These days you can cut the tension with a knife, to use an inappropriate metaphor, at any lobster wharf along the coast of Maine-and it’s even more palpable on the water. Conflicts have been building ever since the nearly catastrophic price decline for lobsters hit fishermen last October. More and more lobstermen wonder whether they have a future in the business and a desperate handful, perhaps motivated by fear about whether they can feed their families, have resorted to violence, trap cutting and dire threats to other lobstermen and competitors.
Maine’s lobster territories are almost as old as the lobster fishery itself, dating back to the end of the 19th century according to Jim Acheson, whose landmark study, Lobster Gangs of Maine, first published over 25 years ago. In the 1880s, lobster fishing went through its first boom times as innovations in technology enabled a spate of new canneries on the coast and islands to process tremendous volumes of lobsters that could be shipped anywhere throughout the United States for the first time ever. As a result more and more fishermen put lobster traps in the water. Lobstermen did not make a fortune-they were paid a few cents to a nickel a piece for any size lobster sold to the canneries-but it was often a less risky way to make a living than shipping out on a long fishing trip to Georges or the Grand Banks to hand line for cod.
Nowhere were lobster territories more actively defended than on Maine islands-and for obvious reasons. The economic options for islanders have always been limited and fishing has been one of the few reliable means of making an island living since they were first settled 400 years ago. If you live on an island and someone “from away” begins to set traps around your island … well, you can understand the likely reaction, particularly if time, distance and fog give you have better access to those waters than to those perceived to be interlopers. Island fishermen not only established limits around islands where mainland fishermen were not welcome to set gear, but the growth of lobstering soon led to territorial line developing between neighboring mainland harbors.
Pushing the lines around lobster territories is as old as lobster territories. As groups of fishermen from one island or another or one mainland harbor or another became more dominant, there were often concerted efforts to move lobster gear into areas where there might not be as many lobstermen to aggressively defend them. Sometimes there is a polite response to finding someone else’s gear in an area by tying a half hitch around a buoy or leaving trap doors open, but ultimately lobster territories have been defended by the “law of the knife,” where trap buoys are cut and territorial lines shift. Isle au Haut’s nearly continuous loss of lobster territory ceded to Stonington fishermen during the last several decades is a recent example.
Of course, there are all kinds of problems with lobster territories-to begin with the vast majority of lobster territories off the Maine coast are not, strictly speaking, legal. In theory anyone with a Maine lobster license can fish anywhere in Maine state waters. For most of the last 100 years Maine’s Department of Marine Resources (DMR) has accepted the reality of lobster territories if not their legality and generally has not intervened or been able to intervene.
Territories are not the only source of conflict in lobster communities. There is also the question of who gets to go fishing in any given community and how many fishermen a territory can support. The power to decide these questions used to be informally settled at the harbor level, but about 10 years ago, the Maine legislature authorized seven local “lobster zone councils” of elected lobstermen to decide set basic rules for fishing within theses regional zones. In addition two island communities-Monhegan and Swan’s Island-successfully appealed to the Maine legislature for approval to create their own island lobster zones with much more demanding conservation limits on the number of traps that can be fished inside these zones.
One of the most controversial questions that lobster zone councils have wrestled with during the past 10 years is whether to allow anyone to apply for a lobster license (open zones) or to limit the entry to the fishery through some sort of entry-exit ratio (closed zones). Today six of the seven of Maine’s lobster zones have voted for closed zones, where either four or five lobstermen must retire before a new lobstermen can get a license. Needless to say, there are long waiting lists in these zones.
The problem with closed zones for island communities is that with so many mainland residents on a waiting list, it could conceivably take several decades for a new island lobstermen to get a license-which especially imperils the sustainability of small island communities. Thus, in a significant development, last session the Maine legislature enacted, with the support and leadership of DMR and the Maine Lobsterman’s Association, an “island homeport” bill. Under the provisions of this new law, island communities can apply to Maine’s DMR Commissioner to establish a maximum number of lobster licenses for that community, in effect setting up its own waiting list, apart from the zone list.
Now stir into this simmering pot of controversy the tragic conflict on Matinicus that involved the shooting and serious injury of one island lobstermen by another. The conflict on Matinicus is not about lobster territory per se, but rather who gets to fish in Matinicus’ very valuable and aggressively defended territory.
The traditional and informal rule on Matinicus has been that if you were born on Matnicus or marries into an island family and live on the island, you can go lobster fishing. But even more informally, you can be also be voted off the island, Survivor-style, by the law of the knife. No one can be on the water at all times during the day and night, so if enough of your neighbors do not want you to fish on the island, trap cutting is a way to bleed a someone economically until they can no longer afford to fish. It is virtually impossible for the state Marine Patrol to police these waters because undercover surveillance, as a practical matter, is impossible.
The conflict that ensued on Matinicus has led to the question of whether Matinicus needs to establish a more formal and legally enforceable means of deciding who can fish and who cannot-and whether formal rules would make any difference in blunting the law of the knife. If Matinicus presses the DMR to establish a formal zone within its traditional fishing waters as an alternative to settling such issues through ugly confrontations, other island communities will also be knocking on the commissioner’s door.
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.