Fish, Ships, Shoes, and Seaplanes: Industrial Speculations on the North Atlantic Sea

“Ships rejoicing in the breeze, / Wrecks that float o’er unknown seas, / Anchors dragged through faithless sand; / Sea-fog drifting overhead, / And, with lessening line and lead, / Sailors feeling for the land. / In that building long and low; / While the wheel goes round and round, / With a drowsy, dreamy sound, / And the spinners backward go.”

In 1854, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow records his impressions of ropewalks and factory buildings along New England’s North Atlantic shore. After exhausting its resources to support the American Revolution, the coastal New England town of Marblehead, MA, ventures to rekindle its once-prosperous, pre-revolutionary relationship with the ocean — to “walk its thread backward” in time.

This article explores the infrastructural role of oceanic space as a medium for industrial innovation. It deploys original research to trace the rapid transformations of Marblehead’s nineteenth-century material legacy through fish, ships, shoes, and seaplanes:

Fish. From 1629 to 1846, Marbleheaders fish the Grand Banks of Nova Scotia and preserve the peninsula’s undulating granite protrusions to provide space for drying the catch.

Ships. Between 1831 and 1871, ropewalks and shipyards reconfigure the coastline and the town’s wind-protected harbor provides a testbed for innovative nautical architectures. Shoes. In the early 1800s, shoemaking, once a sailor’s off-season past-time, finds an international market because of the town’s direct access to oceanic trade.

Seaplanes. In 1910, naval architect, Starling Burgess, repurposes the town’s shipyards, shipbuilding expertise, and spacious harbor to design and test the world’s first seaplanes.