at Homer serves huge crab boats, substantial trawlers, even a Maine lobsterboat far from home, as well as this gillnetter, a relatively small fishing boat with a large roller from which a gill net (one that traps fish just behind their gills as they try to pass through the net) is deployed and retrieved through the gate shown at the bow.

A harbor on Lake Erie

Barcelona, New York, is a small and historic port city on the south shore of Lake Erie, not far from the Pennsylvania boundary. It once served Great Lakes trade as well as former enslaved people escaping to Canada along the Underground Railroad. Today it is a recreational harbor serving sport anglers.

Atlantic mackerel