Charting the Past

Words play across the screen and twist away, reminiscent of a Star Wars movie, ominous but in this case real.
“February 2020 Covid strikes. Suddenly the world is a different place.”
As the documentary continues, voices talk about chaos and fear that ensued at the start of the pandemic; markets for seafood shut down overnight, confusion over what the virus was, no one knew what would happen next.
Then a bright spot: Small Boats, Big Taste.

An iconic image of Old Cape Cod is of the solitary halibut fisherman rowing to shore in a dory, sou’wester pulled low. Winslow Homer’s The Fog Warning comes to mind.

It’s a romantic image, perhaps reflecting human yearning for what people wanted the Cape to be, not what it was, says Matthew McKenzie, assistant professor of history, whose research examined the complex relationships between humans, the sea, and the resource that once was required for survival on the Cape – fish.

McKenzie studied how changes in the cultural landscape of Cape Cod are linked to the economic and ecological changes just offshore, as fishermen tried to cope with the surge and ebb of consumer demand and a dwindling catch.

Acadian Redfish, which ranges from Virginia to Iceland, also has a wide-ranging history, including being co-opted by the United States Army during World War II. But it was first identified in Provincetown.
The bright-colored fish was discovered in the harbor at the tip of the Cape by Captain Nathan Ellis Atwood in 1854. Atwood was friends with Dr. D. H. Storer, a physician and naturalist who identified numerous fish species and described others, including yellowtail flounder.  

“I’m going to Panama. Maybe I’ll do what the old man did back in the day. Land is plentiful and cheap, just like it used to be In Orleans when he bought all this. No regrets”
Those were the last words Harry Hunt Jr. said to me from his driveway two years ago. I have no doubt he did what he intended.
Harry Junior was the only son of Harry Hunt Senior, a man of unusual nautical and other talents.

By Duncan Oliver
With striped bass being fairly plentiful in New England waters today, it’s hard to imagine that this hasn’t always been the case. Stripers have been mentioned since the earliest settlers. Called rockfish further to the south, they were sometimes known as linesiders to fishermen around here. Youngsters are known as schoolies. 
Prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims, several explorers mentioned stripers, along with cod. Captain John Smith found them so plentiful in 1614 that he wrote, “I myself at the turning of the type have seen such multitudes pass out of a pounce [fish trap] that it seemed to me that one might go over their backs drishod [dry shod].”
The first mention of stripers at Plymouth Colony occurred in 1621.

From a dusty racing track around a pond, a mill by a small river, and a marshy natural inlet, over the course of a century the town of Harwich crafted three important harbors opening to Nantucket Sound’s rich fishing grounds.
Allen, Wychmere and Saquatucket Harbors are strung along several miles of coastline in Harwich Port, and none of them originally offered full access to the Sound.
“Allen was a trickle, Wychmere was a salt pond with limited inflow and outflow, and Saquatucket was really just the Andrews River meandering from cranberry bogs down to a marsh,” says Tom Leach, who was Harwich’s harbormaster from 1973 to 2012.

Before draggers, schooners dotted our harbor. Double-ended dories were used to row captain and crew from moorings to wharfs. Schooners operated by sail only.
Then came the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s, the decades of draggers, also called Side Trawlers or Eastern Trawlers. Alarms would go off at 3 to 4 a.m. every morning, all over town. Later, when telephones came into play, captains phoned the telephone operator. She plugged in, by memory, a call to each crew’s home number.