God Rest Ye, Merry Fishermen!
This is a chapter from the Book, Beating To Windward, By Joseph E. Garland, ISBN 09625660-1-2
MERRY CHRISTMAS, YE MERRY fishermen of Gloucester, Greetings, and may providence repent, and reprieve you to hang on 'til another birthday of the Fisher of Men comes around. Do ye remember your First Christmas here? I do. It was 345 of them ago, and I am looking out the warm room through the double-glass window and across the wind-skittered, blue-cold stretch of harbor to Stage Head where you celebrated it. Celebrated, did I say? You miserable lot, the fourteen of you planted there to catch fish for the rich men who staked you, left to live off the land, the rest of the year, you scrimy, dirty, lice-crawling, ragged, scurvied, half-starved, three-quarters frozen collection of damn fools from the English coast. What a jolly Christmas that was, eh? Bunched in your lean-to there between the wilderness and the wicked sea, the Arctic wind blasting through every chink, huddled around the fire, stamping your frostbit feet, gagging on the smoke and swigging the rotgut the rest had left you when they hied back to Blighty for more supplies, cursing the Dorchester merchants who sent you here (so plump and comfy with their wives and little ones, toasting their backsides at the hearthsides, with their Madiera and fat geese and their blood puddings), and trying not to curse your God, too, for leaving you to such a fate on this Christmas of 1623, all forsaken in the land of savages on a God-forsaken rock called Cape Ann. Like fools, you hung on, but after two more such Merry Christmases your ill-planned, ill-commanded, ill-equipped, ill-manned, ill-starred expedition collapsed in bankruptcy. The wise ones sailed home, leaving a few bullheads to straggle farther along with Roger Conant to what somebody said were the greener pastures of Naumkeag. Old John White, the man of God who set you in motion and kept you alive without ever leaving England, watched from 3,000 miles away and reflected: "First, no sure fishing place in the land is fit for planting, nor any good place for planting found fit for fishing, at least, near the shore; and, secondly, rarely any fisherman will work at land; neither are husbandmen fit for fishermen, but with long use and experience." Oh, I remember you, you first fishermen - and it was the first and only time that you and the rest that came after you ever gave up on this place. And you, do you know that it was you created the Bay Colony of Massachusetts, and Massachusetts the Revolution America? And fed it and fattened it on salt fish? In 1879, for example, 429 schooners brought in 40,133,000 pounds of cod, 13,212,000 pounds of halibut, 48,643 barrels of mackerel and 20,000 of herring. The price: 29 schooners, 249 lives, 57 widows and 140 fatherless children. On it went, from father to son, fish, rum, slaves, sugar, molasses, lumber, cotton, dollars, vessels for trading, vessels for fishing, fish for salt, salt for fish, fish for duck, fish for hemp, fish for hooks, fish for bait, fish for Gloucester, for roads, for houses, for stores, for derby hats, for taxes, for whiskey, for City Halls, for wharves, for schools, for summer people, for drug-stores, for tourists, for cars, fish for lives, fish for more fishermen. Merry Christmas, fishermen. Everything Gloucester is, barely proud yet, the once biggest fishing port in the world, you made her. Everything. Fishermen, you are Gloucester, you antiheroes, you fished-out species. Why do you hang on to embarrass a hostile world, glaring at your extinction like fish hawks? They've all had a crack at you. First the French, then the English, and the Canadians (the old rivalry for the grounds and the markets, your brothers, who can blame them?) . . . and your own fish-built country (your last Federal friend John Adams, 1783), the short buyers and the long sellers, the Russians, the Japs, Greenland, Iceland, Scaninavia . . . and the old enemy, riding higher than ever, strutting the deck of your new, antiquated factory ship, telling you dummkopfen how dey do idt in Germany (using your old Marshall Plan taxes that came out of the hold and the dollars they draw off mid dere zo efficient liddle reefers bringing fish slabs into Gloucester.) And always the sea . . . waiting. Merry Christmas, you less-than-merry fishermen of Gloucester every one, and all your families. And hang on, For Gloucester's sake, hang on. December 20, 1968
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