Technology & Engineering

While Nantucket has long enjoyed an illustrious position in America's whaling history, Cape Cod's contribution to the industry is relatively unknown. Yet, it was a Cape Codder who taught the Nantucketers how to hunt whales. In Cape Cod Shore Whaling, authors Duncan Oliver and John Braginton-Smith uncover Cape Cod's integral role in shaping whalefishery, which began along the Cape's sandy shores and evolved into the far-flung whaling expeditions that drove Nantucket's economy into the nineteenth century. Drawing on rare documents never before published, whaling journals, and diaries, Oliver and Braginton-Smith recreate a bygone age when men fought one another for rights to the sea.

Every spring, the Nemasket River welcomes thousands of migratory river herring that thrash and leap as they fight their way upstream from Mount Hope Bay. Of all non-domesticated animals, the river herring--or alewife--has arguably had the greatest impact on the towns along the river in southeastern Massachusetts. The area was called Nemasket, or place of fish, by Native Americans, and its earliest English colonists were dependent on river herring for their very survival. They provided a livelihood for generations of families in Middleborough and Lakeville, shaping their culture and the course of the region's development. Today, herring fishing is banned, and the community is working toward protecting and preserving the river so the herring have a place to return each year. Join historian Michael J. Maddigan as he explores the big story of the small fish that shaped life along the Nemasket River.

Netting shrimp in the icy waters off Cape Ann, hauling up lobster two hundred miles offshore, in the 1970s Gloucester's eastern-rig side trawlers were at the top of a dying and dangerous industry.

In the tough competition for the daily catch, Gloucester's dragger fleets were the best. They went out farther, stayed out longer, and risked all as the fishing grounds grew lean. Author Peter Prybot captures the glory days of the draggers through recollections and his own firsthand observations as a lifelong Gloucester fisherman. Terrible weather, good fishing, bad fishing, great days and greater danger-- these are true stories from the decks of the celebrated trawler fleet that is no more.