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The cannon wasn’t built for herring—which might explain why it exploded.

On a September day in 1805, Thomas Gifford lugged a cannon onto the village green in Falmouth, Massachusetts. The 27-year-old stuffed the barrel with river herring and lit the fuse. Gifford planned to spew bloody bits of fish onto the green in an act of political protest. Instead, the cannon shattered, with mangled chunks of fish and shrapnel shredding Gifford’s body. It took him days to die.

Gifford’s death was the culmination of a years-long conflict. Three years prior, a mill owner named Barnabas Hinckley was arrested and put on trial after refusing to open his dam gates, which town officials said were barring river herring from making their spring spawning journey from the sea to nearby Coonamessett Pond. Hinckley’s arrest polarized the town. Some supported the decision to prioritize river herring, which were needed to fertilize fields. But others chafed at the town’s political elite restricting Hinckley’s business.

“The town was ripped apart by this,” says Matthew McKenzie, a historian at the University of Connecticut. “Here was one person whose individual economic concerns were going to jeopardize the entire [river herring] run itself. It was a classic case of public good versus private benefit.”

The crux of Falmouth’s so-called Herring Wars never really went away. Even after Gifford accidentally dispatched himself, the owners of commercial endeavors, from fishers to cranberry farmers, have continued to clash with river herring supporters across New England.

This long and tumultuous history got a new chapter in 2022 when a federal judge overturned a decision by the New England Fishery Management Council. The agency had banned midwater trawlers—the largest fishing vessels in the region—from going after Atlantic herring near the coast. The marine fish is closely related to river herring, and the different species tend to spend time in the same ocean areas, which means that midwater trawlers often accidentally catch vulnerable river herring, too. The judge’s decision not only renewed exploitation of the already overfished Atlantic herring—it also reinvigorated a contentious debate over how to best protect the beloved river herring.

River herring spend most of their lives in the ocean. But in the spring, mature adults make their way into streams and rivers from South Carolina to Newfoundland to spawn. The sheer number of these small fish makes them a key foraging base for many other creatures, from puffins to whales to cod.

Herring and people share a long history in New England. In the nutrient-poor soil around Falmouth and elsewhere on Cape Cod, people planted herring alongside their seeds to ensure the crops would grow. Puritan settlers from Europe learned this key survival technique from the Indigenous Wampanoag and passed laws to safeguard the fish.

This protective attitude started to erode in the 19th century. Savvy business people began capturing huge numbers of forage fish, including herring, to use as bait in the profitable offshore fisheries for cod and halibut, leaving little for local fishermen. In protest, hundreds of fishermen traveled to Boston to demand that the government regulate the big new nets being used in these bait fisheries, sparking what McKenzie calls the largest grassroots movement on Cape Cod since the American Revolution.

A congressional investigation at the time concluded that the voracious appetites of bluefish—not new nets—were responsible for disappearing herring. (“Probably because bluefish don’t have a say in Congress,” McKenzie says). International tensions flared, too. In December 1877, some 200 Newfoundlanders reportedly attacked a visiting US vessel that had set up nets targeting local herring. So much resentment simmered at a town meeting in 1894 that local officials warned the three members of Falmouth’s herring committee to start carrying guns.

All the while, fewer and fewer river herring were returning to rivers to spawn. While accurate historical estimates of river herring populations are hard to come by, it’s clear that by the mid-20th century, their numbers were dropping, says Matthew Ogburn, a marine ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland.

Dams, even small ones like Hinckley’s, cut river herring off from the bulk of their spawning habitat. Climate change and poor water quality likely played a role. But the steepest declines have coincided with periods of heavy harvest, when fishers netted river herring out of streams and the ocean. All of the commercial fisheries for river herring in southern New England are now closed, but the fish continue to be caught by harvesters targeting Atlantic herring and mackerel. And the small fleet of midwater trawlers that arrived in New England in the 1990s have come under the closest scrutiny.

Midwater trawlers catch millions of Atlantic herring using football field–sized nets, with most of the fish ending up in lobster traps as bait. The ability of trawlers to capture fish in such vast numbers worries other commercial fishers, who say that the trawlers create dead zones devoid of marine life, says Roger Fleming, an attorney for the environmental consulting group Blue Planet Strategies who has been a vocal advocate for river herring conservation.

Whale-watching tour operators, who make their living off the species that dine on both Atlantic and river herring, have expressed concern about how catching so many fish might affect their business. And conservation groups and commercial fishers have raised alarm over seals, juvenile cod, and many other species ending up in trawler nets.

In response, in 2021, the New England Fishery Management Council implemented Amendment 8: a ban on midwater trawlers operating within 22 kilometers of the coast between Connecticut and the Canadian border. The council cited concerns that midwater trawlers catch enough Atlantic herring to deplete the fish in local areas. A similar ban on midwater trawling for Atlantic herring exists near shore in the Gulf of Maine, where river herring appear to be recovering.

The Sustainable Fisheries Coalition—an industry group that represents midwater trawler operators—challenged the amendment in court. The judge, in part unsatisfied with the limited evidence that trawlers deplete Atlantic herring in coastal areas, threw the buffer out in March 2022. And the trawlers went back to scooping up herring off Cape Cod.

Shortly after Gifford’s death in 1805, Hinckley settled with the court and agreed to open the gates of his dam. But the structure stood for another two centuries. Just a few years ago, during a wave of hundreds of river restoration efforts in New England, Hinckley’s mill was removed, too. (That project was also contentious, but in a yard sign kind of way rather than a gunpowder one). Now, volunteers gather along the bank to count river herring as they make their return in the spring.

Like in many other parts of New England, Falmouth’s river herring remain at a historical low. According to the Coonamessett River Trust, more than one million fish made the journey upriver to spawn in the early 20th century. That number was just 31,000 in 2018—the lowest count in years. But “encouraging signs are beginning to be seen,” says Elizabeth Gladfelter, a coastal scientist and project coordinator at the Coonamessett River Restoration Project.

Something that might help, both Fleming and McKenzie say, is Amendment 10: a newly proposed regulation targeting midwater trawlers that would, once again, impose a year-round fishing ban in coastal waters. The amendment is currently making its way through the New England Fishery Management Council’s assessment process. If approved, the restriction could go into effect as early as 2025. The measure would protect river herring from being accidentally killed by midwater trawls near shore—though strategies are also needed to prevent by-catch of the species in other commercial fisheries.

Fleming expects the amendment will be challenged again if it’s put in place. But the goal, he says, is to ensure that enough herring remain in the water to support the people—and other animals—who depend on them.

For now, in the words of 19th-century historian Charles Jenkins, “This question remains undecided. It is not certain but that our descendants may yet fish herring out of Coonamessett Pond.”