Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  ‘When we brought the net in and emptied it on deck, the professors helped us sort. They squatted down and took right hold. There was all the difference in the world between them and the other scientists. They worked as hard as us, except for stopping now and then to jot down a note. And they didn’t throw any Latin around. They used fishermen’s fish names. They didn’t call a squirrel hake a Hippogloppus hoppogloppus; they called it a snot head, the same as we do. We got the haul sorted and barreled, and then we went below for a mug-up, and they started in asking me questions such as did I ever come across any hogchokers, and when was the last bluefish run and how did it compare with the big bluefish runs in the old days, the bluefish gluts, and what species did I consider were being fished out, and other questions like that. They must’ve asked me fifty questions.

  ‘We made two one-hour drags, and then a drizzly fog set in, so we proceeded back to the dock. We unloaded, and it was only noon, so I asked the professors why didn’t they stay for lunch, I’d broil them a fluke. While we were eating, I told them it was my time to be district attorney, I’d like to ask them a question. I told them there was a matter that had bothered me since childhood days, that I had turned it over in my head a hundred times without coming to a sensible conclusion – namely, ‘How do lobsters mate? How in the world do they manage it?’ I asked did they know. Well, they knew. They had the scientific facts, and they got out their note pads and drew some diagrams to show the ABCs of the matter. Frank was up on deck, airing out a net, and I yelled to him to come below; I didn’t want him to miss it. And that led to the mating habits of whales. And then I asked what was their private theories on the eelgrass mystery. That’s a grass that used to grow on the bottom of bays all over the North Atlantic coast, thousands upon thousands of acres of it. It had long, narrow blades that looked eely. It was highly beneficial to fishermen, because scallops lived in it; it was shelter for the scallops. During 1931, it all disappeared. One week there’d be a thick stand of eelgrass in a bay; next week you couldn’t find a living blade of it. Bay scallops practically disappeared, too. That’s why they’re so dear. The old retired fishermen sitting on the docks thought up all kinds of theories at the time, the way they do. One old man, an old Baptist, it was his idea that God was punishing the fishermen for their misspent lives. “The eelgrass is only the beginning,” he used to say. “The fish’ll go next.” The professors had the facts. A fungus had got into the tissues of the grass – one of those buggers that can’t be seen with the naked eye – and had multiplied to a God-awful extent. They made some sketches of it, how it looks under the microscope, and they explained how it rotted the grass. And then we got on the subject of the grounds in the Sargasso Sea, where the eels go to spawn, the American eels bedding down together in one ground and the European eels in another. And then we discussed the tides and the moon and the Gulf Stream and the Continental Shelf and the Continental Slope and the deeps. We talked and drank coffee all afternoon. I answered their questions and they answered mine. I gave them the practical dope and they gave me the scientific dope. It was quite a discussion and I really enjoyed it. When they were leaving, they asked could they go out again on the Eleanor, and I told them, “Why, hell yes.” And they asked could they bring some of their apparatus aboard next trip, and I told them I didn’t see any reason why not, they were entirely welcome to do so. I told them they could make the Eleanor their headquarters.’

  Ever since then, Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel have spent at least one day a month on the Eleanor; it has become their research vessel. Ellery has an old Yale pennant, a souvenir of a Yale-Harvard boat race at New London, that he flies when they are aboard. The oceanographers keep a number of reference books in the Eleanor’s pilothouse. In addition, one shelf of the canned-goods cupboard in the cabin is crammed with books, most of which are about fish. These belong to Ellery; he is building a scientific library of his own. He started it with Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, by Henry B. Bigelow and William W. Welsh, an old United States Bureau of Fisheries reference work that is a classic of American ichthyology. Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel found a copy for Ellery in a secondhand bookstore in Boston and gave it to him for Christmas in 1944. Ellery has great respect for it. He has read and reread it, he lends it to other captains, and he frequently quotes from it. Mr Warfel believes that Ellery is no longer hostile to Latin and is quite sure that he has memorized the Latin fish names in Bigelow & Welsh. Ellery profanely denies this. He slips up every so often, however. Two sharks appear in multitudes in the Stonington grounds at certain seasons, the spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias) and the smooth dogfish (Mustelus canis). Not long ago, in conversation with Mr Warfel, Ellery mentioned a big shark that swam up while the net was coming out of the water and tore a hole in it trying to get at the fish inside, and Mr Warfel asked, ‘What was it – a spiny dog or a smooth dog?’ ‘It was an acanthias,’ Ellery said.

  Ellery and the oceanographers have become good friends. He calls them Dan and Herb. In between their trips to Stonington, he sends them logs, which are full of information about conditions on the grounds. He has collected many specimens for them. Whenever a Stonington draggerman notices a queer fish in a haul, such as one of the strays from tropical waters that work their way north in the Gulf Stream, he saves it and gives it to Ellery. Ellery writes the date and place of capture, and any other relevant facts the draggerman can supply, on a strip of rag paper, sticks this in the fish’s mouth, and drops the fish in a five-gallon can of formaldehyde that the oceanographers keep in Bindloss’s dock house for this purpose. The oceanographers have finished half a dozen monographs on phases of their study. In each of these, they acknowledged Ellery’s assistance. For example, in a footnote in ‘The Spawning Habits, Eggs, and Larvae of the Sea Raven, Hemitripterus americanus, in Southern New England,’ they wrote, ‘The authors are greatly indebted to Captain Ellery Thompson of the vessel Eleanor, out of Stonington, Connecticut, whose cooperation has been invaluable in much of the work of this laboratory in recent years.’ Two of Ellery’s paintings of the Eleanor have been acquired by the laboratory. Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel occasionally bring a colleague along on their trips to the grounds. Dr Ernest Freeman Thompson, an international authority on the hermit crab, and Dr Werner Bergmann, a chemistry professor who studies the taxonomy of marine invertebrates for fun, have made three trips each. Mr Merriman’s father once came down from Harvard and went out to the Mussel Bed with Ellery. All the way out, he stood by the wheel and told Ellery stories about Suleiman the Magnificent, of whom he had written a biography. Ellery liked him. When Professor Merriman died, in September of 1945, Ellery sent flowers. ‘He had a good head on him,’ Ellery says. After their monthly trip, Ellery always gives a supper for the oceanographers at his home in New London. At first, he just had cold cuts and beer, but his mother considered that inhospitable. Mrs Thompson is a cook in the old American big-kitchen tradition, the kind of woman who will make a fruit or meringue pie that no pastry chef in New York City could equal and then apologize for it. She likes to cook and she likes to see people eat, and Ellery’s suppers have developed into banquets. For a recent one, Mrs Thompson stuffed a twenty-pound turkey with three dozen Robbins Island oysters and roasted it.

  Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel drive over to Stonington in an old truck that the Oceanographic Laboratory shares with the geology department, and park it on Bindloss’s dock. They bring two chests of apparatus – thermometers, silk plankton nets, Mason jars for small specimens, a measuring board, and a jug of formaldehyde. They set the chests up on the Eleanor’s aft hatch. During a drag, they bottle samples of sea water, surface and bottom; take the temperature of the air and of the water, surface and bottom; make weather notes; and collect samples of plankton, the microscopic floating plant and animal life that is the basic food of most fishes. When the net is brought aboard and emptied on deck, they examine a few members of each species of fish in the haul. Twenty-three species are encountered in numbers in the Stonington grounds. Commercially, they fa
ll into three categories – regularly marketed, occasionally marketed, and trash. Eight species are regularly marketed – blackback flounders, yellowtail flounders, fluke flounders, witch flounders, cod, haddock, cunners, and porgies. Five species are occasionally marketed – windowpane flounders, whiting, Boston hake, squirrel hake, and ocean pout. Ten species are regarded as trash – Baptist flounders, longhorn sculpin, little skates, big skates, barn-door skates, goosefish, sea ravens, sea robins, spiny dogfish, and smooth dogfish. These are always sorted out and thrown back, a process that kills a large proportion of them. By accumulating data on the whole hauls of the Eleanor and of other draggers over a period of seven months, a project in which they were assisted by Ellery, Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel determined that approximately fifty-three per cent of the catch of the Stonington fleet is thrown back. They consider this an appalling waste. All these fish are edible, but Americans are prejudiced against them, mainly because of their appearance; with the exception of the Baptist flounder, which has four lovely circle-within-a-circle designs on its top side, they are remarkably grotesque. In flavor and texture, most of them are as good as those that are regularly marketed, and one, the barn-door skate, when properly cooked, is superior. Skates are esteemed in England, and raie au beurre noir is one of the great fish dishes of France. Other New England fleets ship trash fish in small quantities to Fulton Market, where they are sold to two dissimilar groups: buyers for luxury hotels and restaurants, and proprietors of little one-and two-bin fish stores in Italian, Spanish, and Chinese neighborhoods.

  A hodgepodge of invertebrates comes up in every dragger haul – lobsters, squid, blue crabs, rock crabs, hermit crabs, surf clams, blood clams, bay scallops, sea scallops, cockles, mussels, moon snails, pear conchs, sand dollars, starfish, serpent stars, sea anemones, sea squirts, sea mice, sea urchins, and sponges. Except for the lobsters and scallops, and sometimes the squid and blue crabs, these are also thrown back or swept through the scuppers – another example of blind American waste. The ripe raw roe of sea urchins is finer than most of the caviar that reaches us. Pear conchs, or conks, shipped as a sideline by oystermen and clammers, are used in a hot Italian dish called scungili; there are basement restaurants on Mulberry Street that specialize in it and are referred to as scungili places. Scungili is similar in taste and texture to mushrooms. Also, like mushrooms, it has a musky, wet-earth smell. People who go often to Italian restaurants have probably eaten pear conchs and moon snails without knowing it; both are widely used in a sauce for spaghetti and other pasta dishes. The Chinese in Chinatown use pear conchs in a number of dishes.

  On every trip on the Eleanor, Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel pick out one haul, usually the second of the day, and buy all the fish in it, marketable and trash, paying whatever prices are current in Fulton Market. These fish, unsorted, are barreled and iced and set aside in the hold; there may be anywhere from two to six barrels. At the end of the trip, they are loaded on the truck and taken to the laboratory. Next day, Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel and their colleagues assemble around cutting tables in a room in the basement of the laboratory called the ‘crud room’ and weigh and measure and decipher the sex of every fish. Samples of each species are then put in cold storage and taken out one by one and dissected and examined in regard to age, stage of sexual maturity, stomach contents, and parasites – a job that takes several days. This laboratory data and the data collected on the grounds, when put together, like the parts of a puzzle, yield information about spawning and feeding habits, rates of growth, ages, natural and fishing mortalities, fish diseases, competition among fishes for food, and relationships between individuals and between species. An analysis of the causes of fluctuations in abundance in southern New England fishing grounds will be made on the basis of this information. That is the main purpose of the study. The oceanographers hope that they will eventually be able to estimate the tonnage of each species that draggermen can take in a season without dangerously depleting the stock.

  Fishermen and fishmongers along the southern New England coast have given obscene names to a number of fishes. Some of these names are so imaginative, scornful, and apt that they are startling. Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel collect them. They also collect Block Island stories, or Block Islands. Block Island is nine miles out in the Atlantic, off Rhode Island, to which it belongs; it is small and shaped like an oyster shell and almost treeless. The tides around it are treacherous, and hundreds of ships have been wrecked on its reefs and sand bars. The islanders are cold to strangers and are hostile to fishermen from the mainland who drag in the grounds surrounding it, such as the Hell Hole and the Mussel Bed. In retaliation, the mainlanders for generations have made up stories about them, accusing them of stinginess and of depending upon wrecks for a living.

  One midwinter afternoon, the Eleanor, with the oceanographers aboard, skirted Cow Cove, on the northern tip of Block Island, while returning from a trip to the Mussel Bed. It was a sunny, still afternoon, and the air was so clear that the lighthouse on Montauk Point, twenty miles to the southwest, was visible. Frank was at the wheel. Ellery and Mr Merriman and Mr Warfel were sitting on the aft hatch, eating boiled lobsters. Charlie was lying on his back in the life dory, staring at a photograph in a magazine called Sunshine and Health, which is the official organ of the American Sunbathing Association, a nudist group. Next to Popular Mechanics, it is his favorite magazine. Ellery suddenly snapped his fingers. ‘I was about to forget,’ he said. ‘I heard a Block Island the other day. Johnny Bindloss told it. Johnny had it years ago from his grandfather, old man William Park Bindloss. He was a stonemason who specialized in lighthouses. He built South East Light on Block Island, and he lived over there a year or two and got acquainted. In those days, according to the general talk, the islanders got the better part of their bread and butter salvaging off wrecks. There’d be wrecks on the reefs all during the winter, coasting vessels mostly, and the stuff in them would wash up on the beach. The islanders would stand on the beach all day and all night, hooking for the stuff with poles that had bent nails on the ends of them. They were called wreck hooks. Everybody would line up down there and hook – little children, great-grandmothers, everybody that could walk. The competition got so thick that they all agreed on a standard-length hook. Everybody had to use the same length. Around that time, a preacher from the mainland came over and settled on the island to preach the word of God and make a living for himself. The islanders listened to him, but they didn’t offer to pay him anything. Along about February, he got real lean and raggedy. He was nothing but skin and bones. The islanders didn’t want him to starve to death over there. For one thing, they’d have to bury him. So they held a meeting and argued the matter back and forth. One man made a motion they should take up a collection for the preacher, but this man had a reputation for being simple and his motion was so idiotic they didn’t even discuss it. Some wanted each family to give the preacher a peck of potatoes or a turnip or two, and some were for giving him a fish whenever there was a good big catch, a glut. They couldn’t agree. They argued until late that night. Finally, they decided they’d let him have a wreck hook an inch and a half longer than all the rest. If he couldn’t make a living with that, he could go ahead and starve to death.’

  ‘Take the wheel a few minutes, Ellery, if you don’t mind,’ said Frank, ‘and I’ll tell a Block Island.’

  Ellery got up and relieved Frank, who came over and sat on the hatch.

  ‘There was a fisherman from Stonington named Tucker Seabury who used to go over to Block Island and fish for cod a month or two every fall,’ Frank said. ‘Did it for years and years. Tuck was an old bachelor, and sort of odd himself. He got to know the Block Islanders, and they got to know him. In fact, he and the Block Islanders gradually got to be quite friendly. Tuck was what you call an old hand-liner. He’d go out in a dory and kneel over the side and fish for cod with hand lines. They don’t fish much that way any more. He mostly fished on the Ledge. That’s a hidden reef that juts out from the island a
considerable distance. There’s a buoy anchored off the end of it. Tuck was out there on the reef one afternoon in his dory, the way he used to tell it, and the cod were running and he was busy as Billy be damned and after a while he happened to look up and he saw a schooner heading for the reef, a big coasting schooner. It was coming in between the buoy and the island, taking a shortcut. It was an insane sight. Tuck stood up in his dory and waved both arms and screamed. “Reef!” he screamed. “Reef! Reef! Reef! Good God A’mighty, you’re heading for a reef!” The schooner turned aside and shot out past the buoy, just in time. A few yards more and there’d’ve been an awful, awful wreck. Tuck glanced toward the landing on the island and there was a crowd of Block Islanders standing there, men and women, watching. Tuck was quite pleased with himself. He figured the Block Islanders would praise him for the good deed he had done. On toward sundown, he rowed in. The crowd of Block Islanders was still on the landing, standing around. Tuck nodded and spoke, the same as he always did, but the Block Islanders didn’t speak. They just stood and looked at him. There was an old man among them who had always been Tuck’s best friend on the island. Finally, this old man gave Tuck a cold look and said, “Why don’t you mind your own business?”’