Nineteenth-century industries tried to fasten even more names to porgies. Machines broke Stenotomus chrysops down into oil, bones, and scraps to make lantern oil, soap, and fertilizer. New England settlers built entire fisheries, with porgy steamers and porgy factories, to make porgy products. Since the days of salting porgies and sending them to Caribbean plantations to feed enslaved labor, northeastern fisheries have imagined great wealth in drying porgies.
Building on Indigenous methods of using porgy for fertilizer, the Quinnipiac Fertilizer Company secured a patent in 1852 for drying fish scrap by solar heat, and used this technique to produce enough fertilizers for plantation owners in New England, southern states, and the Caribbean. Soon, the Pacific Guano Company of Boston started using dried porgy to supplement dwindling bird guano supplies and meet increasing demands for fertilizers. After the abolition of slavery, southern cotton planters adopted these chemical solutions to replace enslaved labor, and the Boston company found great success mixing dried porgy with phosphates from South Carolina.
But not for long. Fisheries, big and small, never fully understood or controlled porgy behavior. Porgies’ sexuality does not map well on spreadsheets, table graphs, and economic forecasting. Many porgy specimens carry male and female organs simultaneously; others change sex as they mature. Their breeding tendencies often didn’t look like tendencies. Some years waters overflowed with the fish, but then they could disappear for decades at a time. Rachel Carson wrote that porgy became one of the most important industrial fish, especially for fertilizers, but with a history marked by “severe fluctuations in the catch.”
Big companies could outlast this uncertainty, but most fishermen went bankrupt betting on porgies. According to the leading contemporary scientific journals, thousands of black fishermen also made careers in fisheries in the 1870s and 1880s. Numbers decreased drastically by the 1890s. The professionalization of the industry excluded them. Black-operated fisheries likely also struggled to weather porgy droughts, but records do not tell their full story. Black fishing people, especially those outside of formal fisheries, were as illegible to the industry as porgies. On black fishing, journals usually quoted the Smithsonian Institute’s foremost expert on fisheries, George Brown Goode, who admitted that “the negro element in the fishing population is somewhat extensive. We have no means of ascertaining how many of this race are included among the native-born Americans returned by the census reporters.”