ABSTRACT
In 1634, William Wood included alewives among the many gifts that nature had bestowed upon the English settlements in New England. He wrote in awe of the abundance of this anadromous fish: ‘alewives … [appeared] in such multitudes as is almost incredible, pressing up in such shallow waters as will scarce permit them to swim’ (Wood, 1634, p34). Three hundred years later, Massachusetts state biologist David Belding’s report on the health of the Massachusetts alewife fishery presented a more ominous picture of southern New England’s former natural wealth. Even though the earliest colonial records showed that ‘this fish has had considerable influence on the welfare of the country’, Belding was compelled to report that: ‘while in some streams the alewife fishery has held its own or even improved, it has in others to such an extent been [in] a serious decline’ (Belding, 1921, pp34, 46). In just three centuries, European immigrants to New England had managed to all but destroy the once bountiful runs of alewives.
