Gloucester On The Wind
America’s Greatest Fishing Port In The Days Of Sail
Joseph E. Garland
The fog had gone, but a sullen sea ran in great rollers behind it. The We’re Here slid, as it were, into long, sunk avenues and ditches which felt quite sheltered and homelike if they would only stay still; but they changed without rest or mercy, and flung up the schooner to crown one peak of a thousand gray hills, while the wind hooted through her rigging as she zigzagged down the slopes.
Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling
No chapter in America’s hectic history has been shut with such a snap as
Gloucester’s. After three hundred years of fishing the richest banks of the Atlantic, under no power but the wind’s—with no help but a sextant, compass, taffrail log, sounding lead, and sea sense—the end came suddenly; in the forty years since the last schooner unloaded the last trip of hand-caught codfish, overkill, greed, and neglect have endangered to the brink of extinction what until too recently was taken for granted as the inexhaustible bounty of the sea.