Collectives

Maine lobster harbour territories

Stretches of sea floor claimed by the fishermen of a particular harbour, with no map, no statute and no office — and a sanction ladder whose middle rungs are things done quietly to other people's gear.

Place
Maine coast, US
Founded
19th century
Status
Enduring
Duration
c. 226 years and counting

What is held

Bottom to set traps on — stretches of sea floor worked by the boats of one harbour and defended against the boats of the next one.

Who is in

Acceptance by the harbour gang. A state licence is necessary and nowhere near sufficient; kinship, long residence and years of not causing trouble do the actual work.

Who decides

No office, and nobody to appeal to. The gang decides collectively and informally, which means in practice that a handful of senior fishermen decide and the rest go along or do not.

How the rules are made

Custom, revised by what the gang will tolerate. State law regulates the fishery — trap limits, size limits, notching egg-bearing females — and says nothing whatever about territory, which is the part being enforced here.

How cheating is caught

Every buoy is painted in its owner's registered colours and floats on the surface where anyone can see it. An intruder's gear announces itself, from a distance, to everyone who passes.

The sanction ladder

  1. A word, in person or over the radio
  2. Trap doors left open, so the catch walks out
  3. Knots tied in the buoy line — unmistakable, and it leaves the gear usable
  4. Trap lines cut and the gear lost

What happens in a bad year

unknown. In a poor season pressure on the boundaries rises and cutting increases, but this draft has found no rule that governs a bad year — which may itself be the finding, rather than a gap in the research.

Notes on the account

This one is here to break an assumption the other eleven pages might otherwise install: that governance means paperwork. Maine’s harbour territories have no charter, no map, no elected officer and no legal existence. The state does not recognise them. They are nevertheless enforced, stable over generations, and consequential enough that a boat from the wrong harbour will lose its traps.

The ladder is the interesting object. Rungs two and three are property damage — graduated, reversible property damage, delivered anonymously, escalating in a sequence everyone can read. A knot in a buoy line costs the owner nothing but the time to untie it, and it is unambiguous. That is a sanction system built by people with no authority to impose one.

What is not settled in this draft

Whether the ladder above is the real one or a tidied version of a messier reality is precisely what HC-006 asks. The century given for founding is when the territorial pattern is first described, not when it began. Row seven says unknown and this draft is not confident it should say anything else.

Sources

  1. The Lobster Gangs of Maine — James M. Acheson, University Press of New England, 1988.
  2. Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry — James M. Acheson, University Press of New England, 2003.