Excerpt of The End of the Line by Charles Clover
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Nailing The Lie
Gloucester, Massachusetts, likes to describe itself as America’s
greatest fishing port. Its claim is inscribed on the most poignant
edifice in Gloucester, the fisherman’s memorial on the seawall
at Cape Ann. A bronze statue of a bearded fisherman in a
sou’wester and oilskins, gripping a ship’s wheel, stares out over
the harbor and the clapboard houses toward the sea. Though
you will find that a greater tonnage of fish is landed today in
Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and that Gloucester’s old rival, New
Bedford, Massachusetts, tops the list of U.S. ports for value because
of its shellfish landings, it seems rude to quibble with
Gloucester’s estimation of its own preeminence, for in terms of
human endeavor and suffering America’s oldest fishing port has
history on its side. The fisherman’s memorial, installed in 2002,
commemorates 5,300 men from the town who died at sea in the
pursuit of fish.
The core of the inscription reads: “These courageous men
have been known by names other than fishermen. They were
father, husband, brother, son. They were known as the finest
kind. Their lives and their loss have touched our community in
profound ways. We remain strengthened by their character, in-
spired by their courage and proud to call them Gloucestermen.”
The story told in Gloucester has an awesome dignity that arises
out of mass human suffering—so many untimely deaths spread
among the population of one not so very large community. The
toll has its equal only in the memorials to the dead of the Civil
War and the First and Second World Wars.
The roll call of the drowned over nearly four centuries is cast
in raised lettering on bronze panels arranged in a semicircle on
the seaward side of the statue. It begins with the Englishmen
who came in 1625 to handline and trap for cod on the submerged
banks that run from here to Newfoundland. Over the next two
centuries, English surnames are joined by ones from Scandinavia
and Ireland, often via the Canadian maritimes. In the past
two hundred years, many if not most of the fishermen have
been of Sicilian and Portuguese extraction. You will still find
boats in Gloucester whose crews speak Italian and have their
satellite TV set to Italian stations. I met a man of Italian descent
in Gloucester who said his family had been fishing in Gloucester
for eight generations. In New Bedford, the capital of whaling
in the nineteenth century and now of the sea scallop fishery,
the fishermen are of mainly Portuguese descent.
You can deduce many things from the number of names inscribed
on the Gloucester fisherman’s memorial. In 2001, the
most recent year recorded on the bronze panels, two fishermen,
Thomas Frontiero and James Sanfilippo, died at sea. In 1927,
the most terrible year in the past century for the fishermen of
Gloucester, the sea took forty-one. You would rightly conclude
that fishing is one of the more dangerous occupations in the
world. You might also conclude that either it has gotten a lot
safer or there are fewer fishermen going to sea. Both happen to
be the case.
You might be tempted to ask why the number of fishermen
has dropped, why the fish dock is half empty, and why many of
the buildings around it have an air of dereliction that contrasts
with the prosperous-looking tourist buildings and marinas of
this attractive seaside town. The reason the dock is underused is
because there are fewer boats and many times fewer fish landed
in Gloucester than once was the case. The story of the overexploitation
of New England’s fisheries is one you will find the
city of Gloucester still reluctant to tell in any of its public pronouncements,
for it is the counterpoint to Gloucester’s heroic
figure of hardiness and heroism. It throws a rather different
light on the bronze fisherman facing out to sea.
© 2006 by Charles Clover. This piece originally appears in Charles Clover’s The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (The New Press, November 13, 2006). Published with the permission of The New Press and available at good book stores everywhere.
