American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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As early as 1633 fish began to be exported from Boston, and very shortly
thereafter the industry had assumed so important a position that the
general court adopted laws for its encouragement, exempting vessels, and
stock from taxation, and granting to fishermen immunity from military
duty. At the close of the seventeenth century, Massachusetts was exporting
over $400,000 worth of fish annually. From that time until well into the
middle of the last century the fisheries were so thoroughly the leading
industry of Massachusetts that the gilded codfish which crowns the dome of
the State House at Boston, only fitly typifies by its prominence above the
city the part which its natural prototypes played in building up the
commonwealth. In the Revolution and the early wars of the United States,
the fishermen suffered severely. Crowded together on the banks, they were
easy prey for the British cruisers, who, in time of peace or in time of
war, treated them about as they chose, impressing such sailors as seemed
useful, and seizing such of their cargo as the whim of the captain of the
cruiser might suggest. And even before the colonies had attained the
status of a nation, the jealousy and hostility of Great Britain bore
heavily on the fortunes of the New England fishermen. It was then, as it
has been until the present day, the policy of Great Britain to build up in
every possible way its navy, and to encourage by all imaginable devices
the development of a large body of able seamen, by whom the naval vessels
might be manned. Accordingly parliament undertook to discourage the
American fisherman by hostile legislation, so that a body of deep-sea
fishermen might be created claiming English ports for their home. At first
the effort was made to prohibit the colonies from exporting fish. The
great Roman Catholic countries of France, Spain, and Portugal took by far
the greater share of the fish sent out, though the poorer qualities were
shipped to the West Indies and there exchanged for sugar and molasses.
Against this trade Lord North leveled some of his most offensive measures,
proposing bills, indeed, so unjust and tyrannical that outcries were
raised against them even in the British House of Lords. To cut off
intercourse with the foreign peoples who took the fish of the Yankees by
hundreds and thousands of quintals, and gave in return rum, molasses, and
bills of exchange on England, to destroy the calling in which every little
New England seacoast village was interested above all things, Lord North
first proposed to prohibit the colonies trading in fish with any country
save the "mother" country, and secondly, to refuse to the people of New
England the right to fish on the Great Banks of Newfoundland, thus
confining them to the off-shore banks, which already began to show signs
of being fished out. Even a hostile parliament was shocked by these
measures. Every witness who appeared before the House of Commons testified
that they would work irreparable injury to New England, would rob six
thousand of her able-bodied men of their means of livelihood, and would
drive ten thousand more into other vocations. But the power of the
ministry forced the bills through, though twenty-one peers joined in a
solemn protest. "We dissent," said they, "because the attempt to coerce,
by famine, the whole body of the inhabitants of great and populous
provinces, is without example in the history of this, or, perhaps, of any
civilized nations." This was in 1775, and the revolution in America had
already begun. It was the policy of Lord North to force the colonists to
stop their opposition to unjust and offensive laws by imposing upon them
other laws more unjust and more offensive still--a sort of homeopathic
treatment, not infrequently applied by tyrants, but which seldom proves
effective. In this case it aligned the New England fishermen to a man with
the Revolutionists. A Tory fisherman would have fared as hard as

"Old Floyd Ireson for his hard heart
Tarr'd and feathered and carried in a cart,
By the woman of Marblehead."

Nor was this any inconsiderable or puny element which Lord North had
deliberately forced into revolt. Massachusetts alone had at the outbreak
of the Revolution five hundred fishing vessels, and the town of Marblehead
one hundred and fifty sea-going fishing schooners. Gloucester had nearly
as many, and all along the coast, from Maine to New York, there were
thrifty settlers, farmers and fishermen, by turns, as the season served.
New England was preeminently a maritime state. Its people had early
discovered that a livelihood could more easily be plucked from the green
surges of ocean, white-capped as they sometimes were, than wrested from
the green and boulder-crowned hills. Upon the fisheries rested practically
all the foreign commerce. They were the foundation upon which were built
the superstructure of comfort and even luxury, the evidences of which are
impressive even in the richer New England of to-day. Therefore, when the
British ministry attacked this calling, it roused against the crown not
merely the fisherman and the sailor, but the merchants as well--not only
the denizens of the stuffy forecastles of pinks and schooners, but the
owners of the fair great houses in Boston and New Bedford. Lord North's
edicts stopped some thousands of sturdy sailors from catching cod and
selling them to foreign peoples. They accordingly became privateers, and
preyed upon British commerce until it became easier for a mackerel to slip
through the meshes of a seine than for a British ship to make its usual
voyages. The edicts touched the commercial Bostonians in their pockets,
and stimulated them to give to the Revolution that countenance and support
of the "business classes" which revolutionary movements are apt to lack,
and lacking which, are apt to fail.

The war, of course, left the fisheries crippled and almost destroyed. It
had been a struggle between the greatest naval power of the world, and a
loose coalition of independent colonies, without a navy and without a
centralized power to build and maintain one. Massachusetts did, indeed,
equip an armed ship to protect her fishermen, but partly because the
protection was inadequate, and partly as a result of the superior
attractions of privateering, the fishing boats were gradually laid up,
until scarcely enough remained in commission to supply the demands of the
home merchant for fish. Where there had been prosperity and bustle about
wharves, and fish-houses, there succeeded idleness and squalor.
Shipbuilding was prostrate, commerce was dead. The sailors returned to the
farms, shipped on the privateers, or went into Washington's army. But when
peace was declared, they flocked to their boats, and began to rebuild
their shattered industry. Marblehead, which went into the war with 12,000
tons of shipping, came out with 1500. Her able-bodied male citizens had
decreased in numbers from 1200 to 500. Six hundred of her sons, used to
hauling the seine and baiting the trawl, were in British prisons. How many
from this and other fishing ports were pressed against their will into
service on British men-of-war, history has no figures to show; but there
were hundreds. Yet, prostrate as the industry was, it quickly revived, and
soon again attained those noble proportions that had enabled Edmund Burke
to say of it, in defending the colonies before the House of Commons:

"No ocean but what is vexed with their fisheries; no climate that is not
witness of their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the
activity of France, nor the dextrous and firm sagacity of English
enterprise ever carried this perilous mode of hardy enterprise to the
extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are
still, as it were, in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of
manhood."

In 1789, immediately upon the formation of the Government under which we
now live, the system of giving bounties to the deep-sea fishermen was
inaugurated and was continued down to the middle of the last century,
when a treaty with England led to its discontinuance. The wisest
statesmen and publicists differ sharply concerning the effect of bounties
and special governmental favors, like tariffs and rebates, upon the
favored industry, and so, as long as the fishing bounty was continued, its
needfulness was sharply questioned by one school, while ever since its
withdrawal the opposing school has ascribed to that act all the later ills
of the industry. Indeed, as this chapter is being written, a subsidy
measure before Congress for the encouragement of American shipping,
contains a proviso for a direct payment from the national treasury to
fishing vessels, proportioned to their size and the numbers of their
crews. It is not my purpose to discuss the merits, either of the measure
now pending, or of the many which have, from time to time, encouraged or
depressed our fishermen. It would be hard, however, for any one to read
the history of the fisheries without being impressed by the fact that the
hardy and gallant men who have risked their lives in this most arduous of
pursuits, have suffered from too much government, often being sorely
injured by a measure intended solely for their good, as in the case of the
Treaty of 1818. That instrument was negotiated for the purpose of
maintaining the rights of American fishermen on the banks off
Newfoundland, Labrador, and Nova Scotia. The American commissioners failed
to insist upon the right of the fishermen to land for bait, and this
omission, together with an ambiguity in defining the "three-mile limit,"
enabled the British government to harass, harry, and even confiscate
American fishermen for years. American fleets were sent into the disputed
waters, and two nations were brought to the point of war over the question
which should control the taking of fish in waters that belonged to
neither, and that held more than enough for all peoples. To settle the
dispute the United States finally entered into another treaty which
secured the fishermen the rights ignored in the treaty of 1818, but threw
American markets open to Canadian fishermen. This the men of Gloucester
and Marblehead, nurtured in the school of protection, declared made their
last state worse than the first. So the tinkering of statutes and treaties
went on, even to the present day, the fisheries languishing meanwhile, not
in our country alone, but in all engaged in the effort to get special
privileges on the fishing grounds. Whenever man tries thus to monopolize,
by sharp practise or exclusive laws, the bounty which God has provided in
abundance for all, the end is confusion, distress, disaster, and too often
war.

But the story of what the politicians, and those postgraduates of
politics, the statesmen, have done for and against the fishermen of New
England, is not that which I have to tell. Rather, it is my purpose to
tell something of the lives of the fishermen, the style of their vessels,
the portions of the rolling Atlantic which they visit in search of their
prey, their dire perils, their rough pleasures, and their puny profits.
First, then, as to their prey, and its haunts.

The New England fishermen, in the main, seek three sorts of fish--the
mackerel, the cod, and the halibut. These they find on the shallow banks
which border the coast from the southern end of Delaware to the very
entrance of Baffin's Bay. The mackerel is a summer fish, coming and going
with the regularity of the equinoxes themselves. Early in March, they
appear off the coast, and all summer work their way northward, until, in
early November, they disappear off the coast of Labrador, as suddenly as
though some titanic seine had swept the ocean clear of them. What becomes
of the mackerel in winter, neither the inquisitive fisherman nor the
investigating scientist has ever been able to determine. They do not, like
migratory birds, reappear in more temperate southern climes, but vanish
utterly from sight. Eight months, therefore, is the term of the mackerel
fishing, and the men engaged in it escape the bitterest rigors of the
winter fisheries on the Newfoundland Banks, where the cod is taken from
January to January. Yet it has dangers of its own--dangers of a sort that,
to the sailor, are more menacing than the icebergs or even the
swift-rushing ocean liners of the Great Banks. For mackerel fishing is
pursued close in shore, in shallow water, where the sand lies a scant two
fathoms below the surface, and a north-east wind will, in a few minutes,
raise, a roaring sea that will pound the stoutest vessel to bits against
the bottom. With plenty of sea-room, and water enough under the keel, the
sailor cares little for wind or waves; but in the shallows, with the beach
only a few miles to the leeward, and the breakers showing white through
the darkness, like the fangs of a beast of prey, the captain of a fishing
schooner on George's banks has need of every resource of the sailor, if he
is to beat his way off, and not feed the fishes that he came to take.
Nowhere is the barometer watched more carefully than on the boats cruising
about on George's. When its warning column falls, the whole fleet makes
for the open sea, however good the fishing may be. But, with all possible
caution, the losses are so many that George's, early in its history, came
to have the ghoulish nickname of "Dead Men's Bank."

North of George's Bank--which lies directly east of Cape Cod--are found,
in order, Brown's Bank, La Have, Western Bank--in the center of which lies
Sable Island, famed as an ocean graveyard, whose shifting sands are as
thickly strewn with the bleaching ribs of stout ships as an old green
churchyard is set with mossy marbles--St. Peter's Bank, and the Grand Bank
of Newfoundland. All of these lie further out to sea than George's, and
are tenanted only by cod and halibut, though in the waters near the shore
the fishermen pursue the mackerel, the herring--which, in cottonseed oil
masquerades as American sardines--and the menhaden, used chiefly for
fertilizer. The boats used in the fisheries are virtually of the same
model, whatever the fish they may seek--except in the case of the menhaden
fishery, which more and more is being prosecuted in slow-going steamers,
with machines for hauling seines, and trawl nets. But the typical fishing
boat engaged in the food fisheries is a trim, swift schooner, built almost
on the lines of a yacht, and modeled after a type designed by Edward
Burgess, one of New England's most famous yacht designers. Seaworthy and
speedy both are these fishing boats of to-day, fit almost to sail for the
"America's" cup, modeled, as they are, from a craft built by the designer
of a successful cup defender. That the fishermen ply their calling in
vessels so perfectly fitted to their needs is due to a notable exhibition
of common sense and enterprise on the part of the United States Fish
Commission. Some years ago almost anything that would float was thought
good enough for the bank fishermen. In the earliest days of the industry,
small sloops were used. These gave way to the "Chebacco boat," a boat
taking its name from the town of Chebacco, Massachusetts, where its rig
was first tested. This was a fifteen to twenty ton boat almost as sharp at
the stern as in the bow, carrying two masts, both cat-rigged. A perfect
marvel of crankiness a boat so rigged would seem; but the New England
seamen became so expert in handling them that they took them to all of the
fishing banks, and even made cruises to the West Indies with cargoes of
fish, bringing back molasses and rum. A development of the Chebacco boat
was the pink, differing only in its rig, which was of the schooner model.
But in time the regular schooner crowded out all other types of fishing
vessels. In 1882, the members of the Fish Commission, studying the
frightful record of wrecks and drownings among the Gloucester and
Marblehead fishermen, reached the conclusion that an improved model
fishing boat might be the means of saving scores of lives. The old model
was seen to be too heavily rigged, with too square a counter, and
insufficient draught. Accordingly, a model boat, the "Grampus," was
designed, the style of which has been pretty generally followed in the
fishing fleet.

[Illustration: ON THE BANKS.]

Such a typical craft is a schooner of about eighty tons, clean-cut about
the bows, and with a long overhang at the stern that would give her a
rakish, yacht-like air, except for the evidences of her trade, with which
her deck is piled. Her hull is of the cutter model, sharp and deep,
affording ample storage room. She has a cabin aft, and a roomy forecastle,
though such are the democratic conditions of the fishing trade that part
of the crew bunks aft with the skipper. The galley, a little box of a
place, is directly abaft the foremast, and back of it to the cabin, are
the fishbins for storing fish, after they are cleaned and salted or iced.
Nowadays, when the great cities, within a few hours' sail of the banks,
offer a quick market for fresh fish, many of the fishing boats bring in
their catch alive--a deep well, always filled with sea-water, taking the
place of the fishbins. The deck, forward of the trunk cabin, is flush, and
provided with "knockdown" partitions, so that hundreds of flapping fish
may be confined to any desired portion. Amidships of the bankers rises a
pile of five or six dories, the presence of which tells the story of the
schooner's purpose, for fishing on the Grand Banks for cod is mainly done
with trawls which must be tended from dories--a method which has resulted
in countless cruel tragedies.

The lives of the men who go down to the sea in ships are always full of
romance, the literary value of which has been fully exploited by such
writers of sea stories as Cooper and Clark Russell. But the romance of
the typical sailor's life is that which grows out of a ceaseless
struggle with the winds and waves, out of world-wide wanderings, and
encounters with savages and pirates. It is the romance which makes up
melodrama, rather than that of the normal life. The early New England
fishermen, however, were something more than vagrants on the surface of
the seas. In their lives were often combined the peaceful vocations of
the farmer or woodsman, with the adventurous calling of the sailor. For
months out of the year, the Maine fisherman would be working in the
forests, felling great trees, guiding the tugging ox-teams to the frozen
rivers, which with spring would float the timber down to tidewater. When
winter's grip was loosened, he, like the sturdy logs his axe had shaped,
would find his way to where the air was full of salt, and the owners of
pinks and schooners were painting their craft, running over the rigging,
and bargaining with the outfitters for stores for the spring cruise.
From Massachusetts and Rhode Island farms men would flock to the little
ports, leaving behind the wife and younger boys to take care of the
homestead, until the husband and father returned from the banks in the
fall, with his summer's earnings. His luck at fishing, her luck with
corn and calves and pigs, determined the scale of the winter's living.
Some of the fishermen were not only farmers, as well, but ship-builders
and ship-owners, too. If the farm happened to front on some little cove,
the frame of a schooner would be set up there on the beach, and all
winter long the fisherman-farmer-builder would work away with adze and
saw and hammer, putting together the stout hull that would defend him in
time against the shock of the north-east sea. His own forest land
supplied the oak trees, keelson, ribs, and stem. The neighboring sawmill
shaped his planks. One lucky cruise as a hand on a fishing boat owned by
a friend would earn him enough to pay for the paint and cordage. With
Yankee ingenuity he shaped the iron work at his own forge--evading in
its time the stupid British law that forbade the colonists to make
nails or bolts. Two winters' labor would often give the thrifty builder
a staunch boat of his own, to be christened the "Polly Ann," or the
"Mary Jane"--more loyal to family ties than to poetic euphony were the
Yankee fishermen--with which he would drive into the teeth of the
north-east gale, breaking through the waves as calmly as in early spring
at home he forced his plough through the stubble.

There was, too, in those early days of the fisheries, a certain
patriarchal relation maintained between owner and crew that finds no
parallel in modern times. The first step upward of the fisherman was to
the quarter-deck. As captain, he had a larger responsibility, and received
a somewhat larger share of the catch, than any of his crew. Then, if
thrifty, or if possessed of a shipyard at home, such as I have described,
he soon became an owner. In time, perhaps, he would add one or two
schooners to his fleet, and then stay ashore as owner and outfitter,
sending out his boats on shares. Fishermen who had attained to this
dignity, built those fine, old, great houses, which we see on the
water-front in some parts of New England--square, simple, shingled to the
ground, a deck perched on the ridge-pole of the hipped roof, the frame
built of oak shaped like a ship's timbers, with axe and adze. The lawns
before the houses sloped down to the water where, in the days of the old
prosperity, the owner's schooner might be seen, resting lightly at anchor,
or tied up to one of the long, frail wharves, discharging cargo--wharves
black and rotting now, and long unused to the sailor's cheery cry. There,
too, would be the flakes for drying fish, the houses on the wharves for
storing supplies, and the packed product, and the little store in which
the outfitter kept the simple stock of necessaries from which all who
shipped on his fleet were welcome to draw for themselves and their
families, until their "ship came in." To such a fishing port would flock
the men from farm and forest, as the season for mackerel drew nigh. The
first order at the store would include a pair of buck (red leather) or
rubber boots, ten or fifteen pounds of tobacco, clay pipe, sou'-westers, a
jack-knife, and oil-clothes. If the sailor was single, the account would
stop there, until his schooner came back to port. If he had a family, a
long list of groceries, pork and beans, molasses, coffee, flour, and
coarse cloth, would be bought on credit, for the folks at home. It came
about naturally that these folks preferred to be near the store at which
the family had credit, and so the sailors would, in time, buy little plots
of land in the neighborhood, and build thereon their snug shingled
cottages. So sprung up the fishing villages of New England.

The boys who grew up in these villages were able to swim as soon as they
could walk; rowed and sailed boats before they could guide a plow; could
give the location of every bank, the sort of fish that frequented it, and
the season for taking them. They could name every rope and clew, every
brace and stay on a pink or Chebacco boat before they reached words of two
syllables in Webster's blue-backed spelling-book; the mysteries of trawls
and handlines, of baits and hooks were unraveled to them while still in
the nursery, and the songs that lulled them to sleep were often doleful
ditties of castaways on George's Bank. Often they were shipped as early as
their tenth year, going as a rule in schooners owned or commanded by
relatives. It was no easy life that the youngster entered upon when first
he attained the dignity of being a "cut-tail," but such as it was, it was
the life he had looked forward to ever since he was old enough to consider
the future. He lived in a little forecastle, heated by a stuffy stove,
which it was his business to keep supplied with fuel. The bunks on either
side held rough men, not over nice of language or of act, smoking and
playing cards through most of their hours of leisure. From time immemorial
it has been a maxim of the forecastle that the way to educate a boy is to
"harden" him, and the hardening process has usually taken the form of
persistent brutality of usage--the rope's end, the heavy hand, the
hard-flung boot followed swift upon transgression of the laws or customs
of ship or forecastle. The "cut-tail" was everybody's drudge, yet gloried
in it, and a boy of Gloucester or Marblehead, who had lived his twelve
years without at least one voyage to his credit, was in as sorry a state
among his fellow urchins as a "Little Lord Fauntleroy" would be in the
company of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

The intimacies of the village streets were continued on the ocean. Fish
supplanted marbles as objects of prime importance in the urchin's mind.
The smallest fishing village would have two or three boats out on the
banks, and the larger town several hundred. Between the crews of these
vessels existed always the keenest rivalry, which had abundant opportunity
for its exhibition, since the conditions of the fishery were such that the
schooners cruised for weeks, perhaps, in fleets of several hundred. Every
maneuver was made under the eyes of the whole fleet, and each captain and
sailor felt that among the critics were probably some of his near
neighbors at home. Charles Nordhoff, who followed a youth spent at sea
with a long life of honorable and brilliant activity in journalism,
describes the watchfulness of the fleet as he had often seen it:

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