THE GLOUCESTERMEN by Joseph E. Garland
The story of the heyday of American fis hing in the Western Ocean is the story of fi shing under sail , the bittersweet saga of the Gloucestermen. The first sailing craft were of necessity fa miliar types brought over from Britain or bu iIt here, shall ops and ketches mostly. The shall op was a double-ended boat propelled by oars or by either a fo re-and-aft, sprit-rigged mainsail or by a two-masted setup with square sails. Being undecked, the shallop was suitable only fo r the inshore fi shery. The larger and more versatile ketch was commonly employed on the offshore banks and was the forerunner of the schooner, in the opinion of the late naval architectural historian Willi am A. Baker. The coloni al ketch carried two masts, the larger mainmast fo rward, the shorter mizzen aft. Though combinations of rig varied greatl y, Baker thought th at the ketch was generall y larger than the shall op, with round stern , flu sh deck, frequently setting a lateen mi zzen sail and sprit mainsail, sometimes a maintopsail. The term schooner was rapidly taken up along the coast in the first quarter of the e ighteenth century and applied, as most of the experts of modern times seem to agree, not to a particular hull fo rm but to a new wrinkle in ri g: big mainsail aft, smaller foresail forw ard. Why did the schooner catch on so quickly with the notori ously conservative fis hermen? Because it was demonstrably fas ter than the ketch, probably. Schooners fl y more canvas than ketches, and under most conditions sail fas ter under a more balanced and versatile sail plan. It may also have been a pleasant surprise for those first schoonermen to discover that their vessels could jog along the banks, under fo resail onl y, barely creeping ahead a trifle off the wind , perhaps with the jib he ld to windward as well, and that in a gale of wind they could lie to with ease under doublereefed mainsail alone-to which thi s author, once the master of a Nova Scoti a-built gaff-rigged schooner yacht of thirty-fi ve feet, can but whi sper amen . For the first hundred years or so the New England fi shing schooners were bluff of bow, broad of beam and high of stern . The Marblehead heeltappers slid off the ways at up to seventy-five tons gross, sixty feet long on deck. When the winter's first surge of Arctic air decended from Canada with the nor' wester, some skippers were apt to make a run down to the West Indies to see what could be bartered for a cargo of salt fi sh SEA HISTORY, SPRING 1989
Dorymenpitch their catch into the deepening deckload ofthe Onato, a l 06ftlong "Indian-header" designed by Tom McManus and built in 1904 by Oxner and Story at Essex. Below, the Onato icing up on the banks, around 1905. These photos were taken by one ofOnato' screw, Chester L. Morrissey, a young man from Nova Scotia , who brought along a cheap box camera and made these priceless photographs of a working Gloucesterman at sea.
-