The Bottom of the Harbor

by Joseph Mitchell

  One Sunday morning in August, 1931, Ellery put his most recent paintings in his automobile to take home and show his mother. He stopped at a filling station near Groton on U.S. 1A for a tank of gas, and the proprietor, an old acquaintance, saw them on the back seat and looked them over and asked if he could put one in his window. “‘Why, hell yes,’ I told him,” Ellery says. “He picked one out, the biggest, and he figured there ought to be a price on it, make it look professional, so we cracked some jokes about that, and finally he stuck a sticker on it reading one hundred dollars. He laughed and I laughed. It wasn’t more than an hour and a half later he phoned me there was a party down there wanted to buy it, a man from New York who was building a summer home at Groton Long Point. He was planning a marine room and wanted some boat pictures for it. He took my address and drove to the house—he surprised me; didn’t look odd at all—and inquired did I have any others for sale. ‘Why, hell yes,’ I said, and hauled them out. He took five, including the one that was in the window—three big and two small—and wrote me out a check for four hundred dollars.”

  This windfall had a bad effect on Ellery. When he started his next painting, he found that he couldn’t get anything to look right. Halfway through, he gave it up and started another. “I know now what was wrong,” he says. “Instead of painting a picture for the fun of it, just something to show to Ma and the fellows on the dock, I was trying to paint a picture worth one hundred dollars.” After a number of false starts, he lost his confidence. He wrapped his art gear in a blanket and stowed it in the Eleanor’s spare bunk and didn’t paint any more for three years. In the summer of 1934, a Stonington captain bought a new dragger and asked Ellery to paint a picture of it. “What’ll you give me?” Ellery asked. The captain offered a box of cigars. “Make it a quart of Scotch and throw in the cost of the canvas,” Ellery told him, “and I’ll see what I can do.” The captain agreed. Ellery got out a stretched canvas and propped it against a lobster trap on the dock and sat on another trap and went to work. “I was real fumbly at first,” he says, “but I soon got my nerve back. Everybody around the dock dropped what they were doing and came and stood in back of me and told me how to do it, but I finished it that afternoon and it turned out good. The dragger was fresh off the ways, hadn’t even been shook down, but I put her out on the high seas, fighting a storm. That tickled the captain. When I got through, two other captains made arrangements with me to paint their boats.”

  Since then, Ellery has painted between fifty and sixty draggers, trawlers, mackerel seiners, and lobster boats, and his price has advanced from a quart of Scotch to thirty-five dollars if the client is a Stonington man or seventy-five if he is a stranger. “I’m proud of my painting,” Ellery says. “On the other hand, I’m sorry I ever started it. It’s hard to satisfy a fishing captain and it gets harder and harder. You not only have to paint his boat as accurate as a blueprint, you have to put it in a storm, a terrible storm. They all insist on that. Like a captain said the other day, ‘It’s a good painting, Ellery, only I wish you’d put in a bolt of lightning striking the mast.’ Each wants a worse storm than the others. It’s got so if I was to paint a boat that looked as if there was a remote possibility it might make port, the captain would take offense.” Except for his own work, Ellery doesn’t have much interest in painting. Once, when the Eleanor was laid up in Newport by engine trouble, he and Frank and Charlie spent an afternoon in Providence and visited the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design. They had on their fishing clothes and felt ill at ease and stayed only a few minutes. “We couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” Ellery says. He sometimes seems to feel that his success as a painter is a joke he has played on the world. “Nearly about every fishing captain from Point Jude to New London has one of my paintings hung up in his home,” Ellery says, “and every now and then, when I’m driving past those homes at night, I can’t help saying to myself, ‘Good God A’mighty! What have I done?’” Other paintings by Ellery hang in net lofts, chandleries, dock offices, and dockside saloons in eastern Connecticut fishing ports. Most of these are of the Eleanor. Bindloss, the dock proprietor, owns six. There is a Thompson in Fulton Market. It is owned by Jim Coyne, general manager of John Feeney, Inc., the firm to which Ellery ships his fish, and it hangs in the Feeney stall in the old Fishmongers Association shed. Every summer, people from New York City, on vacation in and around Stonington, buy some of Ellery’s work. They never fail to inform him that he is a primitive. This word used to anger him. He now understands its significance in relation to painting, but he pretends that he doesn’t. Last summer, a woman from New York told him that she knew dozens of painters but he was the first primitive she’d ever met. “I’m not as primitive as I have been,” Ellery said. “Nowheres near. Back before I got the rheumatism, I was without a doubt the most primitive man in eastern Connecticut.”

  The last few years, owing to the growth of his interest in oceanography, Ellery has been devoting less and less time to painting. He says he first heard of oceanography one Saturday afternoon in May, 1943. He and several other dragger captains had called it a week and were sitting in the sun on the stringpiece of Bindloss’s dock, sharing a bottle, when two strangers walked up and introduced themselves: they were Daniel Merriman, director of the Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory at Yale, and Herbert E. Warfel, a research assistant. Mr. Merriman told the captains that the staff of the laboratory was about to begin work on a lengthy study of the fishes in the eastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island grounds, and he asked for their cooperation. He said that he and Mr. Warfel would be in charge of the study and that they wanted to drive over from New Haven once or twice a month and go out to the grounds on Stonington draggers and examine catches and make oceanographic observations. When Ellery heard this, he promptly left the group and went down the dock and stayed in the cabin of the Eleanor until the oceanographers had departed. Scientists of one sort or another—aquatic biologists from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, ichthyologists from New England universities, and, in recent years, drug-company chemists assaying the vitamins in the liver oil of various fishes—frequently visit the Stonington docks, and Ellery had formed a low opinion of them. On three occasions, just to be accommodating, he had taken scientists out to the Hell Hole. “They were all alike,” he says. “The first hour, while we were making a drag, they got in the way. You couldn’t turn around without stepping on Dr. Somebody-or-Other. The second hour, while we were sorting a haul, they sat on their tails and watched us sort and disputed among themselves concerning what was the right Latin name for this fish and that fish, and somehow—up to our knees in fish and wet to the skin—all that Latin had a tendency to get on our nerves. The third hour, they ate sandwiches. The fourth hour, they threw up.”

  The other captains were more sympathetic. That same month, Mr. Merriman and Mr. Warfel went out with Captain S. W. Stenhouse on the Nathaniel B. Palmer and with Captain W. H. McLaughlin on the Marise. During the first week of June, they went out with Captain Roscoe Bacchiocchi on the Baby II. Mr. Merriman noticed that these captains replied to a good many of the questions he and Mr. Warfel asked them by saying that they didn’t know but that Captain Thompson, on the Eleanor, probably did. Captain Bacchiocchi, for example, when asked if hogchoker flounders ever entered Block Island Sound, said that he wouldn’t know a hogchoker if he caught one but that he thought he remembered hearing Ellery Thompson say something or other about catching some. Twice, seeing the Eleanor tied up at Bindloss’s dock, Mr. Merriman went aboard her looking for Captain Thompson, but each time a man down in the cabin, who he later found out was Captain Thompson himself, shouted up the companionway that Captain Thompson had just knocked off and gone to the movies. Finally, on a Sunday night late in June, Mr. Merriman telephoned Ellery at his home. Their conversation was an odd one, and Mr. Merriman can recollect it. He told Ellery that he was eager to make a trip to the grounds with him and started to tell why, but Ellery interrupted and asked, “What do you call yourse
lf—Doctor or Mister?” Mr. Merriman said that he was a Ph.D. but much preferred to be called Mister. Ellery said he would have to think the matter over. Then, abruptly making up his mind, he said, “Oh, hell, be down at the dock tomorrow morning at half past five and we’ll take you out and get it over with.” Mr. Merriman tried to thank him, but Ellery interrupted again and said, “Don’t thank me. Just keep out of the way. And when you see we’ve got our hands full pulling in a net and the dogfish are swarming around and the gulls are screeching and the winch is backfiring and everything on deck is all balled up, don’t you and the other professor pick that particular moment to butt in and ask questions. And don’t bring sandwiches. If there’s anything I despise, it’s sandwiches. While you’re on my boat, I’ll feed you.”

  Mr. Merriman, having known many fishing captains and having long since concluded that they are the most plainspoken of men, took Ellery’s bluntness for granted. Mr. Merriman is a friendly, adaptable, serious young scientist who has put in about as much time in the field as in the laboratory. In 1930, deciding that fish interested him more than the liberal arts, he quit Harvard, where he was a junior, and spent two years knocking around fishing ports in the United States and England, going to banks in the Gulf of Maine in trawlers out of Groton and to banks in the North Sea in trawlers and herring drifters out of the English ports of Grimsby and Lowestoft. Then he returned to school—not to Harvard but to the College of Fisheries in the University of Washington, in Seattle. After getting a Master’s degree at Washington for a study of the effects of temperature on the development of the eggs and larvae of the cutthroat trout, he went to Yale, in 1935, as a graduate student in zoology. In 1938, he became an instructor in biology. In 1942, when he was thirty-four, he was raised to assistant professor of biology, curator of oceanography in the Peabody Museum, and director of the Oceanographic Laboratory. A paper he did on the striped bass is the standard work on that fish. He is a Bostonian and a member of an old New England teaching family. His father, the late Professor Roger Bigelow Merriman, taught history at Harvard for forty-three years. Charles W. Eliot, the Harvard president, was an uncle.

  Mr. Warfel is an Indianian of Pennsylvania Dutch descent. He has studied fish, sometimes as a teacher and sometimes as a state fish-and-game-department biologist, in Colorado, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. He believes that the proper study of fish embraces the cooking and eating of them. He originated a squid chowder. He and some of his colleagues occasionally stay late in the laboratory and make a quart of caviar, using eggs of the longhorn sculpin—the common hacklehead, a trash fish whose only value ordinarily is as bait for lobster traps.

  Mr. Merriman and Mr. Warfel went out to the Hell Hole with Ellery on the last Monday in June, 1943. “Frank and I got down to the dock at five-thirty, as usual,” Ellery says, “and the professors were already on the Eleanor, sitting on the hatch, making themselves at home, but Charlie hadn’t showed up. The professors were sleepy-eyed and they hadn’t bothered to shave and they had their old clothes on, and I mean old clothes. Frank and I went below to start the engine, and Frank said they were the most un-professor-looking two damned professors ever he saw. It was a hot, drizzly morning and Frank was cranky, and so was I. We got things started, but still no Charlie. Finally, the landlady of a rooming house up on Water Street that Charlie roomed with at that time’s little boy came poking down the dock and said Charlie sent word he wasn’t able to get out of bed, his left knee was hurting him so. Charlie’s got something chronic the matter with his left knee, and he has to quit work every so often and doctor it. It’s a peculiar affliction. It hardly ever troubles him until Saturday. Along about noon Saturday, he starts to limp around and look blue and complain his left knee is swoll up, and Saturday night he starts taking something to bring the swelling down. Sometimes it’s Tuesday or Wednesday before the swelling goes down sufficient for him to do a day’s work. He’s tried all kinds of patent medicines and salves and liniments, but the only thing that seems to give him any real relief is rye whiskey. He takes it internally. I asked him one day, ‘Charlie, for the love of God,’ I said, ‘why don’t you try rubbing it on?,’ but he said it seems to do more good if he takes it internally.

  “I didn’t much want to go out to the grounds without Charlie. We can work the Eleanor two-handed, but I don’t like to; I’m one draggerman that aims to reach old age without wearing a truss. The professors spoke up and said they’d be glad to pitch in and help. I thought to myself, ‘A lot of help you two’ll be.’ On the other hand, I wanted to keep my promise, so I told Frank to let’s get going. I took her out past Watch Hill Light; then I gave Frank the wheel and I went below and got breakfast. I made some coffee and scrambled some eggs and I broiled four nice hen lobsters. As it happened, it was the first time the professors ever et lobsters for breakfast, but I didn’t hear any complaints. We hit the Hell Hole and started to set the net and got in trouble right away. Frank shoved the bag of the net off the stern, the way he always does, but a wave caught it before it sank and gave it a throwing around, and that jerked the wings of the net sideways on the deck, and the bridle on one of the net doors got all snaked up. In other words, a damned mess. I was at the wheel and couldn’t do anything about it. Frank ran back to try and fix it, but before he got there, Mr. Merriman leaped on the door and grabbed the bridle. I thought to myself, ‘That’s one young man that wasn’t present when the brains was passed out,’ and I yelled to him to stand back there. I fully expected to see him snatched into the middle of next week, but he seesawed the bridle back into working order as good as I could have done, or Frank, or any other draggerman, and he leaped off the door a second or two before it went overboard like a shot out of a gun. I called him over to the wheel and I inquired where in hell did he learn how to handle an otter trawl. I asked him did they teach that up at Yale. And he said he’d worked in fishing boats to some extent when he was younger. So, naturally, when I heard that, I had some respect for him.

  “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 notepads 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 wee
k 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.