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Authors: William Souder
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The
Fish Hawk
, a 157-foot steam-and-sail powered schooner, conducted dredging and trawling operations along the eastern seaboard and served as a mobile hatchery. The
Albatross
, a majestic, white-hulled behemoth, was a 234-foot brigantine with twin two-hundred-horsepower steam engines and could carry more than 7,500 square feet of sail.
With a cruising speed of nearly ten knots the
Albatross
could go anywhere in the world, and it did. The first government vessel equipped with electric lighting from stem to stern—Thomas Edison designed the generator—it also carried submersible electric lights for attracting marine life at night. There were two well-equipped laboratories on board and dredging gear on deck that could collect specimens from the depths of the open ocean. The
Albatross
made collecting expeditions along the East Coast, out into the Atlantic, down through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and into the Pacific. The ship traveled to the Galápagos Islands, Alaska, the Philippines, and into the Sea of Japan. Over a span of several decades, research done onboard the
Albatross
laid the foundation of modern marine biology.
Oceanic Ichthyology
,the 1895 classic on deep-sea fish by George Brown Goode and Tarleton H. Bean, was based mainly on collections made aboard the
Albatross
.
The commission continued to grow. It added the maintenance of food fish in inland waters to its duties and eventually established ninety stocking hatcheries around the country. In 1887, the Commission of Fish and Fisheries established a Division of Scientific Inquiry, and in 1902 the commission itself was reorganized as the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and moved into the Department of Commerce. In 1911the bureau landed its most far-flung responsibility: jurisdiction over the Pribilof Islands, a tiny volcanic archipelago two hundred miles west of Alaska in the Bering Sea that was home to a few hundred people of Russian descent, about two hundred thousand fur seals, and an economy based almost entirely on seal hunting. Through prudent management of both the people and the seals, the seal population had steadily risen to more than 1.5 million by the time Carson joined the bureau in 1935.
Carson’s boss was Elmer Higgins, who headed what was by then called the Division of Scientific Inquiry Respecting Food Fishes. Every year, Higgins prepared a long report on the research activities of bureau personnel, including studies and findings published by the bureau itself, as well as papers and articles written for scholarly journals and the general press. In the mid-1930s, Higgins’s reports usually lamented the limited resources that curtailed all research activities and shut some down entirely. During the Depression, the bureau had come to depend increasingly on cooperative research programs with various state agencies and academic institutions. In 1936 the total budget for Higgins’s division was $109,000, about half of which was spent directly on field and lab investigations.
The annual summary emphasized emerging knowledge and the importance of conservation in promoting sustainable commercial and sport fishing. Higgins even occasionally used the still uncommon term “ecology” in discussing the study of specific marine environments—although the bureau did not hold all of the life forms composing such communities in equal regard, as some that preyed on commercially valuable species were regarded as “pests.” Between 1935 and 1937, for example, the bureau received a special appropriation of $125,000—more than its entire budget for a single year—to develop a chemical poison for the “eradication” of starfish in oyster farming operations.
Efforts to control or eliminate predatory species were consistent with the bureau’s mission as Higgins construed it—a mission that did not differ from the quest to understand and then subdue and dominatenature that had existed since the dawn of civilization. In his 1936 report, Higgins
Fish Hawk
, a 157-foot steam-and-sail powered schooner, conducted dredging and trawling operations along the eastern seaboard and served as a mobile hatchery. The
Albatross
, a majestic, white-hulled behemoth, was a 234-foot brigantine with twin two-hundred-horsepower steam engines and could carry more than 7,500 square feet of sail.
With a cruising speed of nearly ten knots the
Albatross
could go anywhere in the world, and it did. The first government vessel equipped with electric lighting from stem to stern—Thomas Edison designed the generator—it also carried submersible electric lights for attracting marine life at night. There were two well-equipped laboratories on board and dredging gear on deck that could collect specimens from the depths of the open ocean. The
Albatross
made collecting expeditions along the East Coast, out into the Atlantic, down through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and into the Pacific. The ship traveled to the Galápagos Islands, Alaska, the Philippines, and into the Sea of Japan. Over a span of several decades, research done onboard the
Albatross
laid the foundation of modern marine biology.
Oceanic Ichthyology
,the 1895 classic on deep-sea fish by George Brown Goode and Tarleton H. Bean, was based mainly on collections made aboard the
Albatross
.
The commission continued to grow. It added the maintenance of food fish in inland waters to its duties and eventually established ninety stocking hatcheries around the country. In 1887, the Commission of Fish and Fisheries established a Division of Scientific Inquiry, and in 1902 the commission itself was reorganized as the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and moved into the Department of Commerce. In 1911the bureau landed its most far-flung responsibility: jurisdiction over the Pribilof Islands, a tiny volcanic archipelago two hundred miles west of Alaska in the Bering Sea that was home to a few hundred people of Russian descent, about two hundred thousand fur seals, and an economy based almost entirely on seal hunting. Through prudent management of both the people and the seals, the seal population had steadily risen to more than 1.5 million by the time Carson joined the bureau in 1935.
Carson’s boss was Elmer Higgins, who headed what was by then called the Division of Scientific Inquiry Respecting Food Fishes. Every year, Higgins prepared a long report on the research activities of bureau personnel, including studies and findings published by the bureau itself, as well as papers and articles written for scholarly journals and the general press. In the mid-1930s, Higgins’s reports usually lamented the limited resources that curtailed all research activities and shut some down entirely. During the Depression, the bureau had come to depend increasingly on cooperative research programs with various state agencies and academic institutions. In 1936 the total budget for Higgins’s division was $109,000, about half of which was spent directly on field and lab investigations.
The annual summary emphasized emerging knowledge and the importance of conservation in promoting sustainable commercial and sport fishing. Higgins even occasionally used the still uncommon term “ecology” in discussing the study of specific marine environments—although the bureau did not hold all of the life forms composing such communities in equal regard, as some that preyed on commercially valuable species were regarded as “pests.” Between 1935 and 1937, for example, the bureau received a special appropriation of $125,000—more than its entire budget for a single year—to develop a chemical poison for the “eradication” of starfish in oyster farming operations.
Efforts to control or eliminate predatory species were consistent with the bureau’s mission as Higgins construed it—a mission that did not differ from the quest to understand and then subdue and dominatenature that had existed since the dawn of civilization. In his 1936 report, Higgins
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