FISHERIES
The story of the Cape fisheries begins and ends at Provincetown, but
the midships section of it finds Provincetown nowhere. The beginning
came in what, from the point of view of this volume, were prehistoric
days--prior to 1620, that is--when wild European fishermen squatted in
shacks along the Provincetown shore and drank rum with the Indians.
During the early ‘historical’ period, when the rest of the Cape was
farming, Provincetown was hardly in existence: it had not even been
officially settled. A little later, when the other towns were merrily
catching cod, the cluster of shanties on the beach way down below
High Head was wondering whether or not it was ever going to achieve
the dignity of a town. But finally, when the demand came for larger
vessels and longer voyages, the creek harbors of the upper Cape
became worthless, while a fleet of schooners swung easily at anchor
inside Long Point, and fishermen flocked to Provincetown as deer to a
salt-lick. Later still, capital concentrated the fleet at Gloucester
and Boston, and Provincetown was once more abandoned. Such, in a
nutshell, are the stages in the development of fishing on the Cape.
It is pleasant to grope back into the prehistoric age--that dim,
enchanted era of the sixteenth century, where the labored quill of
no town clerk has left records of fact to clip the wings of fancy.
Provincetown had no written records to tell of the comings and goings
of adventurers on her shores; only a ruined wooden fort near Corn
Hill, an iron kettle, and a blond-haired skeleton buried in a sailor’s
cassock beside a papoose. These are her earliest records--isolated
links in a century-long chain of promiscuous freebooting with fish
behind it as a motive. The best we can do is to pick up the story in
the middle, and even there our information is so meager as to be of
little historical value. One thing, however, is certain; phantom ships
of nameless fishermen entered Provincetown Harbor before 1600, and
continued to do so, unrecorded and often unobserved except by Indians,
for the next hundred years.
Then in 1714, the Court, judging that the time had come to snatch
the brand from the burning, put the untamed community under Truro’s
jurisdiction. Here its importance comes to an end for the time being.
A life of captivity seems not to have agreed with it. No longer could
outlandish crews enjoy the license of a wilderness, and so exposed were
its shores to French privateers that all but three families moved away
during the long wars that followed.
Meantime, fish had become an important factor in the lives of the
settlers farther up the Cape. Of course they had always caught fish
enough for their own tables, but they had been too busy farming to
go fishing for a livelihood. The thrift of the Old Colony, however,
could not bear to let great schools of cod and mackerel swim about the
Bay without bringing so much as a shilling into the treasury. But the
Plymouth settlers were such unskillful fishermen that, in spite of the
abundance of fish, they usually returned empty-handed. Realizing the
limitations of its children, the Court frankly surrendered, farmed out
the fishing rights to more expert persons, and used the revenue to
support a school.
Among the first Cape men to hire these rights was Thomas Huckins, of
Barnstable, an enterprising man of business whose manifold activities
had made him amphibious as early as 1660--perhaps earlier. Aside from
various public offices which he held from time to time, Huckins kept
the tavern, whose cellar was well stocked with rum which he brought
from Boston in his own packet. As he was his own rum-carrier, so was
he his own fisherman. In those days men did not hire others to do what
they were able to do themselves. Even if he had wished to employ some
one else to do his fishing, it is doubtful whether he could have found
any one without going far afield, for Huckins was very early for a
Cape-Codder in the fish business. In his day the soil was still good,
and most men were exulting in the ownership of their fields and houses.
By degrees, as the novelty of possession wore off and the soil grew
thin, others began to follow Huckins’s lead and, looking out over the
Bay, decided to try their luck afloat for a season.
Early in the eighteenth century, John Gorham, of Barnstable, a member
of the fighting family that distinguished itself in the French and
Indian Wars, was starting in as a trader with a place of business on
the wharf at the foot of Scudder’s Lane. Before long--perhaps as early
as 1730--he had cod-fishermen making voyages to the Grand Banks for
him and carrying their fares to the West Indies, whence they returned
with cargoes of rum and molasses. Eastham at this time was busy not
only fishing but also taking measures to prevent the destruction of
fish by porpoises--which apparently were as great a pest as the seals
in Barnstable Harbor are to-day. The town offered a bounty on porpoise
tails, and was called upon to pay for a good many of them. Elisha
Young seems to have been the most successful man at the business;
he turned in some five hundred tails between 1740 and 1742, all of
them duly recorded by the town clerk. Other Cape fishermen, notably
Eldad Nickerson, of Chatham, found their way to Nova Scotia waters
well before 1760. Some of them, it will be remembered, were so taken
with the convenient location of Barrington, so encouraged by Governor
Lawrence’s inducements to settlers, and so tired of wars and taxes at
home, that they left the Cape for good and became inhabitants of Nova
Scotia before the Revolution began.
The Cape fishing fleet--for the number of vessels had in the late
colonial period grown large enough to be dignified with this term--by
degrees established a well-fixed routine over the triangular course
which Gorham’s schooners had navigated fifty years before: from Cape
Cod to the Grand Banks, where they filled their holds with cod, which
they salted and dried on whatever beach lay closest at hand; thence
to the West Indies, where they traded their salty cargo for rum and
molasses, and so back home with a handsome potential profit under the
hatches. Those who could not afford large enough vessels for the West
Indian voyage, and for whom the rugged water of the Grand Banks was too
great a risk, fished closer to the Newfoundland shore, salted their
catch just enough to keep it during the run home, finished ‘making’
it on their own beaches, and sold it in Boston. Harwich, Chatham, and
Barnstable were at this time the chief fishing ports of the Cape.
It was a miscellaneous-looking flotilla that went codfishing in the
colonial days from the creeks and harbors of the Cape. Standardization
had not yet produced one-design vessels like the fleet which was owned
in Provincetown a hundred years later, or that which keeps Gloucester
on the map to-day. Men used such boats as they had or could afford to
build. The largest of them were round-bottomed, two-masted schooners,
measuring not more than seventy tons, but able to carry their fares
from the Grand Banks across the Atlantic to Spain, if the West India
prices failed to attract them. But these vessels called for more
capital than most Cape fishermen could raise. The best the majority
could do was to hug the shore in tubby sloops and put in at some
cove at the first sign of weather. Always, too, there were the boat
fishermen--the humblest and poorest of them all, but by no means the
hungriest--who would hoist a spritsail in a whaleboat and spend the
day hand-lining for cod on the ledge off Barnstable, or outside Long
Point if they hailed from Provincetown. These unambitious citizens
kept a supply of fresh fish in town for local consumption while the
Grand-Bankers were away. As often as not they were half-farmers, with a
patch of corn to be hoed if they felt like staying ashore. Altogether
the boat fisherman lived as independent and irresponsible a life as men
are likely to achieve in this existence. He had no money tied up in
large vessels, to send him fishing whether or no; his table was well
supplied with the produce of sea and shore; when northeasters howled in
from the Atlantic, he smoked his pipe beside a six-foot fireplace and
thanked God that he was not shortening sail on the Grand Banks. Wise
men, if not admirable, were these boat fishermen of colonial days.
[Illustration: PART OF PROVINCETOWN’S FISHING FLEET A GENERATION AGO]
Then came the Revolution, sweeping banker and boat fisherman, whaleman
and merchant, from the seas more completely than all the storms of a
generation. Chatham’s experience is typical. When the war began, she
had a fleet of twenty-seven cod-fishermen. In 1783, four or five were
all that remained. It was a costly victory which the citizens had won,
and clearly it was the moment for the government which they had fought
to create to lend them a helping hand.
This the Administration was not slow to do. In 1789, Congress voted
to pay a bounty on all exported codfish; in 1792, another bounty was
granted to cod-fishermen who were busy at their calling four months in
the year. Cape-Codders, like the rest of New England, began to rebuild
their fleet, but they headed more often for new fishing grounds--the
Bay de Chaleur and the Labrador Coast--where small craft were adequate
and where miles of desolate beaches lay close at hand on which they
could salt their catch enough for the voyage home. The Grand Banks
were not abandoned; but the ease of the new waters and the fact that
they could be reached in inexpensive vessels, appealed to all but the
richest and hardiest.
This shifting of the bulk of the tonnage to short-voyage work covered
the shore-front of the Cape villages with fish flakes lying gray to
the sun, for the small size of the new vessels made even a West India
voyage too risky. From now on, the bulk of the catch was cured at home.
The process of making fish which was followed at this early date never
changed, so long as there was a schooner in the business or a quintal
of codfish to be sold. As soon as a homeward-bound vessel dropped
anchor, the fish were boated into shallow water in dories, washed clean
of their salt, and rolled up to the flakes in wheelbarrows. The flakes
were low platforms, with slats instead of planking; on these the fish,
split, washed, and again salted, were laid to dry in the sun--in much
the same manner as one broils a steak. They had to be turned every now
and then, and in rainy weather were stacked and covered with tarpaulins.
[Illustration: PROVINCETOWN FISH-FLAKES WITH SCHOONER FREDDIE W. ALTON
AT THE DOCK]
This trend in business brought Provincetown into her own. She had long
since grown accustomed to law and order, but was still numerically
insignificant. In 1755, ten houses sheltered her entire population.
Apparently discouraged by the long detour around East Harbor Creek,
the census-taker of 1764 ignored the town altogether. But now that the
impoverished condition of the young country was setting the fashion for
home-cured fish, Provincetown began to flourish.
Beaches? She was all beach, with her houses strung along just far
enough from the water’s edge to leave room for sheds and flakes
between. As for her harbor, the whole New England fishing fleet could
have anchored in it with room to spare. Drawn into codfishing by
pre-war habit and government bounties, and to Provincetown by its
facilities for the business, men who up to that time had regarded
Provincetowners with scorn, now migrated eagerly to the sandy tip of
the Cape to share in her growing prosperity. In 1790, Provincetown had
20 vessels that went codfishing to the Grand Banks, the Labrador Coast,
and the Bay de Chaleur. A dozen years later the number had grown to 33.
This branch of the business alone gave employment to 225 Provincetown
men and boys, besides 75 from neighboring towns. They brought home on
the average 33,000 quintals of cod a year, worth $3.50 a quintal. Half
these were salted on Labrador beaches, half at home. But this was not
all. From October to December--off months for the cod-fishermen--they
shipped more than 5000 barrels of herring at $4 a barrel. About
the time that the fleet set sail for the Banks in the spring, boat
fishermen began to catch mackerel in local waters, and it was a poor
season when they did not ship 300 barrels pickled to Boston before the
fish struck off. Some of the mackerel-catchers used seines, of which
there were 50 in the town worth $100 apiece. And five vessels were kept
steadily at work carrying lobsters from both sides of Long Point to New
York.
All this business called for kindred industries ashore. Ten salt
works made 8000 hogsheads of salt a year, every pound of which was
bought by the cod-fishermen and mackerel-catchers; five buildings were
used for smoking herring and ninety for storing fish. The population
jumped from 812 in 1800 to 946 in 1802. All this Provincetown achieved
during the twenty years that followed the Revolution. From being an
inconsequential, half-civilized settlement before the War, and the
headquarters for sea-weary Britishers during the War, Provincetown by
1840 had grown to be a famous fishing port with a larger fleet than any
other town on the Cape.
Meantime, the rest of the Cape had not been idle. The shore-front of
every village was a scene of healthy activity. In 1802, Wellfleet, in
addition to five whalers that went to the Straits of Belle Isle and
Newfoundland waters equipped for codfishing if whales were scarce,
had four vessels engaged in offshore cod- and mackerel-fishing, four
oyster-carriers with a capacity of thirty tons apiece, and a dozen
smaller craft that kept busy hand-lining within sight of Billingsgate.
Orleans had no harbor suitable for a fishing fleet of her own, yet
‘the flower of the people’ from twelve to forty-five years old sailed
on cod-fishermen out of Provincetown, Chatham, Duxbury, and Plymouth.
Eastham, never a great fishing town, had only three vessels in the
business, but Chatham owned twenty-five, half of them Grand-Bankers;
the other half divided their time between the Nantucket Shoals and
Nova Scotian waters. Two hundred men and boys were thus employed, and
their annual catch of cod was some 17,500 quintals--about one half
Provincetown’s average. Harwich had the same number of fishermen, most
of whom went on small vessels of forty tons or so to the Nantucket
Shoals, though four good-sized schooners sailed regularly to the
Straits of Belle Isle. A tidy little fleet of twenty Dennis vessels was
moored in Bass River or tied up alongside the three wharves; but they
were all small--none being over forty tons. On the Bay side of the town
a half-dozen more wintered in the Bass Hole and Quivet Creek. Yarmouth
had ten fishing vessels as well as a good-sized fleet of coasters. One
hundred men in Barnstable pulled a living from the sea. If the reader
is not utterly bewildered by these statistics, he will have gathered
that by 1802 almost every village was baiting a good many hooks once
more.
But the years that followed the Revolution were not plain sailing for
the fishermen of the Cape or anywhere else. England, chagrined by
her defeat, not only closed her doors to American traders, but tried
to keep New-Englanders from fishing Canadian waters as well. By the
treaty of 1818, which grew out of the repeated encounters between
Yankee fishermen and the King’s ships, Labrador, the Bay de Chaleur,
and adjacent waters were--theoretically at least--closed to American
vessels. Though northern cod still found their way to the Boston
market, repeated unpleasantness and occasional confiscation of their
vessels considerably dampened the ardor of Cape fishermen. They began
to look again at the dangerous tide rips that criss-cross each other on
the Georges Banks, only a little more than a day’s sail from home.
These waters had always been held in an almost superstitious terror.
Strange things happened on them. Men said that they had seen the water
run off, leaving the banks bare for gulls to feed on. Fishermen had
visited them for years, but the currents had swept them off so fast
that it was an unsatisfactory business. To anchor in the rips was
held to be suicide--the staunchest vessel would be pulled under like
a buoy in a tide-way. Nobody had ever tried it, though men tantalized
themselves by imagining the fares of fish they could catch there if
they did. Finally, in 1821, a hardy Gloucester skipper, tired of
running the gauntlet of the royal fish patrol, and tired of being
carried out of reach of the fish by the Georges currents, took a
chance. Boldly he sailed to the Georges; boldly he anchored; safely he
sailed home. A new era in New England fishing had begun; Georges Banks,
where the churlish veto of British legislation could not be heard, was
open for business.
To the Cape fishermen this discovery meant as much as striking oil
in his cattle range means to a ranch-owner. It brought the source
of wealth hundreds of miles nearer than it had ever been before.
Provincetown, the closest of all to the Georges, became busier than
ever; but Truro and Wellfleet were not far behind; while Chatham,
Harwich, and later Dennis, were well in the running. Codfish and
halibut were the staples of the Georges fishermen; quick voyages and
quick profits were their reward.
But meanwhile and always--treaties or no treaties, Georges or no
Georges--the Grand Banks, with their inexhaustible supply, furnished
the steady background of drumbeats in the Cape’s piscatorial orchestra.
It must not be supposed, either, that the Grand-Bankers rested content
with the old methods. Hazardous as their calling was, even when all
hands stayed on board and fished over the side, these progressive
fishermen devised a yet more hazardous practice, justified in their own
minds, if not in their families’, because it caught more cod. They began
in the late fifties to carry dories with them and to fish in pairs from
these instead of from the schooner. It was believed that the quick
motion of these little boats kept the bait dancing more conspicuously
than the slower rise and fall of the schooner. Theoretically the dories
did not venture too far away for safety, but fog and wind are unstable
elements; a sudden blow, coming while the fish were biting, would often
go too long unheeded by the dorymen. The schooner could no longer ride
at anchor; the nicest handling could not keep her in sight of all her
scattered dories. Some would get back to the safety of her deck;
others would never be heard of again. Thus did the fearless Bankers add
another hazard to their already hazardous calling.
Not content with running these risks, they employed another new
device which took them still farther from the safety zone around
their vessels. A Cape Cod fisherman conceived the idea of setting
trawls--heavy lines anchored close to the bottom with short lines
carrying baited hooks made fast to them at intervals. Sometimes there
were a thousand hooks on a single trawl. The whole contrivance was
buoyed and left, and the fisherman moved on to set the next one. Trawls
had to be set and hauled from dories. If the men were reluctant to
stop hand-lining when bad weather set in, what must have been their
reluctance to abandon a half-hauled trawl with a codfish or halibut on
every other hook? More fishermen were lost than ever, but there was no
scarcity of volunteers to fill the gaps in their ranks.
What induced them to follow such a laborious, dangerous, and above all
unprofitable business, it is hard to say. The Honorable Zeno Scudder,
of Osterville, has calculated that a fisherman’s earnings for four
months for the decade between 1841 and 1851 were sixty-three dollars.
The Government bonus brought the figure up to seventy-seven dollars
but there is still nothing Crœsan about it, even if a wide margin is
allowed for statistical inaccuracy. The old jingle,
‘Sailor lads have gold and silver,
Fisher lads have nought but brass,’
sums up the situation. The gambling element--which would account for
much--was reduced to a minimum with the Grand-Bankers. They were almost
certain to return with a full fare if they returned at all. The best
explanation is that the life itself appealed to a certain type of man.
Discipline on board a fisherman was as elastic as it could be made
without actually removing the skipper from command. It could hardly
have been otherwise, indeed, for crews were composed for the most part,
not only of men who had been friends from boyhood, but of brothers
and fathers and sons. In 1789, a fishing vessel was lost on Nantucket
Shoals with a crew of eight Yarmouth men, six of whom were named
Hallett. The schooner Primrose of Yarmouth, which was lost in the great
gale of 1841, carried two Brays, two Matthewses, two Halls, and two
Wheldens. Of the twenty Dennis men lost in the same storm, twelve were
named Howes.
These crew lists, selected at random from the scores that sailed from
the Cape, suggest another answer to the question, ‘Why did men spend
their lives fishing?’ It was an hereditary calling. The sons of Cape
Cod fishermen were foreordained to the decks of schooners. It was
taken for granted that a boy would step on board his father’s vessel
as automatically as the son of a business man nowadays steps into
his father’s office. Brothers and fathers fished side by side. The
Dalmatia of Truro carried Gamaliel S. Paine and his fourteen-year-old
son, Henry. The Altair, of the same town, was commanded by Elisha
Rich, aged twenty-six, and sailing under him were his two brothers,
Joseph and William. Boys whose parents to-day would think them too
young to be sent to boarding school went to sea as cooks on fishermen,
and all hands fared accordingly. Joseph Wheat shipped as cook on the
Cincinnatus, of Truro, at the age of thirteen. Thomas White was twelve
when he sailed in the Arrival, another Truro vessel, and he was not
the youngest member of the crew, either. Charles Nott was only eleven,
and Dick Atwood was fourteen. But these lads look like grown men when
compared with Ambrose Snow, Jr., who in 1842 at the age of eight
sailed with his father from Wellfleet for the Bay de Chaleur on the
pink-sterned schooner Mariner.
An important result of this family grouping on board fishermen, where
brother was often in command of brother, was to unfit men for the navy
or merchant service. Fine sailors they were, but savage commands, such
as issued from the brazen throat of the mate of a clipper ship, were
not their style. Discipline disagreed with them. If brother ‘Lisha was
shaving Monomoy too close or was slow in giving the order to shorten
sail in a blow, Joe and William were there to tell him of it--captain
or no captain. More informal, free-and-easy crews never sailed the sea.
The ship’s company of a Cape Cod fisherman was a floating democracy
where freedom of speech was the order of every day, and democracy
sorted ill with the routine of a deep-water merchantman. Coming up with
the fishing fleet off Highland Light and tearing past with skysails
set, the foremast hands of a lordly clipper looked with contempt at
the tiny schooners and wondered how men could live on board them. The
fishermen cocked an eye at the towering canvas of the clipper, spat
over the side, and ejaculated, ‘Monkeys on a stick.’ So each went his
way.
In the thirties and forties, mackerel-catching first assumed the
dignity of a serious business on the Cape. Of course men had caught
mackerel since the earliest days, but these whimsical fish were looked
on as too frivolous to warrant more than an occasional voyage. For
years, while luring the humble, necessary cod from his dark lair in
the crannies of some submerged ledge, skippers had watched the merry
mackerel sporting in schools on top of the water--watched them and
caught them, too, from time to time, as a gamey relaxation from the
monotonous tug of the cod. But men in quest of bread and butter have
small leisure for caviar. They were sure of their cod, whereas the
mackerel would come one day, and the next would be gone like the
swallows in winter. The cod-fishermen were not gamblers, but plodding
sailors who preferred a long voyage with sure returns to the off chance
of filling their holds in a single day without losing sight of the
Hog’s Back meeting-house.
But mackerel-catching was just the game for livelier spirits. It meant
following the fish wherever they led, cruising about with a man at the
masthead, watching for the peculiar shimmer and ripple on the surface
of the water that betrayed the presence of a school. Sometimes the
fleet would cruise for weeks without so much as a smell of fish; but
finally, by the forties, experts believed that they had found the route
which these wily fellows followed. By cruising off the Virginia Coast
in the spring, the fleet usually picked up the mackerel headed north,
and stayed with them, marketing their catch at convenient ports on the
way, until the fish disappeared somewhere off Nova Scotia.
The laws that govern the actions of fish are past finding out. One
season the mackerel vanished completely. The fleet sailed as usual, but
sailed in vain, returning as light as it set out. For ten years the
fish remained lost. Rumor had it they had been seen off the African
Coast. Captain Josiah Chase, of Provincetown, who was responsible
for the report, crossed the Atlantic in pursuit, but died during the
voyage. Then, as suddenly as they had vanished, the fish reappeared and
resumed their old route northward along the coast. If the fancy struck
them, they would play about for weeks in Cape Cod Bay, giving local
fishermen plenty of sport and plenty of profits. In 1861, the schooner
Bloomer, which after a useful career was left to drop to pieces plank
by plank in a mud berth at Barnstable, sailed into port with 5700
mackerel, which her crew of ten men had caught with hand-lines in four
hours.
For years hand-lining was the only way men knew of catching mackerel.
Blithe spirits like mackerel-catchers gave no thought to improved
methods; the old way was too much fun. Every man stood at the rail,
throwing and pulling his lines as fast as he could move his arms, while
the barrel at his elbow was filled with shining fish. No time was
wasted baiting up between throws. The lead jig, scraped until it shone
like silver, served as bait and sinker combined, a far more dazzling
lure than the minced menhaden that had been thrown broadcast on the
water to attract the school within reach. Fun enough in this game, even
without the profits, to make up for weeks of cruising without wetting
a line. There was need of frantic hurry, too, for the fish might stop
biting at a moment’s notice and for no imaginable reason. More than
once tantalized fishermen have been forced to lean idly against the
rigging and watch the mackerel swim about smelling at the jigs without
once offering to take hold--this, too, in the midst of a spell of
furious biting that had kept the men hauling and slatting as fast as
their arms could move.
A few such experiences, combined with the mackerel’s habit of traveling
in schools on top of the water, suggested a bright idea to some
inventive fisherman--tradition says to Captain Isaiah Baker. In 1853,
he went mackerel-catching off Chatham with a purse seine--a huge light
net, the lower edge of which could be pursed up by puckering-lines to
form a pocket. When a school was sighted, a longboat very much like a
whaleboat was lowered with the seine carefully piled amidships. The
crew quietly rowed round the fish, letting out the net as they went.
When the school was completely surrounded, the skipper gave the
command, the bottom edge of the seine was pursed up, and the fish were
trapped. The whole maneuver, from start to finish, was a ticklish one,
demanding the utmost speed, skill, and caution, for at any sudden
noise the fish were off like fleeting shadows. But when it succeeded,
anywhere from one hundred to three hundred barrels of mackerel could be
caught in a single cast of the net.
This method was a marked improvement over an earlier style of net which
had been used with some success in shallow water. No puckering line
was attached to this seine; it was a long straight net, deep enough
to reach from the surface of the water to the bottom; it was dragged
along by dories until the fish were swept into it; then the two ends
were brought together, enclosing the school. Baker’s purse seine was
not only a more artistic contrivance than this, but also a surer way
of getting the fish. Hand-lining, however, was never abandoned; it was
too much fun, and called for no capital to speak of. Boat fishermen
remained true to it; so did some of the schooners that followed the
fish offshore. Wellfleet as late as 1889 had a fleet of thirteen
‘seiners’ and eight ‘hookers,’ which may be taken as a fair proportion
for the other towns.
However they were caught, mackerel all received the same treatment
ashore, a treatment very different from that which was shown the cod.
Instead of being dried on flakes, they were salted and barreled under
the eagle eye of a State inspector, who saw to it that they were
graded as number one, two, or three, according to size and quality.
‘Number ones’ were the finest fish, fair and fat; the ‘number threes’
were small and poor, ‘about as nourishing as a spruce shingle,’ but
good enough for the West India niggers, who would tackle even an oily
menhaden.
What with its fleets of Grand-Bankers, Georges-Bankers,
mackerel-catchers, and boat fishermen, Provincetown Harbor from the
thirties to the fifties came nearer being crowded than ever before
or since. Her cod-fishermen alone numbered one hundred sail, stout
schooners of ninety tons or so that could ride the North Atlantic
graybeards like a flock of ducks. Besides these she had a mackerel
fleet that filled Marblehead Harbor, even when the Marblehead
fishermen were away on the Banks. Nor was there anything deserted in
the appearance of the shore-front. Wharves and packing-houses, salt
works and fish flakes, riggers’ yards and ship chandlers shouldered one
another for a bit of beach. The ‘city in the sand’ had outstripped
the older towns of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth in activity, if
not in wealth and self-esteem, and was growing every year. In 1845,
Provincetown cod-fishermen were catching 20,000 quintals a year, a
little more than a third of the Cape’s total. Ten years later, they
were catching 79,000 quintals, somewhere near double the total of all
the other towns. This increase came with her own growth rather than
with the decrease in the fishing industry on the rest of the Cape, for
though such a decrease is recorded, it was so slight (6000 quintals in
all) as to affect the statistics very little.
Other towns, notably Wellfleet, specialized in mackerel-catching and
barreled more of these fish annually than Provincetown did. Wellfleet’s
three meager harbors were taxed to the utmost to accommodate her
fleet of mackerel schooners (supplemented by a smaller number of
cod-fishermen) that lay gunwale to gunwale in Herring River, Duck Creek
Harbor, and Blackfish Creek, like Ægean melon-carriers in the Piræus.
After the Civil War, a fleet of a hundred vessels slid out round
Billingsgate, most of them in search of mackerel. Caulkers and riggers
had plenty of work the year round; salt-makers found a ready market for
their product. Although in the words of a local historian, ‘the largest
portion of the male inhabitants’ went fishing either for mackerel or
cod, there was no reason why a man who preferred to stay ashore should
not prosper.
The most important of all the establishments alongshore was the
outfitter’s. The proprietors of these emporiums were business men with
broad and elastic ideas. They sold everything from molasses candy to
chain cable, owned shares in many of the vessels, and furnished the
fishermen’s families with provisions on credit while the head of the
family was away. Some of them, notably the Union Wharf Company of
Provincetown, were virtually bankers as well, lending money, receiving
deposits, and paying moderate interest; in short, they coöperated
with the fleet in every way. Without the facilities offered by these
broad-minded men of affairs, the difficulties of making a voyage would
have been enough to discourage half the fishermen on the Cape.
The free-and-easy way in which these establishments were sometimes
run is well illustrated by the crash of the Union Company’s store
in Truro. Throughout the flush times of the fishing business, this
store had been the great business house of the town. Most of the
citizens owned stock in it, and received their ten per cent as
regularly as the years rolled around. The Company was both borrower
and lender, merchant and storekeeper, but never thought it necessary
to incorporate. An earthquake could have been no greater shock to the
complacent shareholders than the announcement, shortly before the Civil
War, that the Company was bankrupt. The town never fully recovered
from this blow. It was the beginning of the end of the busy days
alongshore at Pamet Harbor, where Georges-Bankers and a fleet of more
than sixty mackerel-catchers had huddled between voyages; where the
caulker’s mallet had sounded busily from the local shipyards, while
the ubiquitous State inspector saw to it that no number twos from the
mackerel fleet found their way into the number one barrels.
In the end it was Provincetown’s unrivaled harbor that kept her in
the fishing game long after the upper Cape had coiled its lines for
good. After the Civil War, the genial days when a man could make money
with a single small vessel yielded to the power of concentration. By
degrees the business centered in Gloucester, Boston, and Provincetown,
where big fleets and big vessels could be accommodated. The little
fellows could no more compete with these great fishing centers than an
old-fashioned corner grocery store can compete with the Great Atlantic
and Pacific Tea Company. Little by little they gave up trying, went
into other business, and watched Provincetown and Wellfleet go it alone.
The Yarmouth ‘Register,’ in reporting conditions in its own town in
1857, might have been speaking for a dozen others as well; here in
part is the item. ‘Not more than two or three vessels have been sent
from this port the present season, where formerly 20 or 30 sail were
employed. Our citizens have turned their attention to foreign commerce,
or the coasting and packeting business, which pays altogether better
than with our poor facilities for carrying on the fisheries compared
with Provincetown, Gloucester, Wellfleet and other places on the
coast.’ The same periodical says in 1863, ‘The last of the fishing
fleet has been sold.’
Until the nineties Provincetown was well in the running. Aside from her
fleet of mackerel-catchers and Grand-Bankers, the town had developed
a special type of vessel for the nervous work on the Georges--a
schooner more graceful than the big cod-fishermen, faster than the
mackerel-catcher, long-sparred like a yacht, and able to spread canvas
that set the old-timers’ heads wagging. With clipper bows, clean run,
and tapered sterns, these schooners were, in the opinion of the local
experts, the most beautiful craft that ever entered the harbor. But
beauty, in the minds of designers, was incidental, for the Georges was
as dangerous a fishing ground as ever tempted a crew to destruction.
The water was so shoal in places that it broke in every easterly blow,
and even where there was depth enough to prevent breakers, an ugly
sea could get up in a few minutes. Furthermore, the fleet carried
dories, like the Grand-Bankers, and fished from them instead of over
the side of the vessel. This meant delay in getting off in case of
dirty weather. The only solution of the problem was a schooner that
could sail fast, would go to windward under shortened canvas, and yet
was stiff enough to survive the fearful beatings they sometimes took
while rounding Race Point in a northeaster. Hardy as they were, and
fearless as men who live in danger become, the fishermen had no desire
for another calamity like that which overtook the Georges fleet in ’41.
They wanted something better than the blunt-nosed schooners that had
gone under in that memorable gale; and they got it in the lines of the
new Provincetown fleet.
Another reason for speed in this branch of the business was that fresh
fish had for a long time brought higher prices than salt fish. Halibut
and cod were iced as fast as they were caught, rushed to port under a
cloud of canvas, and transshipped to Boston with nothing but ice and
their native salt to preserve them. The way the lean schooners cut
the water in a fresh breeze, as they raced home with their perishable
cargo, was enough to gladden the heart of the dourest skipper in
Provincetown.
The beauty of these vessels was brought out more sharply by contrast
with some of the other hulks that still thrashed their way alongshore
in pursuit of mackerel or anchored exhausted in a Labrador cove.
A fleet still sailed to the Grand Banks, where sterner stuff was
needed--speed giving way to seaworthiness, beauty to capacity. Labrador
and the Bay of Chaleurs remained popular, too, and anything would do
for these trips. The T. Y. Baker, for example, built in Wellfleet about
the time of the Civil War, is described by one of her crew as being ‘so
blunt at the nose she would butt a sea about twice and then fall back
and go around it.’ Nor was she alone in her class. A small fleet of
Bakers was launched at Duck Creek, with lines like those of the T. Y.
It has been argued that the danger involved in the fisheries is one
reason for their decline, and that ‘the toll of manly life taken in
these dangerous seas was so terrible that young women hesitated to
marry seamen.’ If this is so, it is the only time in history that
danger has prevented men from pursuing excitement, or that the glamour
of a perilous calling has failed to fascinate the fair. The real
reasons why the Cape abandoned deep-sea fishing were economic, not
sentimental. All the villages except Provincetown were pretty much
squeezed out when the demand came for larger vessels that needed good
harbors. Wellfleet hung on for some time, but even there the fleet of
the seventies and eighties was no match for the glory of the hundred
sail that had been hers. As for Provincetown, capitalists were few and
far between, and it took capital to float a fleet of purse seiners.
In the old days of hand-lining, a boy of fifteen could catch as many
fish as his father; but no boy was strong enough to shoot a seine or
pull a trawl; so the rising generation, instead of being headed for
a career with the codfish or mackerel, began to seek their fortunes
somewhere else. After the Civil War the whole drift of Cape enterprise
set shoreward, and fishing took the form of tending traps instead of
sailing to the Banks.
From the middle of the century, when the first local weir was tried as
an experiment at Chatham, until the present, this method of fishing has
been followed persistently, through lean years and fat, all along the
Bay shore. In 1890 a dozen weirs were in operation off Truro alone.
Others appeared in Provincetown waters; at present three are operated
outside Sandy Neck, Barnstable; and so on all alongshore. Like every
other sort of fishing, this business is uncertain. From three hundred
to four hundred barrels of mackerel were taken from one of the Truro
traps soon after it was set out; Captain Ed Pierce made another big
haul in 1897, when he shipped thirty tons of cod and pollock taken from
his weir in one day. But such records are rare; a commoner story is
that told for the season of ’95, when whiting and pollock were thought
hardly worth shipping: ‘The fish weirs that dot the coast from Wood
End to Sandwich have experienced a most disastrous season. The first
part of the year they were full of worthless whiting most of the time,
and when they struck off the pollock struck in and hung on until cold
weather started them southward. Some of the weirs hardly paid expenses.’
Quite recently--within a dozen or fifteen years--cold-storage plants
have been built in a number of towns to handle the hauls of the fish
traps. These fish-freezers are by no means fastidious; all is indeed
fish that comes to their net. Not only the ‘worthless whiting’ but the
still more humble squid are shoveled into the omnivorous maw of the
freezers. The squid have some value as bait and are eaten by certain
of our foreign population. The whiting do well enough for chowders.
Yarmouth erected at great expense a very elaborate cold-storage plant
at the head of a little creek that comes wandering inland through
the marsh. A channel was dug through the flats. A gasoline boat and
attendant dories plied in and out with commendable optimism. To-day
the establishment has been torn down; weeds grow tall between the
planks of the dock. The channel--what there is left of it--is handy for
rum-runners and lobstermen, whose boats are the only ones that follow
it, and whose trucks are the only vehicles that now make their way
through the lane that joins the creek with the highway. It is rumored
that some of the Provincetown freezers are making money. _Gaudeamus
igitur_; that is as it should be. The harbor that sheltered the wild
cod-fishermen from Europe, the Pilgrims in the Mayflower, the British
in the Revolution, and the finest fishing fleet on the coast in the
flush days of the high-liners, that harbor is the one that should still
be making money for the freezers.
A man cannot spend his life catching fish without learning something
about their habits. One citizen of Provincetown, at least, Captain
Nathaniel Atwood, found something interesting about them besides their
market value. Captain Atwood lived in Provincetown all his life and
died there in 1886 at the age of seventy-nine. He thus watched the
fisheries from their infancy, was in the prime of life during the boom,
and passed his declining years abreast of the declining years of this
great industry. Many another man had done the same, but though Atwood
had no more education than any other fisherman, he had marked powers of
observation and inference and a lively curiosity in all that pertained
to fish. He became an authority on his chosen subject--one of the most
intricate and baffling in the whole realm of natural history. His
fame spread to Boston and Cambridge, where such scholars as Agassiz
and Storer were glad to supplement their theoretical knowledge with
first-hand information from a man who had spent his life watching the
fish. During Atwood’s two years as representative in the State House,
the Legislature heard less rhetoric and more truth about the fish
business than at any time before or since. He was a member of the Essex
Institute at Salem and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
but the crowning honor came when he was asked to deliver a course of
lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston--an invitation which he
accepted with enthusiasm, to the delight of his audiences, and to the
amusement of his contemporaries in Provincetown, where he was regarded,
as all prophets (and particularly all Cape Cod prophets) are regarded
by their neighbors, with humorous skepticism, not altogether free from
envy nor quite unmixed with pride. The Captain’s achievements form a
picturesque chapter in the long history of Cape Cod fisheries. ‘Let his
name,’ says Dr. Storer, ‘be indelibly associated with the science to
which he is an honor.’
There was hard work but considerable excitement in the deep-sea
fisheries; racing and risk added spice to the Georges;
mackerel-catching, whether with jig or purse seine, was a sporting
business; even the trap fishermen had the fun of an occasional record
haul. But what can be said for the clam-digger, that slave of the
tides, who turns up a living between low water and high and knows
to a peck before he starts out how many clams he will bring home?
Yet there have always been men in every town on the Cape whose chief
occupation was clamming. A hundred years ago, the clam-digger was
usually a veteran of the Banks who had grown too old for livelier work.
But clamming for a livelihood nowadays is no work for old men. Digging
must be hard and fast if a dory is to be filled before the flats are
covered, and the best efforts of the shellbacks of the early days were
no match for the record of ten barrels a tide which was made a few
years ago by a Barnstable expert in the prime of life. Yet taking it
all in all, the old people dug an enormous number of clams. In 1802
more than one hundred men in Orleans were glad to earn seventy-five
cents a day digging clams for the fishermen, and a thousand barrels was
the annual average for the town. Laws were made to protect the Eastham
flats from the inroads of ‘strangers’; and with good reason, for it has
been estimated that a bushel of clams in the shell was worth in those
days about half as much as a bushel of corn, and could be procured much
more easily.
For the past twenty years clamming has been the chief and--except for
the fish traps and a few strings of lobster pots and eel-cars--the only
industry in Barnstable that has taken men off dry land: but it has
taken them by scores. To encourage the business, the selectmen of the
town, about 1906, granted sections of flats for the exclusive use of
any citizen who applied for them. The response was the same as that of
the Plymouth settlers in 1623 when the Court granted them land of their
own. The most enterprising began to propagate clams on their grants,
while the less ambitious citizens, and Finns who had not yet taken out
naturalization papers, found as much work as they wanted digging for
their more energetic or fortunate neighbors. From 1910 to 1925, the
business was in its heyday. Hundreds of acres of flats were dotted
with clam-diggers and dories, to the despair of the duck-hunters.
‘Barnstable cultivated clams’ appeared on the bills of fare in Boston
and New York hotels. Foreign citizens who lived on the South Side and
didn’t know a clam from a quahaug took grants and rented them to those
who did. The peak of the boom was reached in 1925, when an open season
was declared the year round instead of only through the winter. Trucks
backed down to the water’s edge to meet the dories as they returned on
the flood tide loaded to the gunwales. All summer the roads to Boston
were crowded with trucks full of clams. No time was wasted in packing
them in barrels. They reached market in the same ‘dreeners’ in which
they had been dug.
The selectmen, realizing the danger before it was too late, clapped a
closed season on again in 1927, and started a tempest in the harbor by
refusing to renew grants that had expired. The result is, at present,
some hardship to the men with money invested in the business; but
the measure protects the supply, which was melting fast before the
unprecedented ardor of the former grantees.
Quahaugs--hardly inferior to oysters in flavor, euphemistically
styled ‘little necks’ or ‘cherrystones’ on metropolitan menus, and
persistently called clams by untutored inlanders--are well worth the
effort involved in their capture. That this effort is great will be
instantly apparent to any one who watches a Wellfleet quahauger at
work. He chugs out to the west side of the great shallow Bay in a
converted catboat equipped with a gasoline engine. There he anchors,
and drags the bottom with a long-handled rake supplemented by a pouch
made of netting. Beginning well aft, he hitches his way forward,
pulling the heavy drag after him by its twenty-foot handle with a
series of jerks that give him the back and shoulders of a Hercules.
When he has reached the bow, he hauls his rake up and culls out
the quahaugs from the mixture of sand and eel-grass with which its
net-basket is filled. Then he shuffles aft again and repeats the
process for hours on end, coming up a boat’s length on his hawser as
soon as he has exhausted all the bottom within reach of his rake.
In Wellfleet this work is done largely by Finns, who on smooth days
between April and October make as high as ten dollars. Upwards of two
thousand barrels of these shellfish leave Wellfleet every year; a fleet
of about thirty boats is engaged in the business. Nowhere it seems is
there safety for the quahaug. At Orleans he is dredged from apparent
security in sixty feet of water. Eastham shows him no mercy. Twenty
years ago there were plenty of native quahaugs in Cotuit waters. A man
could dredge up thirty or forty bushels a day, and enough of them were
taken to keep Carleton Nickerson and his schooner, Luella Nickerson,
busy carrying them to New London, eight hundred bushels at a time,
as fast as he could make the trips. To-day if a man can rake up two
bushels on a tide he is lucky. In spite of their scarcity, the advance
in price keeps men dredging to the tune of twenty-five hundred barrels
a year--though many of these are quahaugs which wise men have planted
on grants and allowed to grow.
This business in Wellfleet is to-day on a par with the famous oyster
industry, though ten years ago it was of nowhere near the same
importance. And truly the oysterman has a proud history. Native oysters
made life easy for the Billingsgate pioneers as they had for the
Indians before them. Oysters gave Wellfleet its name when the town
grew big enough to be incorporated; oysters were the subject of laws
and restrictions a hundred years before the Revolution, and when a
mysterious epidemic attacked the oysters in 1770, the citizens turned
diseases to commodity and by vigorous protective measures achieved
greater prosperity than ever. Various guesses have been made as to
the cause of the epidemic. Some said it was a ground frost; others
believed that a great school of blackfish, left rotting on the shores
of the bay, so polluted the water that no oyster could live. The
soundest theory is that the oyster shells on which the seed catches
were removed and broken up to make lime, but the superstitious averred
that the Almighty slew them as a punishment for the wicked quarrels
between Wellfleeters and Easthamers. Whatever the cause, most of the
oysters died, and with them went an important fraction of Wellfleet’s
prosperity.
The citizens promptly took measures for protecting and propagating
those that remained. They could do no more for the moment, because the
Revolution was upon them, but after the war they went further and as
early as 1793 had begun to transplant seed oysters from the south. The
change in climate agreed with the imported bivalves so well that not
even the most fastidious could tell them from real Wellfleets.
Wellfleet, in fact, had a strangle-hold on the New England oyster
business. From the thirties to the seventies she supplied the State.
The best schooners that could be built were none too good for this
trade. They were the only fishing vessels that could match the
Provincetown fleet of Georges-Bankers in speed and beauty. Two of them,
the Express and the Telegraph, were designed by the great Samuel Hall,
of East Boston.
Before and after 1870, forty schooners, from eighty to ninety feet
long, the smallest of them with a capacity of 1750 bushels, were
busy carrying young oysters from the Potomac to Wellfleet, and from
Wellfleet to Boston and Portland. The firms of J. A. Stubbs, H. &
R. Atwood, D. Atwood, and R. R. Higgins Company were as well known
along Atlantic Avenue as they were in Wellfleet; but about 1900 the
proprietors of the Southern oyster-beds found other uses for their
seed oysters. This marked the beginning of the decline for Wellfleet.
Her dealers bought some from Long Island, to be sure, and bedded them
down as of old; and after 1914 an occasional schooner slipped quietly
through the Canal with a cargo of oysters from Wellfleet destined for a
sojourn in Cotuit waters; whence they emerged with the ‘Cotuit flavor,’
and a higher market value.
The last ten years, however, have seen the greatest falling off in
the business. In 1916, operating with a fifty-foot power boat and
a gasoline dredge that held three barrels, the Wellfleet oystermen
shipped sixteen thousand barrels at an average price of $7.50 a
barrel. This total was double what it had been the year before--the
increase being accounted for by the improved methods. But in 1926,
this gratifying figure had shrunk to eighteen hundred barrels, partly
because the management of the business changed and partly because
putting power against the oysters did not agree with them. Chiefly for
these reasons, then, and only in very recent years, has the Wellfleet
oysterman been caught up with and passed by the plebeian quahauger. The
fact that his oysters to-day fetch from twelve to eighteen dollars a
barrel instead of seven or eight dollars, gives him but cold comfort.
But what of Cotuit--the name that is synonymous with oysters in every
city from El Paso to Portland and as far west as Denver? In the days
of the Indians, Cotuit, like Wellfleet, had native oysters thriving in
the shallow waters of its harbor. Oysters, indeed, were the magnet that
first drew settlers to the South Sea, a name which covered the whole
shore-front from Bass River to Poponesset. Jonathan Hatch, who left
West Barnstable for the vicinity of Oyster Island about 1655, was among
the earliest pioneers of that region, and he undoubtedly sold oysters,
which he found growing thick on the beds close to his farm, to Nicholas
Davis, who a little later had a trading post on the shore of Lewis Bay
in Hyannis. Davis, at all events, included oysters in his miscellaneous
business; though the method of handling them was at that early date
very different from the present. They were opened and pickled in brine
instead of being shipped fresh--the process being known as ‘making
oysters.’ For years the shells supplied the community with lime.
Another early South Side oysterman was Benjamin Bearse, who died in
Hyannis in 1748. In his will he left his real estate to his younger
sons, but stipulated that his oldest son, Augustian, should be allowed
a convenient way to the landing ‘where I make oysters.’
From such beginnings grew the now celebrated Cotuit oysters. The
business is still the chief industry of the village, although not so
many oysters are raised there as formerly, because of the advance
in the price of seed oysters from Long Island--whence the Cotuits
are transplanted. Lack of capital, therefore, the same cause which
signed the death warrant of the Cape fishing fleets, has forced a
good many Cotuit men out of the oyster industry. The half-dozen or so
that remain send an annual total of about eighty-five hundred barrels
of the finest oysters in the world to the markets of Boston and New
York. This crop is the result of a yearly planting of about thirty-two
thousand bushels of seed from Long Island. For some reason, in spite
of repeated experiments, the spawn refuses to catch anywhere in Cotuit
Harbor, though small oysters thrive splendidly. This phenomenon is what
forces the local oystermen to import their seed and let the alchemy
of the harbor turn it into full-flavored Cotuits. The importance of
the Cotuit shellfisheries will be brought home to lovers of statistics
when they learn that after all shipping charges have been deducted,
about $100,000 a year comes into the village from the combined sale of
oysters and quahaugs.
‘I don’t care much for fish,’ said an old lady in a Barnstable
boarding-house, as a smoked herring was placed before her. ‘What!’
exclaimed the old gentleman who sat opposite; ‘don’t you like a
herring? Everybody likes a herring.’ And so they did when the old
gentleman was young; but fashions change, and the herring, once the
subject of complex and ever-changing laws, may now come upstream to
spawn in comparative safety. It is dangerous for so optimistic a
philosopher as Thoreau to lapse even for a moment into pessimistic
prophecies. ‘There are many Herring Rivers on the Cape,’ he writes.
‘They may soon be more abundant than herring.’ But the herring have
survived with the rivers they have named. Every spring the waters of
these narrow creeks are dark with them as they shoulder one another
in their eagerness to reach a pond. A few men on the lower Cape whose
houses are near a herring river, take some in dip nets either to eat
fresh or to smoke and hang in their barns, a dozen skewered together
with a stick through the gills, but the upper Cape (Mashpee and Bourne
in particular) is the only region where the business thrives to-day.
The middle of the last century, however, had a different tale to tell.
Citizens of every town were jealous of their rights in the herring
fisheries, for at first the General Court, and later the selectmen,
allowed every taxpayer free access to the rivers. Sometimes, if they
saw fit, the towns would rent these fisheries to the highest bidder,
reserving to every inhabitant the privilege of buying what he wanted
for his own use at the minimum price. Even mills--the construction and
maintenance of which were encouraged in every way--were not allowed
to interfere with the precious alewives. When it happened that a mill
was so situated as to obstruct the spring run, it was closed until the
spawning season was over. Incredible as it may seem, the citizens of
the South Side about 1740 dug a canal from Nine-Mile Pond to the sea in
order to bring more herring into the village. And just such a passage
was dug in 1917 to let the herring pass from the newly constructed Cape
Cod Canal into Monument River and so to Great Herring Pond.
Mashpee is the herring center to-day. Within a few years a thousand
barrels have been shipped in a season from the streams of this little
town. Salted and sunbaked, these fish yet fetch prices which warrant
the small effort involved in taking them with nets, curing them and
heading up the barrels. In 1890, the selectmen of Bourne rented the
Herring River fisheries for a thousand dollars--reserving two barrels
for every ‘Indian’ family and one barrel for every white family.
Perhaps after all the old gentleman was partly right, and some still
like a herring!