Chapter X: 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.

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.

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!