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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The Last
Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's
Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town by Mark Kurlansky |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Caught
There’s
a lot to like on the pages of Mark Kurlansky’s new book, The Last
Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's
Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town. He sets Gloucester in its
historical context, and in its unusual place in the world today. His own
drawings and recipes add to the intimacy of this picture. The fisherman he
presents and their adversaries are well described and the issues are explored
with care. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 66-68: The
constant appearance of
newcomers, like the constant disappearance of family and friends, shaped
Gloucester's character. The people of Gloucester were not always kind to
newcomers, but their arrival was always expected. An old Gloucester joke is:
What do you call someone who moved to Gloucester when he was a one-year-old
and lived there to the age of ninety-nine? The answer: A newcomer. Greeted with distrust and
sometimes outright bigotry, the newcomers built their own churches, worked
their own boats, huddled in their own neighborhoods, made their own foods,
and changed the life of the town. One of the groups that permanently
reshaped Gloucester culture was the people known along the New England coast
as the "Portagee." The fundamental thing that New
Englanders do not understand about the Portuguese who settled there is that
they did not come from Portugal. They came from the Azores, an island chain
in a part of the mid-Atlantic known as the Saragosa Sea. The Azores are about
a thousand miles closer to Gloucester than Portugal is, which makes them the
closest piece of European land to Gloucester. They are culturally and
politically part of Europe, but not on the European continental shelf. In
fact, the sea around the islands is so deep that some of the mountains of the
Azores, such as the snow-capped volcano that dominates the island of Pico,
are the world's tallest mountains, if measured from the ocean floor where
they begin. When both the Flemish and the
Portuguese visited these islands in the early fifteenth century, they did not
find a single human, or mammal, or even reptile inhabiting them. The Flemish
and the Portuguese settled there, joined after 1492 by defeated Moors from Spain.
This mixture, along with other European nationalities blended in later, have
made Azoreans look different from the Portuguese, often considerably darker,
and they speak different dialects of Portuguese, which vary from island to
island. The people of the Azores were
largely agricultural. Many were wine producers, but a fair number were
fishermen. They were also whalers and continued hunting whales until the
1980s. In the nineteenth century, whaling became a tremendously profitable
enterprise in New England as well, and Gloucester got in on the craze,
forming its first two whaling companies in 1832. Whaling was important to
Gloucester because of spermaceti, a white, odorless, nonoily, waxy substance
derived from whale oil. It is completely insoluble in water and was used to
waterproof fishermen's clothes, which is why they came to be known as
oilskins. In keeping with the self-sufficient tradition of the island of
Gloucester, oilskins for the fishermen were made in town, as was the
spermaceti, in a plant on Porter Street. It was owned by William Pearce, a
merchant who sustained himself through periodic declines in the fishery with
importing spices and sugar from Suriname and other nonfishing operations. In
1833 he
financed a whaler out of Gloucester, but it did not have a particularly
successful voyage. In fact, in New England even in the years when whaling
profits were at their peak, ground fishing, especially cod fishing, brought
in more money. And so Gloucester stuck to its traditional fishery, although
by the mid-nineteenth century there were already profitable businesses taking
tourists whale watching on the nearest banks, Middle and Stellwagen, between
Cape Ann and Cape Cod, where slick, black giants—humpbacks and finback
whales—squawked, grunted, puffed, hissed, leapt, and cavorted in plain view. Whalers from the Azores would
run across whaling ships from Nantucket, New Bedford, and Mystic, and they
would sign on for better earnings. Once in New England, they would jump ship
in towns such as Provincetown, New Bedford, and Gloucester to find better
paying work. There was always room for new fishermen in Gloucester. From 1850 on, a steady flow of Azoreans
came to Gloucester. Soon not just whalers jumping ship but whole fishing
families, especially from the volcanic island of Pico, center of the Azorean
whaling industry, and its neighbor, tiny Faial, having heard of Gloucester
and its ground fishing, came. Beyond
the history from the excerpt, Kurlansky explores what is to become of this
unusual place. The Last
Fish Tale is finely written and packed with insights. It caught my
interest, and is likely to catch yours if you give it a chance. Steve
Hopkins, August 15, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the Seeptember 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Last Fish Tale.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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