Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  From the beginning, the Montauk charter captains had played an ambivalent role in the bass bill disputes. These captains, whose own livelihood in spring and fall depends in great part on the bass, could have told their clients that the fish were plentiful but unresponsive, and that lack of success when conditions are not perfect rarely stems from a depleted bass supply. It stems, as they cannot point out, from the anglers’ own lack of experience and skill with a phlegmatic creature not easily captivated by jigs, spoons, bucktails, plugs and poppers, swimmers, or rigged eels except during the rare “blitz” when the fish will take almost anything that moves. Sometimes big bass have been observed lying like logs on sandy bottoms, and it seems, at times, that the lure must bounce from fish to fish in its quest for a susceptible and energetic specimen. Of those fish caught from charter boats, many are actually jigged1 and hooked by the captain or mate, standing behind the client “checking” his reel as the boat passes over a known hole or rock. Once the fish is well-hooked, the mate hangs on to the jumping line as the rod is returned to the unskilled labor in the cockpit; then he lets go, and the strike—“There he is!”—occurs a moment later. Even with such stratagems as these, few bass are outwitted on the average day by the much greater number of men and boats dedicated to this purpose.

  In 1956 Captain Gus Pitts stated at a meeting of charter men that striped bass were plentiful, but his less expert colleagues supported a bill prohibiting the sale of striped bass in New York State, thus making it a game fish. This bill won very small support from the organized sportsmen, who, for all their conservation talk, were not yet ready to give up their own form of commercial fishing.

  Once again the Joint Conservation Committee decided against the bass bill, explaining its reasons in a statement issued a week after the hearing. “The striped bass has been the subject of study for a number of years by a number of eminent marine biologists, none of whom recommend such a law.… The Committee is much impressed with the healthy growth of salt-water angling as a recreational sport, and the figures which were offered in testimony to show that the sale of tackle, bait and other goods and services purchased by salt water anglers represent an important economic consideration.… At the same time, the Committee feels that the residents of Long Island who, like their forebears, have engaged in commercial fishing, are entitled to consideration in view of the lack of any showing that their fishing operations are endangering or even depleting the striped bass population.”

  With their defeat in Albany that year, the anglers’ lobbies put aside the discredited conservation argument, producing instead a ten-page bulletin of economic statistics, copies of which were delivered to the Conservation Committee and the newspapers. The bulletin’s purpose, to quote from its introduction, was to “present certain statistical data and economic analysis heretofore overlooked in considering the proposed Hook-and-Line Amendment for Striped Bass in the Conservation Laws of New York State.” Under the heading, STRIPED BASS IS NOT AN IMPORTANT FOOD FISH IN THE COMMERCIAL NEW YORK METROPOLITAN MARKET, the bulletin asserted that “striped bass, expressed in terms of ‘fish meal preference’ served to the public, amounted to only one-tenth of 1 percent of all fish meals served!” The exclamation mark was characteristic of the astounded tone of the bulletin, which also arrived by ingenious means at the figure of 22.5 million dollars as the annual sum expended by striper anglers for the direct benefit of the “real solid citizens” of Nassau and Suffolk Counties (further identified, in capitals, as VOTERS). This amazing sum was favorably compared to the less than one million earned in the bass fishery by the commercial men, whose support of the businesses of the “real solid citizens” was not worthy of mention.

  The qualifications of the sportsmen’s statistician2 were listed in imposing array on the final page. He was a member of five statistical and trade organizations, and he was also the delegate to Albany of the Matinecock Rod & Gun Club of Glen Cove, Long Island, and a director of the Sportsmen’s Council, Marine District of New York, at that time the main lobbying organization. His bulletin supported the first of its two main points with an eye-catching pink chart portraying two diagrammatic columns, side by side. One column, running nearly the length of the page, claimed to represent the consumption of all marine fish other than striped bass in terms of “fish meal preference,” or f.m.p.; the adjoining column, dwarfed and pathetic, represented the f.m.p. consumption of striped bass. But his chart did not bother to indicate that over thirty-five species were represented in the first column, nor did it reveal that cod, butterfish, fluke, whiting, and porgy accounted for over 80 percent of all fish consumed, and the porgy alone for nearly half; on close inspection, it turned out that the great majority of popular food fish were in far worse “fish meal preference” condition than the striped bass. That year, among the remaining thirty species, the bass ranked fourth in pounds landed, third in total value, and second only to the swordfish in wholesale price per pound, plain figures that—to people ignorant of sportsmen’s statistics—might encourage the idea that we like to eat it. In all of these categories the bass exceeded the bluefish, a poor f.m.p. fish if ever there was one, and it also exceeded in value as well as poundage the combined contribution to the New York markets of the shad, weakfish, sturgeon, and mackerel, all heretofore desirable species whose f.m.p. rating on the sportsmen’s chart was simply terrible.

  Under the heading, HAUL-SEINERS CAN EARN MORE MONEY ELSEWHERE, the sportsmen’s dishonest bulletin went on to state that in “Printing and Publishing, the Apparel Business, and other industries,” the fisherman could improve upon the ninety-four cents an hour that was his meager lot in 1956. Unmentioned was the likelihood that the fisherman would prefer a free and modest subsistence in the beautiful ocean landscape where his family has lived for hundreds of years to industrial labor in the cities as a wage-earner in the Apparel Business; that he might enjoy his way of life every bit as much as these sportsmen enjoyed the manipulation of statistics; that he should not be deprived of his traditional living so that a more powerful group could make money on its sport.

  It is true that most fishermen are poor, but they are proud of their work and proud of their independence. Working on shares rather than on salary, they are no man’s employees, choosing fishing as a way of life in the full knowledge that they could make more money elsewhere. Because striped bass are essential to their livelihood, they are at least as concerned about this fish as are the sportsmen; they dislike the destructive seining of immature fish in southern waters and the ruin of the many rivers that formerly harbored bass. As Dr. Edward Raney, the striped bass biologist, once observed of the campaigns against commercial men by anglers, “If the sportsman would put equal energy into correction of known contributing causes to scarcity of stripers, the future of the species would be far brighter.”

  11.

  Swordfish, Fish Flour,

  and Bunker Boats

  One day in the late spring of 1956, on the Merlin’s radio, I picked up the wild shouts of a draggerman up around Noman’s, south of Martha’s Vineyard, beaming the news to anyone who cared that he was rich. Apparently his dragger had hove to overnight in the thick fog so prevalent in June, when the sea is still cold and the air much warmer, and at daybreak had found herself surrounded by a company of migrating swordfish, which lay dull as logs on the smooth surface. The striker harpooned thirty of the weary fish before the rest took alarm, and the dragger was now on her way into New Bedford to celebrate her extraordinary good fortune.

  In those days most swordfish were taken by big draggers, which were fitted out with a spotting tower and a long harpoon stand, or pulpit, extending forward from the boat’s bow. The “finning” fish with its dorsal and caudal fins like black curved knives slitting the surface was struck by a detachable brass dart or lily with tandem barbs, fitted to an eighteen—twenty inch iron rod inserted in the tip of a long wood harpoon pole perhaps fourteen feet long. The lily, which pulls free of the iron when it is struck into the fish, remains fastened to
several hundred feet of line coiled in a tub; this line is secured to a wood keg that is thrown over the side to mark the location of the fish and also tire it. The wild “green” fish cannot be horsed into the boat but must be tended carefully by hand, to be sure that the dart is not pulled free.

  In previous summers, swordfish had been scarce, and I wanted a chance to strike one from the Merlin. On a certain slick calm day of June, Stewart Lester recalls, “We made a haul down Napeague and didn’t do nothin, but the ocean was dead calm, so we decided to take your boat, go get us a swordfish. I think Richard was with us; anyways, we went off southwest of the Point, and it wasn’t too long before I seen a fin. Ol’ Pete here”—he nudged my arm—“was at the wheel, but when I seen that fin and started forward to the pulpit, Pete hollers, ‘Hell, no, Stewart, this is my boat and I’m gonna stick the first one!’ ”

  Among the draggermen, there were a number of great swordfish “strikers.” Stewart’s cousin, draggerman John Erickson, Jr., says that the best of them rarely or never missed with the harpoon, even when the fish was well below the surface. One miss out of ten might be accounted for by the fish flaring off at the last second, but as Elisha Ammon liked to say, “If you miss two out of ten, you get off the pulpit, let somebody else try it.” Even men like these, who made a mystique of swordfishing (Johnnie Erickson’s record for these waters was nine in a single day, although he has taken twice that number off Nova Scotia), were very nervous on the boat’s approach, which required as much skill and precision as the strike itself.

  And so I was wound tight with expectation as I ran forward to the pulpit, freed the long harpoon lashed across its rails, and stared ahead at the two curved blades tracing a thin slit on the water. The beautiful fish was of moderate size, less than two hundred pounds, a swift and graceful distillation of blue-silver sea (larger fish are darker, and look brown). Its round eye, a few inches beneath the shining surface, appeared huge. I was still staring when the night-blue fish shivered and shot away, leaving only the deep sun rays in the sea.

  Years later, recalling this bad moment, Stewart grinned. “If that had been my old man, now, you would have got nowhere near that pulpit. That time with my Uncle Bill when my dad beat somebody to the harpoon by sliding down the guy wire from the spotting tower, there was a turnbuckle at the bottom where the cable wasn’t spliced, and he ran four or five of them wires right through them burned hands. Blood all over the boat, I heard, but he never noticed, not until after he had struck that fish. Anyway, I took the wheel, put you right on that fish, too, but you never struck him, never even let go of the pole; you just stared at him, and you know why? You seen the eye. My old man taught me never to look at the eye, just at the dorsal fin, because right alongside the fin is where you strike him. That fish rolled his eye out and he fixed you, and you ain’t the first. Nobody believes how big that eye is, and by the time they get over the surprise, the bow is past him and that fish is gone.”

  By 1956, Pete Scott and John Cole had despaired of making a living as commercial fishermen; both departed the South Fork for jobs that might take better advantage of their education. That spring I hauled seine with Ted, Stewart, and Milt, and sometimes Capt. Frank’s son Lewis Lester, or whoever else might fill in on the crew. When there was no weather on the beach, I sailed an occasional charter out of Three Mile Harbor, and that summer, rather than hunt up a new mate, I avoided the dog fight at Montauk, where too many boats, fouling one another’s lines around the Point, had taken most of the fun out of the fishing. I sailed out of Montauk only once, in late July, when the Merlin was hired by a man named Peter Gimbel, who did not show up. I took his friends out anyway, and upon returning, we learned that Gimbel had left for Nantucket the night before. He was the first diver on the wreck of the Andrea Doria, which had just been sunk by another ship on the Nantucket Shoals.

  Running without a mate out of Three Mile Harbor, I worked the rip over the sunken sand spit between Gardiners Island and the Ruin, which in those days was still used for bombing practice. More than once, the amateur airmen of the National Guard scared hell out of my unsuspecting clients, missing their target by a mile. That year the blowfish and the kingfish (a small relative of the weakfish) were still thick—both would disappear a few years later—and sometimes I ran bottom-fishing parties to Crow Shoal and Pigeon Reef, using skimmers that I harvested with tongs from the west side of the Three Mile Harbor breakwater. Most of my parties came aboard at the Town Commercial Dock near the harbor inlet, and coming up the channel from the head of the harbor, I sometimes picked up small striped bass by trolling a white bucktail in my wake.

  On occasion I ferried workmen out to Gardiners Island, or ornithologists who wished to band the ospreys. The great sea hawks were so numerous in those days that their huge stick nests, built higher every year, were constructed all along the upper beach along the southwest shore and across the channel on Cartwright Shoal as well. The first black skimmers that I ever saw on the South Fork were already established on the little island across from the Commercial Dock, and the first oystercatchers were nesting on Gardiners Island. (The last-known Labrador duck, or sand-shoal duck, pied black and white like the swift old squaw, was shot down here on Gardiners Bay in 1874).

  Out on the bay, even in summer, a few solitary loons and gun-shot sea ducks left behind by the northward migrations would be scattered among the gulls and terns that nested on Cartwright and on Gardiners Point. Among the white birds dipping on the fish were the roseate terns that hunted out over the tides from their nesting place in the old gun emplacements on Gull Island. One day, bluefishing in the Race, I saw a big ice-colored glaucous gull that had wandered down out of the Arctic.

  In midsummer, the snapper blues would invade the channel, attracting summer children with long bamboo poles and red bobbers who fished in small excited flocks from the Commercial Dock. The snappers reminded me of Cap’n Posey, an old barnacle of local legend, who was popularly supposed to say at this soft, misty time of year, “Some foine day, bub! Yis, yis, bubby! Goin out, goin citch m’silf a miss o’ snop-uhs!” Not until many years later did Bill Lester tell me that Cap’n Posey was his father, Nathan Lester. “In the old days, now, all the Lesters was fishermen, and farmers, too, but I guess the Amagansett bunch was the only ones that never stopped—kind of the offsprings of the family, don’t you know. And they called us the Posey Boys or Posey Lesters because Father used to wear a rose in his lapel goin to church. So they called him Cap’n Posey, and all around here near the old homestead, they named that Poseyville.”

  I loved the quiet of the summer bay, the blue water and the hot sand shores with their acrid horsefoot smell and windrows of stout quarterdecks and light gold jingle shell that in other days was gathered up for oyster cultch; the gulls plucking scallops from the shallows, swooping upward, and dropping them on the old erratic boulders carried down out of the north by the great glaciers that formed the high moraines of “fish-shaped Pommanocc”; the ospreys lugging glinting fish across the sky, the bright lobster buoys and white sails, the yelp and crying of the nesting gulls, the screech of terns; the dull red shadow in the sea made by myriad gills of flat oily menhaden that turned that red purplish, so the bunker captains said, when the school was thick; the phosphorus from the plankton in the night water that thickened in the boat’s wake as it entered the warmer water of the harbor; the rising of the bow wave as the shallows neared, in warning to the boatman (baymen say that the boat has a natural pull toward the deep of the channel). On every shore were the long silhouettes of pounds, or fish traps, with their weed-hung mesh, looped up on the stakes for drying in the August dog days, on every stake a tattered shag perched spreading its ancient wings to dry.

  Off Gardiners Island I sometimes glimpsed Milt Miller, on whose boat Pete Scott’s place would be taken by William Havens’s young son Benny (and later, despite all Milt’s precautions, by his own boy, Milton Jr., known as Mickey). Mostly he used a run-around net—essentially a gill net, heavily weighted
to sink fast, which is run quickly around bunker slicks, terns diving on popping bait, or other sign of bluefish feeding in the open water. Although he had no use for traps (“Went trappin three times in my life, and went broke three times; wouldn’t pay me nothin for what I caught”) he did pretty well with dragging, power-seining (setting a seine by power boat, then hauling from shore), and set nets. Milt had spent half his life out around Gardiners. Often he slept on the island overnight in order to make an early morning set, dining on oddments of marine fare for which a market might one day be developed; he would try anything out of the sea, including scallop guts and gull eggs, and he swore that the black roe found in horseshoe crabs was as good as caviar.

  A swift run-around boat that the Merlin sometimes passed off Gardiners Island was a trim Jersey skiff belonging to a fisherman named Dick Hamilton, who never waved when our boats passed. Hamilton was an up-Islander, fierce loner, and hard drinker who turned up with the migrating fish schools in the spring and disappeared again when the bluefish left the bay in the late fall; for years he rented a small shack that used to sit in the corner of Ted Lester’s yard in Poseyville. By habit Dick was a man of few words, and those words, it was said, were likely to be abrupt and rude. I had never met him face to face until one windy day close to Thanksgiving, the year before, when a tight-faced stranger accosted me on Newtown Lane. “For many years,” this stranger growled, “I had the prettiest boat on the east end of Long Island. Now she’s the second prettiest.” That was all he said, and he walked away before I realized who it was. I wanted to call after him, but I wonder if Dick Hamilton would have turned. Within a few years I would sell the Merlin to my brother, who took her back to Massachusetts, and once again Dick Hamilton’s sea skiff was the prettiest boat on the east end of Long Island.