| Quintessential Gloucester
Maybe you've heard about Gloucester from the bestseller, The Perfect Storm,
Sebastian Junger's book about the crew of the Andrea
Gail that was lost at sea in 1991. But Joe Garland was
writing about Gloucester's traumas at sea before Junger
was born.
For us in Gloucester, Joe Garland is our storyteller.
Journalist, historian, Joe's written a dozen books
on the maritime history here. He seems to know every
cut of land, nearly every building in the city laid
out before us, and who sailed where, and when, and how
for more than three centuries, they've traveled hundreds
of miles to the fabled fishing grounds at George's Bank
and the Grand Banks off the coast of Newfoundland.
I pull out a book of photographs—Gloucester on
the Wind, old photos Joe has compiled and written captions
for, showing Gloucester in the days of sail.
There's one of old Howard Blackburn. In Lone Voyager,
Joe told the story of Gloucester's most legendary fisherman:
in 1893, after being separated from his mother ship
in a terrible winter storm, he rowed 65 miles in a little
dory, without gloves, in bitter cold, to the coast of
Newfoundland. His dory mate died, and Blackburn lost
all his fingers. And there he is in the picture, fingerless,
out for a sail in this same Gloucester harbor.
Joe: "I can hold this here like this and look
across the harbor, there's the beach, we're sitting
exactly where he was sailing."
Picture after picture shows the acre after acre on
shore given to the cod, salted to preserve it, placed
in wooden frames called flakes, sun cured, and then
shipped across the world.
Joe: "And the business got so big, the roofs of
the buildings were covered with these fish flakes."
Sandy: "And that's right across the street from
where my house is."
Joe: "Right across the street from where your
house is...in the heyday, Gloucester was the saltfish
capital of the world. It was the biggest fishing port
in the western hemisphere."
That hasn't been the case in a long time. Joe's going
to take us into the inner harbor, to see the change.
We move down the shoreline, near where Clarence Birdseye
perfected his freezing process and put the salted cod
out of business; under the line of fire of British cannonballs,
fired by Captain Robert Linzee in 1775, before Gloucester
patriots chased him off; and now past the paint factory,
scene of more recent battles.
For more than a century, this great red wooden icon to
the fishing industry
applied the copper
paint that protected
the bottom of the
wooden schooners.
Last year developers
proposed to convert
the abandoned building
into condos; they
were unsuccessful.
Joe: "We still want to hang onto everything we
can of the fishing industry, and the paint factory symbolizes
all that. And the idea of the paint factory, being squarely
at the entrance to our harbor, being turned into condominiums
didn't sit well with a lot of us."
We're at ground zero of Gloucester's change.
From here you can see past, present and future: the
Gloucester Adventure, the last of the Gloucester fishing
schooners up on the rails for historical renovation;
a handful of steel hulled fishing trawlers headed out
toward the fishing grounds that remain; and yachts,
and little sailboats, and a replica of an old fishing
schooner, with tourists on board, out for a sail; and
jet skis, and kayakers, and whale watch boats, and the
newest entry into Gloucester harbor, the casino ship.
First came the Vegas Express, then the Eldorado. Now,
waiting to come on line, the Southern Elegance, built
to look like an old riverboat.
Joe: "Maybe one gambling ship, you can take, two
gambling ships, you raise an eyebrow. But three gambling
ships, you're looking at Gloucester becoming the gambling
center of New England, or the gambling center of the
East Coast, and there's a lot of us who don't like it
at all."
In a year of operation more than 75,000 people have
boarded the casino ships; the Vegas Express employs
120 people, most local, on a weekly payroll of about
80 thousand dollars. And, Joe acknowledges, with the
fishing down, the wharf owners need some kind of business.
And so the change. If you want to know what's changed
around here, says Joe Garland, you need only sniff the
air.
Joe: "There's a little bit of smell of fish but
nothing the way it was in the old times. The old times,
the whole harbor here would be redolent of this strong,
strong smell of salt fish being dried in those fish
flakes, mixed in with that just enough soupçon
of rotten fish, fish heads and stuff that had been thrown
overboard from the cleaning of the fish to add another
level of elegance, if you will, to the compost. It was
tangy, it really caught you by the nostrils and in the
lungs, but boy, it spelled Gloucester and the sea.
"There are going to be great changes here. The
big question is, are we going to be able to hang on
to this strange uniqueness what we have had, and I hope
we can hang onto that. We're going to have to change."
At stake here, says Joe Garland, is the sense of place
that people here have always had. The hope that we will
stay connected to who we've been—a safe harbor
for the people who live here.
Joe: "I've seen an account in an old newspaper
where literally hundreds of schooners sailed in here
one afternoon, because the barometer told them there
was going to be threatening weather, and they come here
almost like a parade, and dropped anchor in the harbor
here, and the guy counted them it was something like
two or three hundred schooners just in the outer harbor
here at anchor.
"The next morning, when the breeze came up and
it was a fair breeze, and how one after another they
got their sails up and they sailed out of the harbor,
as if organized in a parade. And the sight, as I think
about it, it brings almost a lump to my throat, as I
think about the sights that this harbor has seen and
the vessels it's harbored."
We've drifted in front of the quintessential Gloucester
figure: the bronze man at the wheel, standing at the
boulevard, at the edge of the harbor—turned green
with salt and time, in his oilskins, at the helm, eyes
on the sea. Joe reads the final passage from his book,
The Gloucester Guide:
"Braced against the cant of his schooner's deck,
gripping the wheel, the weather eye on the set of his
jib, shaping his course out this harbor to come about
out there beyond eastern point, sails thundering, spray
flying across his bow, sheets hauled full and by for
the fishing banks."
A great chronicler of this place, old Joe Garland looks
up from his boat, fixing his eyes on the silent man
of bronze, the man at the wheel, gazing out toward the
fishing grounds.
Back to Top |
|
Selected Works
Books
The Lemon Tree
Me and Hank
Articles
First-Person Narratives in Radio
Quintessential Gloucester
Shoot to Maim
Vanishing Forests, Endangered People
When is a Handful of Beans Not Just a Handful of Beans?
Despair Feeds Hatred, Extremism
Baseball's Chasm Between Heroes
Radio
 The Lemon Tree
Oil in Ecuador's Amazon
Ecuador's Golden Cities
Quichua Indians and Oil
Ecuador's Resource Battle I
Ecuador's Resource Battle II |
