| Summary: | Sea creatures, both real and imagined, helped forge the principal pathways of Atlantic world circulation and exchange. By the sixteenth century Europeans were crisscrossing the North Atlantic in pursuit of fish and marine mammals and the equatorial Atlantic in search of gold, silver, sugar, and souls. Those voyages created new economies of extraction but also produced new knowledge of Atlantic geography and marine natural history. With the help of African and Native American divers, Europeans marveled at turtles, manatees, corals, and pearl-producing mollusks. They forged new material and psychological relationships with sharks, which haunted an expanding slave trade. And fishing transformed European foodways and helped establish New World settler societies. Yet, along the limits of philosophical understanding, where the apprehensions of exploration muddled perception, there often lurked merpeople, sea serpents, and other apocryphal beasts. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, inquiry into these real and imagined sea creatures helped lay the foundations of taxonomy, marine biology, and oceanography. A more organized, professionalized science of the sea developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often in efforts to understand changing ocean ecologies. Some marine scientists sought to fix ailing fisheries, and often made great strides in ocean conservation. But at various times, as was the case with oysters and clams, their efforts to modernize fishery management served to privatize fishing grounds, thereby transferring those resources from fishers to powerful corporations. In other cases, fishery scientists were simply unable to accurately estimate fish stocks or rates of reproduction, which led to overfishing. And in still other cases, traditional knowledge trumped science. As the history of marine creatures has shown, humans have shaped the living sea in profound ways, and sea creatures—from the smallest plankton to the largest whales—have shaped human history across the Atlantic ...
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