Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  In late summer the bass start to move south again, while those in Long Island Sound move east, heading seaward through the passages at Plum Gut and the Race. Throughout the autumn, striped bass congregate around Montauk Point, where they fatten for the winter on the shoals of bait fish. By Thanksgiving most of them are gone, though a few small bass may persist along the beach until the first snow in early December. Once they leave Montauk, their distribution is incompletely known. In 1953 one authority speculated that “a good proportion of these bass that come from the south when they are three or four years old may remain in the north for the rest of their lives.”4 Some fish overwinter in deep tidal channels of the coastal rivers, and some, it appears, move offshore to deep water of the continental shelf (in February 1949, a small bass was picked up by a trawler in the open ocean about sixty miles south of Martha’s Vineyard). But bass schools are never seen on the surface more than a few miles offshore, and most fish, it was thought, seemed to return south to the Chesapeake, with a good number moving farther still, to inshore waters between Cape Henry and Cape Lookout.

  The Chesapeake and Hudson appear to supply almost all the migratory bass in the Northeast,5 but in other days large populations in such places as the Roanoke River of North Carolina, the York River of Virginia, and the Delaware Bay doubtless contributed to the migrations. Before the nineteenth century, when many rivers were despoiled by dams, industry, and untreated sewage, this prosperous species must have spawned in almost every estuary on the Atlantic coast, and small endemic races still persist all the way north to the St. Lawrence River and all the way south to the St. Johns River in Florida, in addition to the northeast Gulf Coast populations (entirely isolated from the fish of the Atlantic coast by the emergence of the Florida peninsula after the Ice Age), which occur as far west as Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana. While these races may vary in such minor morphological traits as the number of soft rays, or spines, in the dorsal, pectoral, and anal fins, and the number of scales along the lateral line, all are local populations of the hardiest and most widespread food fish species in the coastal waters of North America.

  Before the ruin of the rivers, striped bass numbers must have been more consistent than they are today. The bass helped to sustain the Pilgrims in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and astounded Captain John Smith, who wrote in his journal of that coast (1614), “I myself at the turning of the tyde have seen such multitudes pass out of a pounde that it seemed to me that one might go over their backs drishod.”6 One of Smith’s contemporaries called the bass “a most sweet and wholesome fish as ever I did eat … altogether as good as our fresh Sammon.… Our Fishers take many hundreds together … yea, their Netts ordinarily take more than they are able to hall to Land.”7 Twenty years later, William Wood, in his New England’s Prospect, called the bass “one of the best fishes in the Country … a delicate, fine, fat, faste fish.… The English at the top of an high water do crosse the creek with long seanes or bass nets which stop the fish; and the water ebbing from them, they are left on the dry grounds, sometimes two or three thousand at a set, which are salted up against winter, or distributed to such as have present occasion either to spend them in their homes or use them for their grounds.” The Pilgrims also caught them “with hook and line, the fisherman taking a great cod line to which he fasteneth a peece of lobster and threwes it into the sea. The fish biting at it, he pulls her to him and knockes her on the head with a sticke.”8 (The passage also testifies to the abundance of lobster, which nobody would use today for fish bait.) But as early as 1639, in the first conservation law passed in the New World, Massachusetts forbade the use of this delicate, fine, fat, fast fish for fertilizer, which suggests that its multitudes had limits, even then.

  Colonists from Massachusetts who settled the east end of Long Island in this period apparently found bass common on the Long Island coasts, but in the last half of the eighteenth century a decline was already noted in the Gulf of Maine. The fish recovered somewhat in the first part of the nineteenth century, but a history of Cape Cod published in 1862 described the species as much less plentiful than formerly. Though still abundant in the Mid-Atlantic states in the 1870s, bass became so scarce north of Boston that in certain years there was no commercial catch at all (the nonmigratory populations farther northward were more stable), and a decline was soon apparent to the southward. In the half century and more of increasing striped bass scarcity after 1880, dams, dredging, and pollution ruined the spawning grounds, as more and more estuaries, rivers, and creeks were removed from the species’ range.

  Amagansett men “occasionally fish with seines for striped bass and other species on the Atlantic side. The bass have been scarce this year,” says an observer of a century ago, in 1880;9 he cites a Talmage of Sag Harbor, a Ludlow of Bridgehampton, and a Burnett of Southampton, all of whom agree that the striped bass was scarce and growing scarcer. Between 1880 and 1897, the highest yield of bass in a single year was 200,000 pounds as compared to a high of 2,500,000 pounds for weakfish. There seemed no cause for alarm, however. “Though the striped bass has undoubtedly decreased greatly in abundance during the century, it is still an abundant fish,” according to turn-of-the-century authorities.10

  To judge from the recollections of the Lesters, the first decades of the present century were progressively poorer. Between 1921 and 1938, the highest annual bass catch for all Long Island was 120,000 pounds,11 a tiny fraction of the annual Long Island landings of all finned fish species, which in 1938 came to fifty million pounds. In 1928, when a fifth dam was built on the Chesapeake’s main tributary, the Susquehanna, the bass stocks in the bay quickly diminished, and by the early 1930s it was actually said that the species was becoming extinct. But the enlargement of the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal a few years earlier had flushed out much of the stagnation in the upper bay, preparing the way for successful spawnings in 1933 and 1934; the great year-class of 1934, in fact, was the largest in the memory of man.

  With the reappearance of small bass a few years later, measures were taken to avoid another precipitous decline. In 1939, following the recommendations of Dr. Daniel Merriman, director of the Bingham Oceanographic Laboratories at Yale University, the size limit on coastal bass taken in New York (and most other North Atlantic states as well) was raised from fourteen to sixteen inches, or about two pounds, at which size the young female fish first spawns. But on the Chesapeake fishing grounds of Maryland and Virginia, where over half of the Atlantic coast striped bass were harvested, the size limit remained at fourteen inches, and in Delaware and North Carolina, it was twelve.

  Throughout the forties the striped bass grew more abundant, but rod-and-reel fishermen were now abundant, too. Schooling up in large lobbying aggregations, they began to put pressure on the politicians for legislation to reserve the bass for recreational anglers, who could round up far more votes than the commercial men. This campaign, led by the rugged fraternity of surfcasters (which produced its own dominant year-class with the advent of beach buggies and sophisticated spinning tackle after World War II), was generally endorsed by small boat fishermen. Similarly, the charter boatmen felt obliged to support their excited customers, though most of them knew there were plenty of bass and that restrictions on small local net fisheries that were harvesting migrating fish would not significantly affect the far greater numbers taken on rod and reel.

  In 1945 the sportsmen triumphed in Massachusetts, where all netting of striped bass was now prohibited; the sportsmen could and did point out that good surfcasting and bass boat fishing at Cuttyhunk, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and many other excellent locations produced far more income for local communities than the marginal net fisheries, and far more votes for politicians, as well. The commercial netters, in effect, had been put out of business by commercial rod-and-reelers, who now had a monopoly on peddling bass, and this new breed of money-minded sportsmen organized effective lobbies that put strong pressure on sportsmen in other states to fight for complementary legislation. Maine, New Hampshire, a
nd Connecticut, where netting was insignificant, fell into line (though bass laws vary in each state), but New York and Rhode Island, with important local fisheries, refused. No reputable biologist seemed to feel that such discriminatory legislation was desirable, and even the anglers’ magazine, Salt Water Sportsman, had certain doubts about the proposed restrictions. In 1948 it offered the views of the leading striped bass expert, Dr. Merriman, who wrote in part: “The fluctuations in abundance are due more to the environment than to the size of the adult stock.… Indeed, an awkward problem is posed by the fact that the dominant year-classes [such as the one in 1933] have a nasty habit of turning up when the adult stock is at the lowest level. In the case of the striped bass, there is no evidence that an increase in stock will produce more young. Since all evidence indicates that the stock of striped bass is adequate for both commercial and sporting interests, the efforts of the sportsmen to eliminate commercial fishing is in no way justified from a conservation point of view.”

  “In the case of the striped bass,” declared another bass biologist, Dr. James R. Westman, chairman of the Department of Wildlife Conservation at Rutgers, “hook-and-line fishing is inadequate for harvesting anything like the quantity of stripers that can be quite safely taken each year. The present net harvesting of striped bass, for example, is some eight million pounds per year throughout its Middle-Atlantic range from Virginia to Massachusetts, and yet the supply of striped bass has been increasing, irregularly, since 1933.… At present, the elimination of commercial netting for striped bass would not only be unjustified from a conservation point of view but would actually be wasteful.”

  In June of 1952, alarmed by the sharp dispute that year in the state assembly, the magazine of the New York Conservation Department (now the Department of Environmental Conservation, or D.E.C.) published the opinions of Drs. Merriman and Westman, who were growing weary of having their findings ignored. “It is a curious anachronism,” Dr. Merriman observed, “that the unusual abundance with which we have been blessed has, in a round-about way, resulted in frequent acrimonious disputes between commercial and sporting interests.” And the Conservationist commented, “In this controversy the department found itself, as it often does, being pressed to throw overboard the findings of the country’s best biologists, who in this case do not recommend reserving the striper solely for the angler.” As will be seen, the pressure had scarcely begun.

  Already a great amount of research on the striper was being implemented, organized, and published by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which was subsidized, in part, by an excise tax on fishing tackle. The commission, which concerns itself with all fish and shellfish problems on the Atlantic coast, coordinates the findings of the marine biological laboratories, the state research programs, the university departments of conservation and biology, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and interested anglers and commercial men whose aid is conscripted in fish-tagging surveys and other studies contributory to the understanding and management of this resource. The chief function of its striped bass committee is to discover and promote conservation practice and state legislation beneficial to both bass and man.

  In 1953 the commission made this statement on the general subject of legislation in the fisheries: “During the past thirty years there has been a growing trend toward social legislation in the marine fisheries of the several Atlantic states. Except in rare instances, such social legislation seeks to protect one particular fishery interest at the expense of another.… Such acquisitive attempts often claim conservation and sound management as their objectives. Rarely, however, is there sound scientific evidence to back these claims. Accordingly, this commission now feels called upon to indicate the possible results and danger that such legislation may hold and to point out that unless this trend is checked and far greater consideration given to scientific data and warranted conclusions, the longtime result may well be a gross mismanagement of our marine fishery resources.…”

  But none of these sensible observations eased the dispute, which was to fester for the next thirty years. Old-fashioned sportsmen had largely been replaced by the “meat fishermen,” who accused the commercial men of ravaging natural resources, a cry taken up by fishing columnists and sportsmen’s magazines. Wrongly encouraged in such prejudices, as one observer commented, “the angler, in company with his friends, will start a crusade against some innocent group of people who make their living from the sea.” It was not an apologist for the commercial men who made this comment but Dr. Edward C. Raney of Cornell, who would inherit Dr. Merriman’s position as the foremost authority on the striped bass. I happened to know Dr. Merriman quite well and had spoken and corresponded with Dr. Raney, who came to Long Island several times to observe the haul-seining operation; both biologists deplored the unsporting crusade against the commercial men that was already well under way in the early fifties.

  8.

  Under Montauk Light

  In the early summer of 1954, a power boat with the most beautiful lines I had ever seen was riding at anchor in the harbor of Rockport, Massachusetts. Her designer turned out to be a local sailmaker who had built her as a tuna harpoon boat; she was the only one of her kind, and she was for sale. The following day I took the helm on a run around Cape Ann, as the owner ran forward to the pulpit and harpooned a small harbor seal (bounded in Massachusetts) with an astonishing throw of the clumsy pole. In Ipswich Bay, giant bluefin tuna were carving circles on the surface, and the sailmaker showed me how to approach them, how much to lead the swift fish on the throw, how important it was that everyone aboard stay well clear of the line tub when the fish was struck, but because he was selling his beautiful boat, he seemed too disheartened to pursue them.

  With her high bow and deep hull forward, her long low cockpit and flat stern, the thirty-two foot boat looked like a trim and elegant Maine lobsterman, and she handled well in any kind of sea. Powered by a 120-horsepower Buick engine adapted to marine use (automobile engines, readily and cheaply acquired at wrecked-car yards, are often adapted by commercial fishermen), she came equipped with spotting tower, outriggers, harpoon stand, harpoons and line, a heavy tuna rod and reel and fighting chair, boat rods, shark hooks, and miscellaneous gear of all descriptions. At five thousand dollars, she was a bargain even in those days, and I knew from the first that she was my boat, though I had to borrow to obtain her; she was the most compulsive purchase of my life.

  Signing the papers, the sailmaker was close to tears. He had designed and built this lovely craft with his own hands, he was losing her for an unworthy purpose (his wife desired a breezeway for their house), and throwing in all the fishing gear was an acknowledgment that a vital aspect of his life was at an end.

  A few days later I ran the boat southward down the coast off Salem and Boston and on through the Cape Cod Canal and Buzzards Bay, putting in at Block Island late that evening, and continuing on to Three Mile Harbor the next day. By that time it had come to me, a little late, that writing and commercial fishing were barely paying my household expenses, that there was nothing left over for boat insurance, berth fees, maintenance, or even gas for a boat this size (the one-cylinder engine on my scallop boat ran mostly on air, and the rude hull could be berthed on a mud bank, invulnerable to theft or serious damage). And so, within a few days of her arrival, the beautiful boat I had rechristened Merlin—after the small swift falcon of that name as well as the celebrated magician—was sailing out of Montauk as a charter boat, with John Cole as mate. For the next two summers, often twice a day, we headed east along Gin Beach, rounding Shagwong Point and running south to join the fishing fleet off Montauk Point, or continuing offshore to the tuna grounds at the eighty-fathom line, where one misty morning of long and oily swells, many years before, I had seen the first whales of my life, the silver steam rising from the silver surface, the great dark shapes breaking the emptiness of ocean sky.

  For many years as a boy in the late thirties, I had gone deep-sea fishing off Montauk with my fathe
r, and to this day I cannot see that high promontory of land with its historic lighthouse without a stirring of excitement and affection. Montauk is essentially a high rock island, cut off from the glacial moraines of the South Fork by a strait four miles wide. This strait, now filled with ocean sand, was known to the Indians as Napeague, or “water land”—old-timers speak of going “on” and “off” Montauk1 as if it were still an island—and the headland at Montauk’s eastern end was known to the Indians as Wompanon.2 A lighthouse fired by sperm whale oil was constructed at Wompanon in 1795 by order of President George Washington, who proposed that it should stand for two hundred years.

  Montauk’s access to swift rips and deep ledges, to the wandering Gulf Stream, forty to seventy miles off to the south, has made it a legendary fishing place since Indian times. It was the fishing that attracted the developer Arthur Benson in 1879, when New York sportsmen were establishing striped bass fishing clubs in New York and Rhode Island. In 1880 some visionary anglers caused the construction of an iron fishing pier3 over seven hundred feet long on the ocean beach at Napeague, only to see it torn away in its first winter.