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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 11, part 2
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 22:42:09 -0600
References: <200112191104.fBJB48Q10270@lists2.rootsweb.com>


======================================================================
Cape Cod Pilot, by Jeremiah Diggs, American Guide Series, published by
Modern Pilgrim Press, Provincetown, MA, 1937. This was a work
underwritten by the Federal Writers Project, Works Project
Administration (WPA) for the State of Massachusetts.
======================================================================

Chapter XI - PROVINCETOWN I [part 2]

There are a few of the old-time "fish stores" left in Provincetown -
rough gray sheds on the harborfront where the men store their gear -
and though these ramshackle warerooms are seldom noticed by the crowds
that motor up and down Commercial Street, it is here that one must
come, really to know the fishermen; here one must sit and listen to
the talk, when the February sleet is falling, and the harbor is
banging away at the bulkheads along-shore under a southeast blow. Joe
Flounder sits on a mackerel "kag" across from Tony Yellow and deals
out the cards for a game of two-handed "bisqua," while Tony leans over
and pokes up the potbelly stove. There is fishing gear on the walls,
in the corners, on the floor, everywhere - strings of netcorks, stacks
of anchors, buoys, oars, and hangings of crackly yellow oil skins. The
southeast breeze screams through the old timbers, and even Cap'n
Two-time, the half-Siamese cat, edges a little closer.

Through the doorway you can see into the next room, where Big Billy is
tarring nets. He looks like a god of darkness, hanging the room with
shadows. In another corner old Pete Fayal is over-hauling his gear - a
tub of trawl-line on which he is replacing the lost "gangin's" - and
his huge fingers twist and tie with incredible speed as he makes the
new strings fast and fixes a hook to each. But he pauses now and then
to take a swig from the bottle of prune whiskey which is in easy
reach, and when he has done this a sufficient number of times, Pete
begins to spin a yarn for the boys.

"You fellers wouldn't remember old Cap'n John Santos - feller that had
his leg et off by a shark on the Western Banks. But I can remember
him, back when I was a boy, and how proud he was of the new jury-leg
they rigged him up with. It was a sight, I tell you, to watch him
dance a 'chamarita' with that leg and not nick the floor once. Carried
around furniture polish just like the doctor carries iodine, in case
of a cut or scratch, and one time he copper-bottomed her to make sure
the worms wouldn't get to him before his time.

"Well, you know once a man is chawed on by a shark, he's shark-jonahed
for the rest of his life. Some day a shark's going to get the rest of
that feller, if he keeps on going to sea. And Cap'n John kept on.

"The Cap'n's trawler, the 'Hetty K,' was ten mile from the Race when
the Portland Gale struck. That was November 27. On the 28th she come
crippling round the Point under bare poles with two foot of harbor
water over her lee rail. The crew said Cap'n John was washed
overboard, along with two other men.

"The bodies of the other two drifted ashore; the Cap'n wasn't never
found. But a couple of days after, Joe Barcia picked up the old man's
wooden leg off the beach. He took it home to Mary Santos, the widow.

"Married thirty years, them two. When Joe Barcia brought back the leg,
Mary took it into the house. She petted it and talked to it.

"Nothing more come of it till the night of November 26, a year later.
That night, Mary said, she set up in bed, and there, standing straight
as two yards of pump-water on his one leg, was old Cap'n John. He
hopped over alongside the bed and canted over. Then he whispered to her.

"'Barometer's falling, Mary,' he says, 'and the wind's no'theast.
We're in for thick weather, and I'll want my store leg to keep me
steady when she strikes.' He pinched her cheek, and Mary let out a
yell. When she looked again, the Cap'n was gone.

"Next morning, Mary said, she had a little red spot on her cheek. And
before she turned in that night, she took the skipper's leg out of the
spice-cupboard and left it laid out for him in a corner near the
fireplace.

"That night a breeze of wind come up, and in a couple of hours it
turned into a living gale - from the no'theast. The willer tree
outside howled like the yo-ho bird of every dead sailor in hell come
there to roost. All of a sudden Mary hears a thump-thump-thump across
the floor, down below, and then the door shut to. She stayed in bed.

"Next morning she went to look if the Cap'n's leg was still there. It
was, but when she picked it up, it was wet. "Well it'd rained bad
enough to come in by the chimney. But it gallied her so, the sight of
that leg, with the water on it, that she got sick. She called in Doc
Atwood. When he got through sounding, and didn't find nothing sprung,
Doc said something was eating on her. Then she told him the whole story.

"When he'd went over the leg, he looked hard at the widow. "'You say
you left it by the fireplace all night and rain come in on it?' he
asks. Then he sets the leg down, comes over to the widow, and tells
her straight out. 'Mrs. Santos,' he says, 'I'm going to ask you to
have one of the men take this thing out to sea, and weight it with
net-leads, and heave it overboard. I'm a doctor,' says he, 'and I
don't listen to stories. But Mrs. Santos,' he says, 'I put my tongue
to that wood. It don't rain salt water!"

Provincetown fishermen go out mainly for mackerel, whiting, haddock,
cod and flounder - very little for aesthetic atmosphere. If you have
ever helped haul up the float-traps, or jumped aboard a seine-boat in
a choppy sea, or tried to "haul back" trawl with them on the Banks,
you will appreciate what a hardy, muscular set of decorations the
town's art colony has.

They are grossly underpaid, always have been, and probably always will
be. Fishing is definitely skilled labor. Its routine is exacting and
irregular; large risks and constant exposure go with it. But fishermen
have been, from the earliest times, victims of the "share" system, by
which they have forever deluded themselves with the hope of a "big
stock." Occasionally they do come home with a big "trip," and a good
stock is divided among the crew. These are the high spots, the trips
that are easy to remember, to hope for again. Lured by such
possibilities, it is the fisherman himself who insists on the share
system - and as a consequence he averages so little over the long pull
that his labor, however skilled, has always been poor man's work, and
with a few exceptions those who make up the crew of a fishing vessel
are poor people.

I do not mean to say that the major spread goes to the skipper. He,
too, is a fisherman. To state roughly what he is up against: when fish
are plentiful, fish are cheap. When fish are rare, the price rises,
but he has no fish to sell. The "freezers" - fish packing houses - buy
much of the local fleet's catch whenever the price of shipping it to
better markets is prohibitive - which is most of the time. The
freezers also buy all the catch of the float-traps and weirs in the
harbor. These companies hold ownership of the traps, and the men do
the labor of keeping them in repair, putting down the weirpoles in the
spring and pulling them up again in the fall - most of this on their
own time.

The Gloucestermen come in to tie up at Town Wharf occasionally -
seiners with their Italian crews, trawlers with their Portuguese and
Irish and Nova Scotians. One night not long ago twelve big Gloucester
mackerel seiners were tied up at the docks. One of them, the "Frank
Wilkinson," had made the first catch of the season - 35,000 pounds -
and the skippers of the others were wondering where she did it. But
the 'Wilkinson's" skipper was uncommonly shy and retiring.

The seiners watch from the masthead for the ripples that mean a school
of mackerel, and when they raise one, they lay a "purse" of net under
it and haul in the net with a winch until their big machine-driven
"dipnets" can reach the fish caught in it. At night, the schools fleck
the water with great phosphorescent patches - "fire the water," as the
men say - and thus they can be spotted. You will find these schooners
"laying over" in the harbor on nights of full moon. They can do no
fishing then, for on bright nights the phosphorous doesn't show; and
at such times the men play whist in the fo'cs'le and talk of the
catches of other days. I heard one of them say he had helped haul in
more than 100,000 pounds of mackerel in a single set.

"Sometimes they will school up so thick the vessel will run for ten
minutes on top of the school."

The seiners are in Cape waters in the fall, when the schools of
mackerel strike here on their way south. Where the fish winter nobody
knows. Long arguments about this keep the fo'cs'les lively each
November, and large companies have hired marine experts and spent
thousands of dollars trying to solve the mystery. Some of the
fishermen declare the mackerel burrows into the mud for the winter,
and they point to his glazed eye and scrawny figure when he is hauled
up in the spring. Others say they have seen schools in the Gulf Stream
in those months.

The trawling schooners carry dories and go to the banks to set for
groundfish - cod, haddock, sometimes halibut. They go over the side,
two men to a dory, and each dory lays its long line on the bottom of
the shoal water. The hooks are four to five feet apart and are baited
with frozen herring, squid, sand-eels or whatever is plentiful. They
let the trawl lie for half an hour or so, and when the schooner's horn
gives them the signal, they "haul back." This is back-breaking
business, at which even these men must take turns.

Sometimes they are rewarded with a doryful of haddock, sometimes with
a dog-fish on every hook - "little sharks" - which have to be slapped
off against the side of the dory. When you see a cloud of gulls around
a dory in the distance, you know she is having poor luck. The gulls
are there to snap up the wasted bait.

What the fisherman hates most is sharks; what he fears is fog. A
doryman gone astray in the fog blows on his conch-shell, making a
sound that rides down-wind for miles. His vessel either finds him by
this clue, or hopes some other craft will pick him up. In several
instances, dorymen have been rescued in mid-Atlantic, and among old
fishing records I have seen sworn statements by men who went astray on
the Banks, drifted out to sea, and - still in their open boats -
reached Portugal, Spain or France.

Fog imperils the vessel as well as the dories. Most Provincetown
trawl-fishermen can tell you the story of the black Newfoundland dog.

Old "Cheeny" Marshall, who was drowned on the banks when his dory
capsized in April, 1937, told this story to me. Cheeny was just a boy,
a "salt-passer" on one of the old hand-liners, when - so help him God
- it happened.

The vessel is well out to sea, off Newfoundland. She has not sighted a
sail all day, when suddenly, out of a sea calm and smooth as an oil
slick, up pops the great black dog. Cheeny lifts him over the rail and
lets him lie, half dead, on the deck. The dog has webbed feet.

"Heave him overboard!" shouts one old-timer. "He's the divil!"

But the lad pleads for him, keeps him, takes care of him, puts him in
his own bunk. And finally comes the day when the "soup" settles thick
over the Devil's Graveyard, in the Bay of Fundy. The helmsman is
steering blindly. The dog, standing in the bow, suddenly barks a
warning. The helmsman - Cheeny Marshall himself - puts her hard over.
And the vessel veers in time to clear by inches the massive bows of a
steamer looming out of the mist! It happened, Cheeny Marshall assured
me over and over - so help him God!

[more to come]
transcribed by and all errors attributed to
Bobbie Hall







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