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    Gloucester on the Wind: America's Greatest Fishing Port in the Days of Sail
    Gloucester on the Wind: America's Greatest Fishing Port in the Days of Sail
    Gloucester on the Wind: America's Greatest Fishing Port in the Days of Sail
    Ebook211 pages47 minutes

    Gloucester on the Wind: America's Greatest Fishing Port in the Days of Sail

    By Joseph E. Garland

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    About this ebook

    Gloucester on the Wind is an engaging history of this town, with never before seen historical photographs.


    Since the development of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, the camera has been used as a tool of both discovery and preservation. Photographs bring alive our image of the past, and can open a floodgate of memories and nostalgia or inspire curiosity and a sense of history. Originally founded by a fishing company from Dorchester, England, in 1623, Gloucester has always been linked to fishing and the sea. By 1870 Gloucester was the leading fishing port in the Western Hemisphere, and its great fleet of fast, white-winged schooners ranged deep into the heart of the Atlantic in search of cod, haddock, halibut, and mackerel. These stunningly beautiful ships and the hardy men who sailed them made "Gloucester" an evocation of courage, perseverance, and seamanship unique in America's maritime heritage.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateApr 1, 1995
    ISBN9781439616239
    Gloucester on the Wind: America's Greatest Fishing Port in the Days of Sail
    Author

    Joseph E. Garland

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      Book preview

      Gloucester on the Wind - Joseph E. Garland

      1855

      Introduction

      The fog had gone, but a sullen sea ran in great rollers behind it. The We’re Here slid, as it were, into long, sunk avenues and ditches which felt quite sheltered and homelike if they would only stay still; but they changed without rest or mercy, and flung up the schooner to crown one peak of a thousand gray hills, while the wind hooted through her rigging as she zigzagged down the slopes.

      Captains Courageous

      Rudyard Kipling

      No chapter in America’s hectic history has been shut with such a snap as Gloucester’s. After three hundred years of fishing the richest banks of the Atlantic, under no power but the wind’s—with no help but a sextant, compass, taffrail log, sounding lead, and sea sense—the end came suddenly; in the forty years since the last schooner unloaded the last trip of hand-caught codfish, overkill, greed, and neglect have endangered to the brink of extinction what until too recently was taken for granted as the inexhaustible bounty of the sea.

      Nowhere in the Western Hemisphere was that reckless romance with wind and wave pursued more fruitfully or more fatefully than from this Beau Port. Discovered on the edge of the wilderness and named by Samuel de Champlain in 1606, it was settled in 1623 by fishermen from Dorchester and then Gloucester (in the west of old England). Here on the shore of New England was planted the first outpost of the Crown’s Colony of Massachusetts Bay.

      A century ago upwards of four hundred of Gloucester’s uniquely beautiful two-masted schooners sailed forth to the northwest Atlantic fishing grounds from Virginia to Greenland. Thrashing year-round through seas infamous for their treachery, tens of thousands of brave and hardy fishermen returned to market with hundreds of millions of fish, every resisting ounce pulled up from the bottom with hook and line, or brought over the rail, inch by straining inch, in hand-hauled nets.

      No kind fate decrees that those who go to sea return: during the romanticized glory days of the windships between 1830 and 1900—a mere fifth of Gloucester’s history—3,800 of her fishermen never sailed back around Eastern Point, nor did 670 of her schooners. The toll of these years alone on a town averaging but 17,000 souls exceeded by more than seventy percent the entire American losses in the War of 1812.

      What kind of a price is this to pay for the bounty of the Lord, for feeding hungry mouths? What sort of compact did these men make, they who went down to the sea? The object of this work is to invoke a vision, albeit fragmentary, of a departed and poignantly recent past as a reminder to those of us who are the inheritors and beneficiaries of what only a rapidly dwindling band remembers at all. The reality of that vision is defined, limited, and by its nature distorted by the photographic montage that I (whose family blood is in the shallow soil here, yet who like everyone else remembers so very little, and who has never gone fishing) have selected.

      Perhaps my view as a Gloucester writer is no less idiosyncratic, after all, than whatever motivated the dozens of photographers whose work appears here to aim their old-fashioned cameras at this or that at a particular moment on a particular day in whatever year. Nor does it really matter.

      What does matter is that this sorrowful, hopeful birthplace of the American fisheries has survived lean times and times of plenty, writers, photographers, and artists by the thousands, summer folks by the tens of thousands, tourists by the millions, and even its fishermen. Surprisingly, much of our sprawling, sea-girt, wilderness-embraced, saltmarsh-insinuated, glacierforsaken, tide-licked place remains recognizably, if ever more tenuously, as it once was when clouds of sail scudded over the harbor. Beyond this, the legacy of the long voyages under the wind, which ruled every going and every coming and breathed life and death into every corner of the port from 1623 on, has become the province of the antiquarian and the archeologist.

      Artists have a prominent place in preserving visions of Gloucester’s past. In his twenty-five most productive years before he died in 1865, our mysterious Fitz Hugh Lane immortalized in his glowing oils the eerie luminescence of Gloucester Harbor and the still powerful presence of the fishermen and their schooners. Later the robust visitor Winslow Homer captured the romantic vitality and contrasting moods of subject and setting. Many lesser knights and ladies of the brush followed to make a pioneer summer art colony of the more or less oblivious old fishtown. None caught the feel of the schooners at sea, and of the fishermen (ghosts in his mind’s eye), like my friend the late Tom Hoyne.

      Photography, on the other hand, emerged from the Civil War as a documentary art. By the early 1870s stereoscopic views of the real Gloucester were being produced by Rogers and the Procter Brothers, newspaper publishers who were far ahead of their time in reporting on the doings

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