The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town - Softcover

Kurlansky, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594483744 ISBN 13: 9781594483745

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

"A marvelous, compelling tale"(Rocky Mountain News) from the New York Times bestselling author of Salt and Cod.

Gloucester, Massachusetts, America's oldest fishing port, is defined by the culture of commercial fishing. But the threat of over-fishing, combined with climate change and pollution, is endangering a way of life, not only in Gloucester but in coastal cities all over the world. And yet, according to Kurlansky, it doesn't have to be this way. Engagingly written and filled with rich history, delicious anecdotes, colorful characters, and local recipes, The Last Fish Tale is Kurlansky's most urgent story, "an engrossing multi-layered portrait of a fishing community that can be read for pure pleasure as well as being a campaigning plea for the environment" (Financial Times).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Kurlansky is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including The Food of a Younger Land, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History; 1968: The Year That Rocked the World; and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. He lives in New York City.

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Chapter One

The First Gloucester Story

From hence doth stretch into the sea the fair headland Tragabigzanda fronted with three isles called the Three Turks’ Heads.

—John Smith,
Description of New England, 1616

There are two kinds of stories told in gloucester: fish tales and Gloucester stories. A fish tale exaggerates to make things look bigger. It is triumphal. When in the early seventeenth century George Waymouth reported that the cod caught off New England were five feet long with a three-foot circumference, this may have been a fish tale. We don’t know. Surely the Reverend Francis Higginson’s reports from Salem in 1630 that lions had been seen running wild in Cape Ann, or that the squirrels could fly from tree to tree, were fish tales.

A Gloucester story is just the opposite. It is a story of miserable irony in which things are shown in their worst light, a story with a sad ending.

Often the history of a place begins with the person who named it. But in the case of Gloucester, the story begins with the men who didn’t— the ones who tried to name it and failed. The naming of Gloucester is an entire cycle of Gloucester stories.

The earliest Europeans to arrive at what is today Cape Ann are thought to have been the Vikings, who, according to the written Icelandic legends known as the Sagas, sailed in 1004 down the North American coast from Labrador to Newfoundland to a place they called Vineland. For a long time it was debated whether to believe this story. But in 1961 the remains of eight Viking turf houses dating to the year 1000 were found in a place in Newfoundland known as L’Anse aux Meadows. Where, then, was Vineland? Today many historians believe that it was the coastline of New England, named after the wild grapes that grew there. According to another story, in 1004, Leif Ericson’s brother Thorwald landed on Cape Ann and named it Cape of the Cross. But neither the name nor Thorwald went far. Thorwald died on the expedition and those historians who believe the story at all think that he is buried somewhere on Cape Ann. And that is the first Gloucester story.

In 1606, Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer of the coast of Maine, sailed down to Cape Ann, and seeing three islands off its tip— now called Thachers, Milk, and Straitsmouth Islands—he named the peninsula with the great gray granite boulders marking its headlands, the Cape of Three Islands, which even if said in French, Cap aux Trois Îles, is not much of a name. He noted that there were actually two rocky headlands and a passage between them, which he sailed through taking depth soundings as he went, thus charting the course that fishermen home from the sea have been using ever since—from Thachers around East Gloucester to Eastern Point, into the harbor between West and East Gloucester. Champlain thought this was an extraordinary harbor, deep and sheltered with ample mooring space, and he spent three months charting it. He named it Le Beau Port, which was a little more poetic than the Cape of Three Islands, but was destined to be no more durable. Being a skilled seaman, he found anchorage in the safest, most leeward cove in the harbor, but that was not to bear his name either. Instead, the sheltered nook is known today as Smith Cove, named after the young English adventurer, thirty- four-year-old Captain John Smith, who arrived eight years later, in 1614.

This Englishman was very different from Champlain. Though they both were prodigious writers, Champlain’s writing revealed little about the man or his life. It is not even certain what year he was born. But Smith’s writings are very much about himself, full of praise for his own extraordinary deeds. Historians, distrustful of Smith’s braggadocio, tended not to believe what he wrote. Only in recent years has it come to be understood that most of his yarns of daredevil adventures are true.

Smith was a self-made man in more than one sense of that phrase. He not only made his own way in the world—though always assisted by his remarkable ability to attract the patronage of the wealthy—but he also used his writings to establish a colorful persona for himself.

When he was still a teenager he went off to the Lowlands, as did many adventurous young Englishmen, to help the Protestant Dutch fight for their freedom from the despotic Roman Catholics of Spain. The savage combat of that war produced many disillusioned young veterans for the new colonies. But Smith, after three years of fighting the Catholics, did not cross the Atlantic and instead joined the Austrian army to fight the Turks, the true infidels, in Hungary.

According to his immodest but generally accurate journals, Smith showed great cunning and courage and was rapidly promoted to the rank of captain, but then was captured by the Turks, who sent him into slavery in Turkey. There he found himself owned by an aristocratic woman whom he called “the young Charatza Tragabigzanda.” According to Smith, her name meant “girl from Trebizond.” Smith and his “fair mistress,” as he put it, developed some kind of friendship and it seemed a happy time until she gave him to her brother. The exact nature of Smith’s relationship with his fair mistress is unclear, but throughout his life he would be rescued and befriended by young women of social standing. Many historians believe that Tragabigzanda had sent him to her brother to learn their language and customs—she had communicated with Smith in Italian—and that her plan was then to marry him. But Smith either did not understand or did not think much of this plan. He murdered her brother and escaped, traveling by horse to the Ukraine, then Poland, and on to Western Europe.

colonialism was the great opportunity for young English adventurers of the early seventeenth century. There were no traditions and few rules, and a resourceful young man could invent as he went along. Smith was personally involved in the two most important British colonies in North America, Virginia and Massachusetts. At the time, Virginia was seen as the more promising and it was the one that attracted sponsors and investors. But Smith believed that New England had better prospects for the future. The reason for this, he argued, was its wealth of fish. Smith maintained that New England fish were a natural resource worth more than gold. “The sea is better than the richest mine known,” he wrote.

This stance was surprising in an age of exploration dominated by highborn men who considered themselves above such activities as fishing and bringing fish to market. The traditional source of wealth for the great men of the Age of Exploration was gold.

It was his 1614 voyage that had convinced Smith of the importance of fishing. Having never been a man of affluence, one of the goals of his voyage was to somehow get rich. He had hoped to find gold but could find none. He then tried whaling, but did not encounter a suitable species. The only thing left was fishing, an activity he despised. So he ordered his men to go fishing, while he had himself and a crew lowered in a small boat to begin charting the coast, an activity he had developed a great fondness for in the Chesapeake. The little boat would move into every inlet and measure its nooks and turns, sounding depths so that their value for future ships would be documented.

Smith charted the coastline with great accuracy from the mouth of the Kennebec in Maine to Cape Cod and tried to name everything as he went. The British had simply referred to the area as part of Virginia, and it was Smith who gave it the name New England. But less successful were some of his other names. The island off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that he dubbed Smyth’s Iles—his...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1594483744
• ISBN 13: 9781594483745
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: RIVERHEAD; https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar