Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man by Mark Kurlansky

Author:Mark Kurlansky
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385535885
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2012-05-08T07:00:00+00:00

When the Birdseyes arrived in Gloucester, the city had just celebrated its three hundredth birthday. Founded in 1623 as an English fishing station, it remained, and still is today, one of the leading fishing ports of the United States. Its deep and extensive harbor, on the headlands of a peninsula but in the sheltered lee of the wind, makes it the ideal port for New England’s richest fishing grounds.

By 1873 the population had grown to 15,397, making it the most populous town in Massachusetts, and so a new charter designated that it was now a city. When the Birdseyes arrived in the mid-1920s, it was only slightly larger, and most of the population, directly or indirectly, lived off the fisheries. In addition to the fishermen themselves and their families, there were the lumpers—the dockworkers. Kids could be lumpers if they were big and strong enough and by working very long hours could earn enough money, if they were frugal, to buy a house when they got married. There were also the ancillary trades that repaired ships, made iron fittings, and manufactured oilskins for fishermen to wear. Glue was made from fish skin, later sold nationally by William LePage.

It was a working town with a tough waterfront of bars and merchants, and the harbor was crammed with the masts and canvas sails of some 150 working fishing schooners. There were also fat-hulled, square-rigged barks from Sicily that arrived with Trapani salt. The Gloucester fish industry used enormous quantities of salt—one of the things Birdseye was about to change.

The schooner, a fast-sailing vessel, sleek and rigged not with cross spars but from bow to stern so that it would be swift and maneuverable and sail close to the wind, was an eighteenth-century Gloucester invention designed for fast voyages to the Georges Bank fishing ground and a fast sail home again. Schooners were so swift and so beautiful that they were redesigned as racing yachts. The America’s Cup race was originally a contest between Gloucester and Nova Scotia fishermen.

Gloucestermen were so in love with their wooden-hulled fishing schooners, most of them built in the nearby marshes of Essex, that in the 1920s, well into the age of engine-powered steel-hulled fishing boats, the Gloucester fleet was still mostly schooners, and fishermen continued to use them into the 1950s. But they were built for speed and not safety. They flew large topsails high on the masts and would easily blow over in a storm. They fished bottom fish, mostly cod and halibut, with hand-hauled longlines with baited hooks from small two-man rowboats called dories. The dories could capsize on a high sea, or sometimes just catch too many fish and sink to the bottom from the weight, or sometimes get lost in a fog and never find their way back to the mother schooner. Some years hundreds of men were lost at sea.

So they were a tough people, living a hard and tradition-bound life, and accustomed to tragedies that bonded them into a closely knit,

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