FISHING "DOWN OUTSIDE"
In the beginning of things were the cunners, known along
Massachusetts Bay mainly as perch. Names are good only in certain
localities. If you ask a Hingham boy how the cunners are biting he
will be likely to throw rounded beach stones at you, thinking he
is being made game of. Down at Newport, R. I., they catch cunners
and if you talk salt-water perch to them it is at your peril.
Elsewhere they are chogsett, or peradventure burgall, but
everywhere they are nippers and baitstealers, and the trait which
makes these names universal is the reason why in the beginning of
things were the cunners. For the first bait of the first fisherman
that ever threw hook into the North Atlantic was taken by a
cunner. There are today forty million, more or less, North
Atlantic fishermen who will corroborate this testimony with
personal experience. It may be that the first hook was taken by
some other fish, but the cunner got in ahead on the bait. The
cunner is not very large. He rarely tips the scales at a pound,
but he will eat his own weight in bait in a day and he is numerous
and pretty nearly omnipresent.
Wherever the salt tides flow, whether it be up the sandy stretches
of a clean bottomed cove, along the mud bottom of the creek, or
amid the red-brown tangle of kelp on some ledge awash a mile off
shore, there comes the cunner, suiting his color chameleon-like to
that of the bottom.
On the mud he is brown, on the sand gray, but if you wish to see
handsome creatures you must pull them from some bottom where the
red kelp grows. Then their rich bronzy reds will make you forget
their bait thievery and love them for their beauty.
If you will go back to Dombey and Son and read the description of
Mr. Carker you will realize that Dickens must have been fishing
off the ledges of some English headland when he planned that
gentleman and his characteristics. In whatever mood or from
whatever side Mr. Carker approaches you it is his teeth which
dominate the situation. I am convinced that every time Dickens
tried to make him otherwise he found another cunner tugging and
drew him up.
Judging by Carker it must have been good fishing for cunners. Like
Carker this fish comes to you teeth first. His mouth is so full of
them that they stick out like quills on the fretful porcupine.
Nature, which gives each tools for the trade which he most loves,
made him a bait-stealer extraordinary with these.
The beginner who fishes in the salt sea does it almost invariably
with a pole, whether from cliff or dock or from a boat. Experience
brings the desire for the hand line. The farmer's boy who comes
down for the salt hay tucks his long birch pole into the bottom of
the wagon and the trolley tripper comes to the beach with his
split bamboo. Down in Maine years ago the pinkies used to sail
equipped with numerous short poles whereby to trail for mackerel.
In the day of your grandfather and mine it must have been a sight
to see the crew of a pink-sterned chebacco boat dancing from pole
to pole flipping the number ones aboard when a good school struck
in. Of course, all that is a waste of energy and of wood. A hand
line is the more intimate and serves the purpose better. A man is
not really a salt water fisherman till he has learned the use of
one. Then let him go forth. Through that line shall flow to his
nerve ganglia deep sea knowledge galore. By it shall come to him
in time all creatures of the vast deep.
*****
Lovers of deep sea fishing grow best from small beginnings. They
yearn from tide flats to the spar buoy in the harbor channel,
thence through Hull Gut to the rocky bottoms about the Brewsters.
After that the sirens sing to them from every wash of white waves
over ledges far out to sea, caution drowns in the temptation of
blue water, and they fish no more except it is "down outside."
They who dwell on the very rim of this deep sea, at Marblehead or
Nahant, at Cohasset or at Duxbury never know the full depth of its
lure as do those who must win to it from the Dorchester flats or
the winding reaches of the Fore River. To these latter only is the
perfection of desire and the full joy of fulfilment. You can leave
the shallow bays inland only when the tide serves, hence gropings
for a tender on the beach of starlit mornings, the chuckle of
halliard blocks in the rose of dawn and a long drift in the pink
glow of morning fog while the boom swings idly and the turn of the
flood drifts you eastward. Little wayward winds, too lazy to make
a ripple on the glassy surface of the water or stir the sail, play
strange tricks with this morning fog. They carve chasms in it and
open tunnels down which you see far for a moment, then they wind
it like a wet sheet about you and you may not see the bobstay from
your post at the tiller.
[Illustration: Outward Bound in Plymouth Harbor]
They bring you sounds and scents from afar. You know you are
abreast Grape Island now far you scent the wild roses on the
point. Another breeze brings faint odors of the charnel house from
Bradley's. A stronger chases it away and you have a whiff of an
early breakfast, brown toast, fried fish and coffee, at Rose
Cliff. The chuckle of oars in rowlocks tells you that the old
fisherman is astir at Fort Point and the man with the new motor
boat over at Hough's Neck is giving it a little run before
breakfast, with the muffler off, as usual. A gull goes over,
flying low. You do not see but you hear the soft swish of the
wings. By and by the sun shows through a rift in the fog and you
begin to move before a faint air from the southwest. A half hour
more and the shreds of fog are melting upward into the blue of a
clear day, the wind fills your sail and you are sweeping eastward
with wind and tide round the Sheep Island bar.
The Argo, bound eastward for the golden fleece, bearing Jason,
Hercules, Theseus and the other Greek heroes, carried no higher
hopes and no greater joy in the dangers and mysteries of the sea
than does many a keen-bowed sloop or broad-beamed cat bound
"outside" on a fishing trip. It is neither the goal nor the gain
that counts. It is the spirit of the quest. The golden fleece
looms eastward over all such prows. In the tide rip of Hull Gut,
where current meets current at certain turns of the tide in such
fashion that "the merry men" dance gleefully, is a dash of
adventure, and if you come through with a cockpit half full of
water and your clam bait afloat so much the merrier. Thus you are
baptized into the sect of the deep sea rovers and the leap of the
mysterious green dancers into your boat is the coming of Neptune
himself. Henceforth his trident is at your mast head, a broom
wherewith to sweep the seas as Van Tromp did. The conquerors are
abroad.
You may bother about the skerries that skirt Boston Light if you
will. There are cunners big and ravenous at the base of Shag Rocks
or along Boston or Martin's ledges. I dare say there are flounders
skimming the sand to the east of Hull, but you will hardly care
for these if you have Neptune aboard. His spirit will bid you jibe
your sail to that freshening west wind off Allerton and bowl down
the coast parallel with the long stretch of Nantasket sands. Again
at the spindle on Harding's Ledge you may catch cunners; perhaps a
stray cod. A cod! There you speak a magic word to the fisherman
from the tide flats far inland. There is the golden fleece for
which the Argonauts of the land-locked harbor set their prows to
the eastward in the starlight. A pull on the sheet and it is
full-and-by to the southeast, with Minot's Light looming gray dead
ahead in the gray wash of breakers. Black-headed gulls swing
across your wake, and in their laughter rings a wild note of sea
freedom. Thus the Vikings laughed as their boats wan to seaward
outside the black cliffs.
*****
The cod is the solid citizen of the sea. In some localities they
call him the ground keeper, and he seems to be that--a sort of
land owner of the sea bottom. Just as ashore most substantial
success comes from land-holding, and those who own the earth are
almost invariably financial magnates also, so the cod is a banker.
Some people, not financial magnates themselves in all probability,
have given this substantial dweller of the under-water plateaus
undignified names. They call him pilker, scrod, groper, etc. This
is pure envy. When he bites it means business. There is none of
the bait-stealing tomfoolery of the cunner, none of the dancing
hilarity of the pollock. It is just a steady down tug that makes
the line cut your fingers and likely takes your hand under water.
If he is a good one you will need to sit back and snub the line
over the gunwale in that first plunge which follows the stab of
the hook. Then it is a steady, muscle-grinding pull to get him up.
It is a stogy, heavy resistance which he offers. To lift him out
of his depths is a good deal like explaining to a middle-class
Englishman something that he does not wish to comprehend, but by
and by, leaning perilously over the rail, you see his tawny bulk
coming up through a well of chrysophrase lined with the
scintillant gold of the imprisoned sun. A lift and a swing, and he
is aboard. He may weigh anything from a few pounds up to a score.
Cod have been caught weighing 150 pounds, but not in Massachusetts
Bay of late years.
A half-mile to the east of Minot's and southward to beyond
Scituate harbor runs an irregular ridge along the sea bottom at a
depth of six to ten fathoms, while to the east and west is deeper
water. Something like a half-mile farther eastward again you will
find another, both probably moraines of sand and gravel on the sea
bottom like those one finds ashore. These ridges the fish seem to
frequent rather than the valleys between, and if you will ease
your sheets and, setting your boat's prow a little off the wind,
drift slowly along these ridges, you will be able to cast your
lines among the best of the summer society. The cod go into things
only on the ground flood. It is a way substantial citizens have.
You will need to let your sinker strike bottom and then lift it a
little, but not too far. A greased lead dropped will show you a
variety of bottom. Here are rocks, about which especially the cod
congregate and where sometimes giant cunners dwell, there is a
sandy stretch which is beloved of the big flounders, which when
hooked make a gallant though unsteady fight before you get them
up.
I am always sorry for the flounder. He looks as if he might have
once been a fish of respectable, perhaps even beautiful shape and
proportions, that had met with an accident. He is a shore
frequenter, especially when young, and I cannot help thinking that
in antediluvian days when mastodons were plentiful and went wading
they stepped on the flounders. A flounder is shaped just as if he
had been run over by an Atlantic avenue truck. His eyes moved over
onto one side of his head, fleeing hand in hand to escape the
wheel. His mouth was mashed fairly and seems to be perpetually
ejaculating "Help, murder!" and one side of him is still white as
snow with the fear of the affair. He ought to be in a cripples'
home, but he is not. Instead he is as jolly as a sand man and
amply able to take care of his wreck of a body, which is flat
indeed but fat. Necessity is the mother of invention. When the
flounder sees food that he wants he falls upon it and holds it
down with ease while he devours it. A slender fish would have no
such chance.
At this time of year come roving northward from unknown feeding
grounds outside the Cape the haddock. There are people who call
the haddock "scoodled skull-joe," probably in derision because he
is such a dapper fish. He is so silvery and neat that the black
stripe down his side seems to give him the effect of being clad in
the very latest thing in summer trousers. The Banks fishermen who
sail from Gloucester and are probably more intimately acquainted
with the personal affairs of fishes than anyone else, say that the
haddock, though now reformed, has not always been what he should
be. The haddock, they say, was once such a young sport and
conducted himself in such unseemly fashion that he was in danger
of hell fire. In fact, the devil, searching the Grand Banks for
whom he might devour, took the shameless youngster between his
finger and thumb and held him aloft in glee, saying, "You for the
gridiron." But the agile haddock, skilled in getting out of
scrapes, squirmed loose and fled in the depths of the sea. In
proof of this adventure if you examine a haddock's body just
behind the gills you will see the marks where the Old Boy's
fingers scorched him, the scars remaining to this day. I am not
sure whether this fable teaches us to be good or to be agile.
With the cod, as often most intimately with him in the boneless
codfish box, come the hake and the cusk, both rated as inferior
fish, though it is hard to see why. The cusk in particular is
esteemed by the fishermen for their own use above any other fish
that is taken from the trawls on the banks. Go down into the
forepeak of any Gloucesterman and ask the crew, while they "mug
up," if they like baked cusk. You will see their mouths water and
their eyes shine in appreciation of the suggestion. Yet the cusk
is hardly a beauty. In fact, the first man who suggested eating
him must have been hungry or else adventurous beyond the common
run of men. If you will take a bilious looking eel and compress
him lengthwise till the becomes a stubby bunch, put on him a pair
of yellow goggle eyes that stare madly as if at ghosts, and seem,
withal to be sadly afflicted with strabismus, you will have the
beginnings of a cusk. Then he must have a broad fin that begins at
the back of his neck, promenades his spine to and including his
tail and returns beneath him to the spot where some people wear
neckties. That is a part of the paraphernalia of this denizen of
the deep sea. Often when brought to the surface this peculiar fish
will swell up with imprisoned air until he is enormously fat and
covered with blisters.
The cod and the flounders, cunners and pollock will make up the
bulk of your catch as you drift along these under-sea moraines,
though now and then a freak may come to your hook in the shape of
a dogfish or a skate. These are to be looked for and welcomed.
Once the horse mackerel struck into Massachusetts Bay. These weigh
a thousand pounds apiece and take live fish of considerable size
on the fly. In those days a deep-sea fisherman, hauling in a
respectable cod, was likely to find adventure enough with the
situation suddenly reversed and a horse mackerel hauling in the
line with the fisherman, on the end of it.
It is leviathans of the deep like these that Jason Theseus and
their companion Greeks bear in mind as the Argo drifts and the
catch steadily grows. By and by the low sun flares red through
surly clouds of nightfall. The sea is getting up and it is a long
sail up the coast to the lee of the outer light. Then with
darkness gathering and a head wind and tide the real glory of the
day comes. Out of the black west blows half a gale. The waves curl
in ghostly phosphorescence and the merry men dance wildly in Hull
Gut. It is a long and dogged fight to win through these against
the swift tide to the comparative safety of the shelter of
Peddocks, where you catch the back wash that helps you well along
the lee of Prince's Head.
And so the Argonauts sail westward again in the pitch blackness of
the gathering storm. They know the harbor floor as they know the
floors of their homes and can as well feel their way. What if the
falling tide leaves the flats bare and they may not win to the
mooring, but must lie at anchor off the channel edge until morning
shows gray through the rain? They have won the golden fleece of
adventure from the blue sea to eastward and sailed home with it.