Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  “In the days when I used to go fishin with Milt Miller,” Benny Havens told me some years later, “Dick Hamilton was out there, too, and he outfished me and Milt every time; never done nothin but run-aroundin all his life, I guess. I used to fish with Dick a little, and he’d talk to me some but not much. Dead now, from what I hear—drink got to him, I guess.”

  By far the largest boats on the summer bay were the “bony boats,” or bunker steamers that sailed in summer from the Smith Meal Company and Edwards Brothers docks at Promised Land. The bunker boats used large purse seines of 250 fathoms, set from the sterns of two circling seine boats thirty-six feet long; the seine boats met and passed each other in order to close the net, doing their best to avoid bluefish, which bit holes in the netting with their razor teeth. The bunker fishery was (and is) the largest commercial fishery in North America.

  The ship dispatched in 1633 by Governor Winthrop of Connecticut to explore the East End fisheries had observed huge schools, many acres in extent, of a fish known to the Indians as munnohquohteau, “that which restores the earth,” but not for many years did the settlers adopt the custom (popularly attributed to the Indians) of burying a mossbunker, as the Dutch called it, in each hill of corn, and spreading these bunkers on their fields. By the end of the eighteenth century, after the trees were gone, and the bare land worn down to old-field pasture, the farmer-fishermen harvested this fertilizer in a systematic way, using large seines and round-bottomed lapstrake1 skiffs, fifteen to twenty feet long, hauled down to the sea on horse-drawn carts. In 1822, the Reverend Timothy Dwight, in his travels through the region, described “the immense shoals of whitefish [menhaden] with which in the beginning of summer its waters are replenished” and which—together with “the fish called horsefoots [horseshoe crabs], the remains of which yield a smell still less supportable”—were being used to restore the exhausted soils. Eight thousand bunkers, it was estimated, would “dress” one acre. By 1840, there were thirty full-time seine gangs, or seines, with a main summer occupation of harvesting menhaden for the farmers. Each small community owned a seine about 2,500 feet long that required hauling by forty or fifty men.

  In 1847, at Jessups Neck, Marcus Osborn used whale try pots to process oil from the menhaden. As a new substitute for whale oil, this bunker oil was reserved for paints and tanning; only the dried scrap was used for fertilizer. A new industry was under way, and improved potworks, or bunker factories, twenty or more, were built at Northwest, Shelter Island, Greenport, Cape Gardiner, Napeague, and various locations on Peconic Bay. With the growing demand for fish oil, the community seine boats had given way to large commercial vessels. By 1880, 232 sailing boats and 24 steam vessels were purse-seining bunkers in Gardiners Bay; one wonders how they found room to maneuver.

  With the advent of the purse seine,2 which could be fished offshore in open water, a large coastal fishery had been born. In May 1876, Oliver Osborn was noting in his journals the presence of bunker steamers3 off the beach: “The first steamers that I ever knew to do anything fishing off here came along last week. They did well.” With such a steamer, in the single season of 1888, Captain Josh Edwards of Amagansett caught an estimated eleven million bunkers. Cap’n Josh, his brothers, and their sons—the Edwards Brothers—built docks on the bay shore at Napeague where fish factories were already in operation, and where deep water for steamers came in close to shore. This location, known as Bunker City, was judged the most remote from the new summer visitors to East Hampton, who protested from the start the strong aroma that came their way on an east wind. (The bunker men, who were now plying the coastal waters, and who lived for long periods with large cargoes of rotting fish on unrefrigerated ships, were not sympathetic.) Later this smelly place was known as Promised Land, the proposed name for a proposed post office to be situated near George Conklin’s general store, established there in 1879.

  In 1909 the Gardiners Bay Company, developing a summer colony at Devon, sought in vain to prohibit by law the malodorous pall being cast over its genteel community by the “fish factories” on the low shores of Napeague and at Deep Hole on Cape Gardiner. The factories were consolidated about 1920, when the coal-burning wood steamers were still running, and workers from Nova Scotia came as summer help, but they were shut down throughout most of the twenties as the menhaden became scarce. (The Edwards Brothers ran a curtailed operation, with the crews of two small steamers also serving to process the fish ashore.) In 1931 and again in 1933, the main buildings of the factory, closed for a decade, were destroyed by fire, but the fish had already started to return, and the old factory site adjoining the Edwards Brothers dock was acquired by Smith Meal, which brought in crews of black fishermen from the South and took on the Edwardses as captains.

  “The younger generation, my uncles and my father, they all went on bunker steamers sometime during the days of their life … and I took a likin to bunker fishin,” says Joshua (Jack) Edwards, grandson and namesake of the old whaler, Cap’n Josh; he recalls being sent down to Virginia and bringing back a whole truckload of black fishermen, who were now replacing the Nova Scotian crews on the steamers that tended the ocean traps in spring and seined menhaden for the fish factory in summer. Jack’s father, Cap’n Sam, and his uncle, Cap’n Bert, were concerned about his poor hearing and poor eyesight, saying he would never make a bunker captain—“You gotta have a pretty quick eye sometimes to see them bunkers playin,” Jack admits—but his Uncle Evvie (Cap’n Everett, or E.J.) encouraged him to pay them no attention. Jack Edwards did well in his first season, in 1938, and “stayed at the top of the fleet for many years.”

  With the advent of World War II, and the big sea-going draggers that came after, the ocean trapping operations of the Edwards Brothers were dissolved for good, and the trap anchors and barrel nets were sold to Rhode Island fish companies for use in Narragansett Bay. But Smith Meal resumed operations when its requisitioned steamers were returned after the war, and the Edwardses stayed on as captains of new steel ships up to 175 feet long. The factory crew numbered 125 men, with 290 more as crew on ten big boats. Eventually some 1,500 boats were working the continental shelf, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of Maine.

  In the 1950s, Cap’n Jack’s 151-foot Shinnecock was one of the swift steamers working Gardiners Bay; I passed her often on the way out to Crow Shoal and the Ruin, or when I put into Promised Land for fuel. Her huge black crewmen, lonely and far from home, became a part of local legend with the wonderful chanting heard across the water as the big steamers drew close to the seine boats and the nets were lifted; the chant insured that all pulled together, since the net was so heavy. “Oh God yes, they were strong, they were really strong men, the whole gang of them,” Jack Edwards says. “There wasn’t many of those colored fellas that lived to be too old, because they were such hard, hard workers.”

  In the 1960s the picturesque high crow’s nests on the raked steamer masts would give way to spotter planes and electric scanners that tracked down the last enormous shoals of this oily herring whose great numbers shivered the broad reaches of the sea. Inevitably the fish became so scattered that local factories were no longer efficient. Residents and real estate speculators, unable to develop the Napeague Stretch because of the smell, had been pressuring the town for years to close the fish factory, and in 1968 the old Bunker City closed down for good. A few steamers still tied up on weekends at Smith Meal’s shipyard in Greenport, but the center of operations was moved to New Jersey. In recent years, the bunker fleet has been based still farther south, in Reedville, Virginia, and Cameron, Louisiana.

  When the Smith Meal factory closed, the Edwards Brothers fish company, founded before the turn of the century when the family patriarchs were going off after their last whales, “died right out, too,” Jack Edwards says. His brother, Captain Norman Edwards, went south with the bunker fleet (though his home is still in Amagansett) and Cap’n Jack became master of one of the big ferries between Orient Point and New London until he retired with heart tro
uble just a few years ago. (His old ship Shinnecock was converted to deep-water clamming for the fried clam and canned chowder market, using jet dredges in water as deep as eighty fathoms.) Today the bunker fleet consists of six large refrigerator ships, each with its own spotter plane, and capable of carrying up to 2.5 million pounds. Captain Norman Edwards, locating a huge school in 1980 in the Gulf of Maine, took 750 thousand pounds, or over three hundred tons, in a single haul. “Fish are not so plentiful all over the place, just here, there, and everywhere,” says his brother Jack, “but eventually them fish are coming back.”

  The local menhaden fishery might well have been replaced by a commerce in the so-called trash fish that the commercial men heaved over by the ton. In a new plant set up in Greenport, sea robins, skates, dogfish, daylights, and other unmarketable denizens of the deep were trundled on conveyor belts from boat hold to dockside factory, emerging presently as “fish protein concentrate” or FPC, a pristine white flour with long storage life, perhaps the most economical source of pure protein yet devised. (FPC could also be made from bunkers, and tollhouse cookies made with fish flour were well received at a promotional meeting for this product, Jack Edwards says.) One day in Greenport I visited the new factory and tasted FPC, which could be baked into long-lasting bread: the flour was bone white, with no odor or fishy taste of any kind. Inevitably this wonderful new product was seen as a threat by bread and dairy interests, which maintained powerful lobbying groups in Washington. These lobbies saw to it that government agencies banned the distribution of fish flour as “unsanitary” because of those processed spines and guts and eyes; certain solvents used in the manufacturing process were also attacked. As a result, the Third World leaders whose countries were in desperate need of a cheap protein source were unable to advocate its use, knowing that their political opponents would accuse them of foisting on their countrymen an unclean product that Yankee capitalists were trying to dump on poorer nations. Meanwhile the fishermen themselves could not or would not bring into the factory sufficient tonnage to make the operation viable, according to Dick Nelson, the plant manager. And so a safe, healthy, and remarkably economical source of protein was denied the world’s poor, a new fishing industry was destroyed, and the new fish flour factory at Greenport was closed. Once again, tons of wasted fish killed in trawls and traps and nets were dumped over the side by the commercial men, who were finding it more and more difficult to make ends meet.

  In August of 1956 I was approached by Lewis Lester, who had been picked as the new captain of a rig owned by Reggie Bassett and was putting together a new crew. “Got most of ’em, I guess,” Lewis said, “but I’m still looking for a good, experienced man.” I shook my head; my days as a commercial fisherman were over. My marriage had disintegrated, my old fishing partners were scattering, and my friend Jackson, driving drunk, had destroyed himself and a young woman passenger when he lost control on the Springs-Fireplace Road. I had lost all heart for charter fishing, which meant that I could not afford to keep the Merlin, and I soon sold to Jimmy Reutershan a beautiful piece of woods high on Stony Hill, in Amagansett, where I had once planned to build a house.

  It was time to move on, but Lewis’s words sent me on my way feeling much better. I would never be a Bonacker, not if I lived here for a century, but apparently I was accepted as a fisherman. The three years spent with the commercial men were among the most rewarding of my life, and those hard seasons on the water had not been wasted.

  12.

  Changes

  For the next four years I was traveling to remote corners of the Americas, from Alaska and the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, and I rarely visited the South Fork. The Vop-Vop had already gone to a charity summer camp on Three Mile Harbor, and I sold a half-interest in the Merlin to my brother Carey, who was now a marine biologist on Martha’s Vineyard. In the late fifties I took the Merlin to the Vineyard, where Carey showed me his boat-casting spots on the ocean shoals south of Chappaquiddick. Here striped bass and blues, on the right tide, could be taken with almost every cast into the breaking seas. Like many Massachusetts sportsmen, he was taking big bass in such numbers that he sold commercially what he could not use.

  One day on the way to Noman’s Land, looking for swordfish, we came upon a dead humpback whale under Gay Head. The huge black body lay awash in the heavy swells, which rode ashore and boomed under the cliffs, the echo riding back in the soft mist. That summer I had a phone call from a charter boatman who sailed out of Provincetown. Knowing of my interest in whales, he told me that orcas, or killer whales, had appeared on Stellwagen Bank, between Cape Race and Boston, together with finbacks, humpbacks, and pilot whales. I left next morning for Provincetown, and found all four species on the surface in a slick August calm.

  Then in the summer of 1960 I visited for a while at a friend’s house in Sagaponack, an old farming community in the potato fields between Wainscott and Bridgehampton, in Southampton Town. From these farm communities, a road led over the scrub oak moraine to Sag Harbor (originally Sagaponack Harbor) where the South Shore farmers had once kept their boats. In the old days, these fields were “dressed” after the Indian fashion with the tons of menhaden seined out of the bays. As the American Midwest became planted in wheat, the local wheat crop was replaced by diversified crops of potatoes, strawberries, and cabbage, and potatoes emerged as the main crop when, in the first part of this century, a number of Polish clans arrived to join the founding families.

  “Sagaponack” is another form of “Accabonac,” an Indian word for an edible tuber that was gathered in both places.1 Like all of the earliest settlements, it was still organized in the European way, with the house lots within shouting distance up and down Sagg Main Street as a protection against Indians, wolves, and pirates, and the unbroken fields stretching east to the next farm village at Wainscott. Westward lay Sagaponack Pond, in country so opened up by farming that the bone white steeples in Bridgehampton2 could be seen against dark hills of the high moraine off to the north. This little-known farm hamlet south of the highway had one of the last “little red schoolhouses” in the Northeast, and a small spare general store owned by Lee Hildreth, who was also postmaster and gas pump operator. The schoolhouse and store, together with an excellent summer boarding house run by Mrs. Sczepankowski on the family farm (the first summer people in the Hamptons found lodgings in farm homesteads such as these) comprised the whole of downtown Sagaponack. All but a few of the old houses belonged to Toppings and Hildreths, Whites and Fosters, who had been here for many generations; one piece of Topping land between the cemetery and the sea was the oldest piece of land in the United States farmed continuously by the same white family.

  No houses were available in Sagaponack, and that fall I lived in a small cabin in the Springs by the Green River cemetery where Pollock had been buried four years before. Toward the end of that year, I was offered a fine property in Sagaponack, part of a tract, still called Smith Corner, inhabited originally by that Richard (Bull) Smith who founded Smithtown after his eviction from Southampton.3 In 1960 the sudden rise in local land values had not started, and the whole property—six acres, a large decrepit house, an outlying stable and small cottage—cost much less than just one of those overgrown acres would be worth today. The value of the property increased three times in the very first year that I owned it; since then, the selling off of the South Fork has become so frenzied that children of many local families, and the fishermen especially, can no longer afford to live where they were born.

  By the early sixties almost all of my old friends were gone. John Cole had settled down in Maine, Pete Scott had died in a car accident in California, and tough “Jimmy Root” would die a few years later of a flawed heart, not long after he had built his house on my former land on Stony Hill in Amagansett. (“Jimmy was a scientific fisherman,” Milt Miller once observed, “experimental, always looking into different ways of making and hanging nets. Trial and error, mostly error, but since then I have seen different people using his id
eas.”) Jackson Pollock was dead, and so was Herb Latshaw of the Three Mile Harbor Boatyard, one of my gunning partners on those wintry days stringing for coot at Cedar Point; the only friend from the old days I saw regularly was the painter Sherry Lord, who moved from the Springs to Sagaponack a few years after I did.

  When my neighbors realized that, come the autumn, I would still be there behind my hedge, I was accepted. My friend Bud Topping got me into the local gun club, and sometimes I filled in on the beach with the farmers’ haul-seine crew led by Bob Tillotson, whose brother Frank had been Ted Lester’s original partner in Montauk Seafood. Another crewman—the potato farmer in striped coveralls who would later bring that salmon into my yard (see Preface)—was a namesake and descendant of the John White who appears in the town records within a few years of the first settlement in 1640. Most of these men’s ancestors had been farmer-fishermen, and they were still attached to the fishing tradition. Although the farmers were beset by the erosion of poor crop years, heavy inheritance taxes, and the increasing pressure of a summer resort economy, most of the old farm families had held onto their land, which had suddenly become immensely valuable.