As the many New England nautical trades died away, fishing became the last holdout. The Revolution and later difficulties with England kept fishing on the Grand Banks erratic (the final questions of American rights were not resolved until 1910), and after the War of 1812, many towns turned from working the Banks to chasing the elusive schools of mackerel that frequent coastal waters from Cape Hatteras to the Maritimes. By the mid-nineteenth century, the fishing boats, hailing from many little seaports, made up a fleet of over a thousand, which followed in like manner the mackerel swarming beneath them. The schools bit unpredictably, which often left the crews with little to do: “Some sleep, some read, some talk over old times, and a few old fishermen sit upon the quarter , hour after hour, spyglass in hand, watching the fleet and wishing for fish.
Nearly every fisherman went to sea well stocked with dime novels (then called “penny dreadfuls“) and the more lurid newspapers.
When bad weather blew in, the fleet made for protected harbors, huddling at anchor to await the end of a ragged nor’easter.
It was one of the most impressive events of any age along the New England coast, when this forest of vessels, their green hulls embellished with gilt scrollwork, tacked about with white duck unfurling against a sky clearing to blue, and rounded Eastern Point to meet the gray ocean swells.
By the 1860s, some two hundred of the “mackerel catchers” called Gloucester their home port. This once-sleepy town, whose vessels had unloaded at Boston docks until the railroad arrived in 1846, grew from some 6,000 in 1840 to 12,000 in the 1860s as it became America’s most important fishing port during the last half of the nineteenth century.
Gloucester and its harbor sit on the south side of Cape Ann, a rocky peninsula north of Boston. Ocean breezes perpetually sweep the Cape, dispersing many of the fogs that settle into the mainland harbors. Before its growth, the old seaport climbed irregularly up a rocky hillside to the ancient highway to Salem. Narrow crooked lanes connected both large homesteads and fishermen’s cottages. Outside the village, farmers worked the rocky soil, and flake fields gave off their fishy scent.
What the town lacked, the harbor made up for. A perfect harbor for shallow- draft vessels, it has a small inner haven and an outer area of bolder water some two by three miles, where the wind and ocean rollers are broken by the granite bedrock of Eastern Point. Behind the town, hills rise to create a lee for the harbor during the dangerous northeasters.
Gloucester’s rise coincided with the shift from hunting the migrating mackerel up and down half the coast of North America, to working the swirling shoal waters of Georges Bank, 100 miles east of Cape Cod. Other Gloucester vessels made for the cod of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The town of Gloucester, with its railhead and large fogless harbor, attracted an ever-growing fleet. The ships set out in late February for the Banks to anchor in ranks among strong tidal rips.
If a vessel dragged her anchor in a winter storm, it was a certainty that any other vessel she ran down would join in the common doom. If a ship bore down on you, your only chance was to cut your own anchor, ride with the storm, and pray. Not until the turn of the century were Gloucester vessels designed to weather storms, not just to hold as much fish as possible.
Fog banks and line squalls on the Grand Banks often scattered the dories used in working the cod lines, too.
In the 1860s investors began looking at the fishing trade to turn it into an industry. They underwrote the cost of vessels, established large packing factories, advertised nationwide, and forced the fishermen themselves to take greater care with their catch. Gloucester-caught and packed fish was soon the best in the country. The fishermen worked on the whalers’ familiar lay system; their profit was a certain percentage of the vessel’s take. “It’s curious, the way we manage.
The improvement of business by consolidation brought fishing into two ports: Gloucester became the center of the packaged fish industry (canned, salted, smoked, cured), and Boston took in the fresh fish. Soon the aroma of packing plants and glue factories had transformed Gloucester by the sea to “Gloucester by the Smell”.
When Banks fishing came to dominate the industry, the lone fishermen of the other New England fishing villages found themselves in financial straits. They could move to Gloucester, fall back to subsistence fishing-supplying only a local market or give up the sea. The sons of the old Marblehead and Beverly fishermen now joined their counterparts farther down the coast at Lynn, to live an inshore life, working leather into shoes. By the 1890s, most shore towns were similarly affected.
In the twenty years between 1875 and 1895, the New England Yankee virtually relinquished the fisherman’s calling to foreign-born fishermen. In 1876, there were fifteen Yankees to one immigrant fisherman; by 1896 the ratio was reversed. What sprouts of the old family stock remained in the business had risen to managerial positions ashore. These departures, and the regular mortality of Banks fishermen, forced Gloucester first to rely on green hands from inland farms, who were soon replaced by seafaring foreigners: island Portuguese, Nova Scotians, and Swedes.
Of these groups, the island Portuguese formed the largest ethnic influx. The first had come to America in the forecastles of whalers, and by the 1850s their immigration was brisk. Most came to work in the New England mills or the California gold fields, but a few kept to their hereditary fishing. In the late nineteenth century, Portugal changed to a blanket military draft rather than conscripting one out of every three youths, and soon the cream of the Cape Verde, Madeira, and Azore islands’ youth took passage to America in preference to eight years in the mainland army.
Portuguese fishing colonies soon began working out of Boston, New Bedford, Fall River, Gloucester, Provincetown, and other, smaller communities. Here they erected their churches, such as Gloucester’s Church of Our Lady of the Good Voyage, and while the men fished, the bronze-faced, serious-eyed women took their children to say the rosary, praying that the sea would not claim their men. The Nova Scotians followed the Portuguese in numbers. They often came just for the fishing season, returning to their homes for the colder months. Others became naturalized in order to become masters of American vessels. They were a rollicking sea-chanty crowd, of the same stock as the Yankees they replaced, but far livelier. They often helped lift the lid on the waterfront bars when the fleet came in from the Banks.
Gloucester required a constant yearly influx of these newcomers. Poor ship design, dangerous fishing practices, and ocean steamers pushing through the foggy Banks trying to keep on schedule, claimed many lives.
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