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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 11, part 4
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 22:42:28 -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 4]

When you buy a fish, look him in the eye. If his gaze is bright and
unblurred, he has not been away from home long. If his gills are
bright red, that is another sign he is fresh. But if his eye is dull
and sunken, he probably has been witnessing the destruction of his
race over a long spell in the hold of a beam-trawler. Professional
fish buyers will also have a look at what they call the napes, but the
eyes and gills will tell you the story.

Cod and haddock are "firm fish," which keep fresh longer than "soft
fish," such as whiting or herring. America, great among nations,
nevertheless has no sole. Boston calls flounder "lemon-sole," and a
hotel calls almost anything "fillet of sole." Usually it is selling
you flounder. Fishermen like "yellowtails" better than the more
expensive kinds of flounder. They say it isn't so dry. "Black backs"
also are flounder, and halibut is one of the same family's rich
relatives. Fish dealers say the public "won't take a mackerel west of
Pittsburgh," but whiting is popular in the west. Frozen whiting are
sent by carloads from Provincetown to St. Louis, for the "fish
sandwich" stands in that territory. They used to call it "Jack salmon"
out west, until the law intervened in favor of just plain "whiting."

Our Congressmen know distressingly little about fish, but they have
learned one or two facts regarding whales. Recently Senator NORBECK
had the job wished on him of drafting a bill to ratify a treaty for
the protection of whales. NORBECK was from South Dakota.

"Is a whale a fish?" asked one of the senators.

When he was informed that it was not, they proceeded to that part of
the bill having to do with "right whales." Congressman TINKHAM of
Massachusetts asked Senator NORBECK if he knew what a right whale was.

"I suppose it is any whale that isn't wrong," the puzzled sponsor of
the bill answered.

They should have read Provincetown's own historian, one Herman A.
JENNINGS, who was the town auctioneer back in the nineties. JENNINGS
gravely penned a little book - now out of print - which can still be
obtained from the public library, and which is really wonderful for
the solemn, scientific essays he included, embellished with the
handsome idiom of his time.

Some of the literary elegance he shed in his discourse on whales
should be quoted if only for safekeeping:

"These whales [sperm] are not, as a general thing, much for fighting,
seeking safety rather in flight, but occasionally a lone bull, that
has been driven out of the herd, is fallen in with, and his ugly
disposition, made more sour and morose by the want of companionship,
makes him an ugly customer."

Yes, JENNINGS would have told Senator NORBECK that a right whale is
the "largest specimen of known animal life," which swims "through the
water with open mouth and takes in immense quantities of small shrimp
and other animalculae called whale feed." The fins and tail are a
"tooth-some dish, and one not to be despised by epicures, the flavor
resembling somewhat soused pigs' feet." He adds that the swordfish, "
Who is the John L. of the sea, delights in attacking the whale. . . .
Why the swordfish should make this onslaught on the whale is a
mystery, as the swordfish cannot eat any part of the whale, and it
must be done purely out of spite."

In addition to writing his "history," which somehow gets the pirate
Sam BELLAMY aboard the British warship "Somerset" and does a number of
other marvelous things. JENNINGS was an undertaker, wreck master, real
estate dealer and auctioneer sans pareil. Once he made $10 with this
speech:

"This, ladies and gentleman, is what Cape Codders of another day used
to prevent intrusion of members of different families upon each other
when they spent the night in the same house and the number of trundle
beds failed to come out even. You see, when more than one family had
to use the same bed, they just took this board, made for the purpose
and called a 'privacy plank,' set it upright down the middle of the
bed, an privacy was insured."

He sold an ironing board.

JENNINGS was a contemporary in Provincetown of David STULL, "the
ambergris king," who bought the precious substance from the returning
whalers, and was the world's leading dealer in it. STULL shipped the
ambergris to Paris, whether he sold it to the perfume manufacturers.
During a fifty-year period in the Nineteenth Century, a little more
than a ton of ambergris was brought into Atlantic coast ports, and
STULL bought most of it. "A valuable secretion," JENNINGS writes, "is
found in this specie of whale [sperm] called Ambergris. This is found
in hard bunches in the whale's intestines; it is of a dark chocolate
color, and in most cases the specific gravity is greater than water,
though there are cases where it has been known to float. It is one of
the best known articles as a base on which to fix perfumes, and is
largely used in France for that purpose. A good article is worth more
than its weight in gold, at present prices [1890] about $200 a pound.
It has a strong pungent odor, but by no means unpleasant. Its
formation is not fully known, but is supposed to be in some way
connected with the food this specie eats." Specimens of ambergris are
still owned in Provincetown. A collection was preserved by the
"ambergris king" and left to his daughter. Of the town's whaling days,
few other reminders are to be found now - an occasional log or account
book, a chart or a harpoon, a trypot here and there, and a scattering
of whale vertebrae.

Whaling out of Provincetown was continued, however, long after
Wellfleet and Truro had to give it up. The Revolutionary War killed it
for the two neighbor towns, but Provincetown's whalemen resumed the
chase, and again after the Civil War had interrupted it, the "fishery"
persisted out of this port.

The last whaling skipper of Provincetown was Captain John Atkins COOK,
who kept at it until 1916. Some of his voyages in the brigantine
"Viola" actually paid better than those of the old days; a 25-Month
trip, ending in 1910, netted 2,200 barrels of sperm oil and 75 pounds
of "first chop" ambergris - worth together $47,000. After he quit the
sea, Captain Cook wrote a pretentious account of his voyages and had
it published. But the story of Viola, his wife, will live long after
the Captain and his book, his ambergris and his "ile," are all forgotten.

Viola went to sea with her husband. In 1893 he took her to the Arctic
aboard his steam-bark "Navarch," and returned to San Francisco in
1896. She spent the winter of 1900-01 aboard the "Bowhead" at Baillie
Island, a hundred miles north of Herschel Island, where there was a
58-day spell of unbroken night, with the thermometer going to 57
degrees below zero. Boston and other New England newspapers were full
of the story of the "courageous woman whose home was the frozen
north." When she returned to Provincetown after her 1901 voyage, they
quoted her as saying:

"Sewing helps to dispel the monotony that will manifest itself
assertively at times." On that voyage the Captain earned $115,000.

In the spring of 1903 he took her again. I have an old manuscript
account of the trip, written by a relative and kept in a Provincetown
home. It says:

"Two years were spent in the land of everlasting cold and desolation,
only a few short weeks of summer whaling in partly open seas breaking
the monotony of the ten-months lockup periods. The second summer in
the ice was as fruitless as the first. . . . The weather of the second
winter was unusually severe; the crew members were mutinous; scurvy
and starvation were kept in abeyance only by Eskimo hunters."

Upon the Captain's failure to turn back, as had been expected of him,
Viola, "inconsolable, hugged the privacy of her cabin for weeks on
end, dwelling constantly upon her isolation. So great was the shock of
her disappointment, her reason nearly fled, and for months following,
Mrs. Cook remained mentally ill."

The townspeople say she was "mentally ill" not only for months, but
until her death several years later.


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







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