The Bottom of the Harbor

by Joseph Mitchell

  In his first two boats, Ellery was nomadic. If a rumor came down from Martha’s Vineyard that there was a phenomenal run of cod off Gay Head, he would fill his gasoline tanks and go up there. If he heard that swordfish had been sighted foraging on mackerel off Montauk Point, he would sharpen some lily irons and go out and try to strike a few. One morning, in the Louise, working out of New London, he and his mate went on a scallop-dredging trip, fully intending to be back that night. Instead, for three weeks they strayed down the coast, dredging until nightfall and then putting in at the nearest port to express their scallops to Fulton Market. They reached Sheepshead Bay before turning back. “If there was a speakeasy near the fish dock in those ports, and there usually was,” Ellery says, “we’d hole up in it and hobnob with the riffraff. I remember one speakeasy down on Great South Bay that was run by three sisters. All were red-headed and all were widows. They were called the Three Merry Widows. It was a disgraceful way of life, and I sure did enjoy it.” Ellery found that the Eleanor was much more of a responsibility than his other boats. Shortly after getting her, he quit wandering and began concentrating on the Mouth, the Yellow Bank, and the Hell Hole.

  There are two kinds of dragger captains: those who go out every day the weather allows and drag all over everywhere, figuring if they cover enough bottom they are bound to run into fish sooner or later, and those who carefully pick their days and drag only in areas where they are pretty sure fish are congregating. In his youth, Ellery was of the first kind; he is now the best example in the Stonington fleet of the second kind. He has a vast memory of the way the six species of flounders inhabiting the Stonington grounds have behaved in all seasons under all sorts of weather conditions. Consequently, he can foretell their migrations, sometimes to the day. Blackbacks, for example, the sweetest-meated of the flounders, spend the summer in the cold water offshore. Some time in the late fall, they begin moving inshore by the millions to the shallows, where they spawn. The biggest hauls are made during this migration. Ellery is always ready for the blackbacks. He knows the routes they follow and the best places to intercept them. Frank Muise, his mate, and Charlie Brayman, his third man, profess to believe that he thinks like a flounder. “Ellery doesn’t need much sleep,” Brayman says. “He only sleeps four or five hours. The rest of the night, he lies in bed and imagines he’s a big bull flounder out on the ocean floor. When the blackbacks get restless, he gets restless. One morning he shows up at the dock with an odd look in his eye and he says, ‘The blackbacks commenced moving into the coves last night.’ And I say, ‘How the hell do you know?’ And he says, ‘Let’s go out to the Hell Hole and try the fifteen-fathom curve off the Nebraska Shoal.’ Or he says, ‘Let’s go up to the Mouth and drag in between Bartlett Reef and the North Dumpling.’ He never misses. We go where he says and we always hit them where they’re good and thick.” Ellery has a simpler explanation. “I take a look at the weather,” he says, “and I act accordingly.”

  Ellery is also an extraordinarily skillful wreck fisher. Fish forgather in great numbers around wrecks, some to feed on the mollusks, crustaceans, sea worms, and other organisms that they harbor, and some to feed on those that are feeding on these organisms. If pickings elsewhere are thin, a few of the more self-confident captains will risk their nets to get at such fish. By trial and error and by hearsay, Ellery long ago learned the location and shape and condition—whether sitting, lying on a side, or broken up—of every wreck in the Mouth and the Hell Hole. On calm, clear days, when he can take accurate ranges on rocks and buoys and on landmarks ashore, he goes out and methodically drags up close to a dozen or so of these. The others are so decayed and their pieces scattered about so treacherously that even he will not approach them. He usually starts with the Larchmont, a Providence–to–New York sidewheel passenger steamer that collided with the three-masted schooner Harry Knowlton during a snowstorm on the night of February 11, 1907, drowning over a hundred and thirty people, and ends with a coal barge that sank from a leak in May, 1944. He drags around the barge more for the coal that spills out of it during storms than for fish. He burns this coal in the Eleanor’s galley stove. Some nights, he fills the back seat of his automobile with Hell Hole coal and takes it home.

  Ellery is an almost overly cautious captain, and he says that wreck fishing made him so. “Once I heard a contractor tell about cutting a ditch through a graveyard,” he says. “It reminded me of wreck fishing. I’ve brought up bones in my net many and many a time, and I’ve brought up skulls or parts of skulls several times. Oh, Jesus! Once I brought up a jawbone with nine teeth left in it, and there was a gold filling in every tooth; some had middle fillings and side fillings. Whoever he was—him or her, I couldn’t tell which—the poor soul sure God wasted a lot of time in the dentist chair. Once I was fishing with my brother Morris. I was below eating lunch and Morris was on deck sorting a haul and he found a skull in a bunch of seaweed. The roots of the seaweed had grown around the skull and had kept it intact—the lower jaw was still attached to it, and you could open and shut the jaws with your hands. Morris was standing there, looking at the skull and opening and shutting the jaws, when I came on deck munching on a big juicy peach. Morris looked at me, and then he looked at that toothy jaw, and then he took sick.

  “All kinds of odds and ends come up in the net. One day a bucket of U.S. Navy paint came up, a five-gallon bucket of battleship gray. We prized the lid off and there wasn’t a thing wrong with it I could see. Some sailor probably took a sudden dislike to it and heaved it in. We used it on the Eleanor. Another day, what came up only a woman’s pink lace shimmy. Some woman on a summer yacht probably got a couple of whiskey sours in her and flung it off. Oh, it was a pretty thing. It had roses and butterflies on it. We tied it to a stay and flew it like a flag all that summer. Johnny Bindloss said no doubt some mermaid off Newport lost it. ‘Over around Newport,’ he said, ‘even the mermaids wear pink lace shimmies.’ Back during prohibition, there were some rum runners around eastern Connecticut. Some were Canucks and some were local boys. They used to buoy their booze in shoal water in the Hell Hole. They’d wrap the bottles in straw and sew them up in waterproof tarpaulin bags, twenty-four bottles to a bag. They were called buoy bags. Sometimes a storm’d part one from the buoy and it’d go wandering around on the bottom. One hot August afternoon, we emptied the net and out dropped a buoy bag. Twenty-four bottles of square-bottle Scotch. The crew wanted to pitch right in, but I could just visualize the consequences, so I argued and pleaded we ought to store it and use it in the winter for chills. So we stored it. Fifteen minutes later, the mate complained he had a chill. Then the third man’s teeth began to chatter. Then I began to feel a little shivery myself. It was a week before things got back to normal. I don’t mind buoy bags. It’s the bones I mind. I had a mate once, a peculiar man, a Rhode Islander, and every time a bone came up, or anything else unusual, he’d squat down and study it. ‘Throw that thing back where it came from,’ I’d tell him. He’d study it some more, and he’d say, ‘Ellery, there’s many and many a secret buried out there in that Hell Hole.’ And I’d say, ‘Damn the secrets! Please do like I told you and throw that thing overboard.’ Oh, I dread those bones. There but for the grace of God go I. Sometimes I take chances. Like a fog comes up, and I keep right on dragging. Then, all of a sudden, I think of those bones, and I don’t fool around no more; I open her up and I head for the dock.”

  Although Ellery puts in an appearance at Bindloss’s dock every weekday, usually before dawn, he seldom goes out on the grounds more than three days a week. Last year, he went out only a hundred and thirty days. Nevertheless, he shipped seventeen hundred and twenty-six barrels to Fulton Market, each holding approximately two hundred pounds of fish. There are boats that went out one-third again as many days and did not catch as much. Ellery ships to John Feeney, Inc., in Stall 13. Feeney’s is the company that once employed Alfred E. Smith as a basket boy. Ellery is not the kind of man who will talk about how much he makes. “That’s what’s know
n as nobody’s business,” he says. On a fish dock, everybody knows everybody else’s business, and three of Ellery’s closest friends estimate he cleared six thousand dollars last year, maybe a thousand more, maybe a thousand less. His mate and his third man probably cleared between twenty-five hundred and three thousand each. Like all captain-owners in the Stonington fleet, Ellery works on shares with his crew under the forty-per-cent system; that is, at the end of each week, from the Eleanor’s earnings, less operating expenses (gasoline, oil, ice, and barrels), forty per cent is subtracted. This percentage, called the boat’s share, goes to Ellery; out of it, he pays for nets and gear, repairs, drydocking, insurance, taxes, and so on. The balance is split equally among Ellery, Muise, and Brayman.

  Young draggermen regard Ellery with awe because of his frugality with gear. He once went a year and seven months without snagging a net. Unlike most draggermen, he doesn’t buy ready-made nets; he buys netting by the yard and makes his own. He gets the netting from George Wilcox, who runs a net loft on his farm in Quiambaug Cove, a crossroads village between Stonington and Mystic. There is a sign in this loft which reads, “NO CREDIT EXTENDED IN HERE UNLESS OVER 75 YRS OF AGE & ACCOMPANIED BY GRANDPARENTS.” “I’m related to George,” Ellery says. “I guess we’re cousins. My grandmother on Pa’s side was a Wilcox. They’re a long-lived set of people. George is in his eighties and the Wilcoxes don’t hardly consider him full-grown; he’s got two brothers and a sister older than him. There was another brother, but he died some months ago. His name was Jess. Jess was ninety-three years old and getting on close to ninety-four, but he was still able to do a little light work around the farm. A few days before he died, he was breaking up some boulders with a sledge hammer, so he could use them in a stone fence. He had a blood blister on his left thumb he’d got shingling a roof and couldn’t use his left hand at all and he was swinging the sledge hammer with one arm and the boulders were great big ones and the job was taking him twice as long as it ordinarily would and it aggravated him. A pouring-down rain came up and he wouldn’t stop. He worked right through it and he got the pneumonia. The only reason he died, they took him to the hospital. Jess never slept good in a strange bed. Around midnight, he got up in the dark and put on his clothes, intending to slip downstairs and strike out for home, but he fell over something and broke his hip. The Wilcoxes used to operate a big fish-scrap factory on the Cove, the Wilcox Fertilizer Company. That’s the reason they’re so long-lived. The factory was just across the yard from the house and the prevailing wind blew the fish-scrap smell right into the house. This smell was so strong it killed all the germs in the air, and it was so rich it nourished you and preserved you. People in poor health for miles around learned about this and used to come in droves and sit all day on the porch, especially people with the asthma and the dropsy. Some days, there’d be so many sitting on the porch, getting the benefit of the smell, that it was quite a struggle for the Wilcoxes to get in and out of the house.”

  Ellery is the most skillful and the most respected of the captains in the Stonington fleet, and he is also the least ambitious. His knowledge of the behavior of flounders is so acute that he could double his production without straining himself, but he doesn’t see any point in doing so. There are four reasons for this. First, he has rheumatism. Second, he is a self-taught oil painter. He prefers to paint when it is too stormy or foggy to drag, but if a painting looks as if it might turn out good, he will stay with it for days on end of perfect fishing weather. Third, he is an amateur oceanographer, a kind of unofficial member of the staff of the Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory at Yale University, and this takes up quite a lot of his time. Fourth, he lacks an itch for money. He makes a good living and considers that sufficient. He says he owns a boat, an automobile, a house and lot, seventy-five books, a trumpet, a straight razor, and a Sunday suit, and can’t think of anything else he particularly wants.

  The way Ellery disposes of the lobsters he picks up in his net exemplifies his attitude toward money. There are lobsters in all the grounds dragged by the Stonington fleet. They are thickest in the Hell Hole, where swarms of them live in, under, and around the old shipwrecks that lie there. In the summer and fall, a few are caught in every drag. Now and then, a couple of bushels come up in a single haul, in among the fish. They bring high prices. The majority wind up in New York seafood restaurants as choice Maine lobsters; in these restaurants all lobsters, even those from Sheepshead Bay, come from Maine. All the captains except Ellery ship the young, combative, bronzy blue-green ones to Fulton Market and keep the culls and jumbos for their own tables. (The culls are those that have recently molted and whose new shells have not yet hardened, and those with one or both claws snapped off in fights or while mating. The jumbos are the sluggish, barnacle-incrusted, stringy-meated giants—old ones, who can be captured only in nets, since they have grown too big to go through the mouths of traps; the record for the fleet is a cock lobster that weighted twenty-two pounds and was fit only for salads and Newburgs.) Ellery does just the opposite. He selects the finest he catches and sets them aside for himself and his crew and ships the rest. “Let the rich eat the culls,” he says. The third man in a three-handed fishing crew is supposed to do the cooking, but Ellery attends to most of it on the Eleanor; he is one of those who believe that to get a thing done right you have to do it yourself. He is a matchless lobster chef. He boils and he broils and he makes lobster chowder, but most often he boils. He puts a tub of fresh sea water on the little coal stove in the cabin and heats it until it spits. He wraps his lobsters in seaweed and drops them in, half a dozen in a batch, and times them with a rusty alarm clock that hangs from a cup hook on the underside of a shelf above the stove; after exactly fifteen minutes, he dips them out. He lets them cool slowly, so that the meat won’t shrink and become flavorless and rubbery, the common condition of cold boiled lobsters in restaurants, and then he heaps them on the cracked ice in the ice bin in the forward fish hold. He and his crew—Frank, the mate, and Charlie, the third man—reach in and get a lobster any time they feel like it. They eat them standing on deck. They smack them against the rail to crack the shells, pluck out the tail and claw meat, and chuck the rest overboard. One fall day, out on the Hell Hole, the three of them ate fourteen in between meals.

  Ellery began to paint in the winter of 1930. At that time, he was sleeping aboard the Eleanor, at Bindloss’s dock in Stonington, going home to New London to see his mother only on Sundays. In school, in her teens, Mrs. Thompson went to an art class, and several prim paintings of flowers she did still hang in her parlor. That winter, because she complained about being by herself so much, Ellery tried to reawaken this interest. In Brater’s, a small art-supplies store in New London, he bought some stretched canvases and a set of paints and brushes. “Ma tried, but she couldn’t somehow seem to pick up where she’d left off,” Ellery says. “Her hands were too stiff. I had all that art gear laying around, and one Sunday afternoon I took a notion I’d paint me a picture. Ma gave me some directions and told me to start out with a rose, but I started out with the Titanic hitting the iceberg. I worked on it four Sundays. I didn’t have much trouble with the Titanic or the iceberg, but the poor souls bobbing around in the water like to drove me crazy.” He called the painting “Nearer My God to Thee.” His mother admired it; she had it framed and hung it in the parlor between two of hers and called the neighbors in. “To tell the truth,” Ellery says, “that made me proud.” He took the art gear to Stonington and began to spend off hours scrutinizing objects around the dock, getting the look of them in his head, and then doing paintings of them—a battered tin bucket, a clam rake, a scallop dredge with fragments of scallop shells sticking to it, a capstan, an anchor. A lobster buoy is a block of wood, most often two feet long, which is attached by a tarred rope to a lobster trap and which floats above it, marking its position. Buoys are painstakingly and sometimes beautifully whittled into a variety of shapes and are brightly painted, usually in stripes in three colors; each lobsterma
n has a different set of colors; like racing silks, they denote ownership. Some discarded and barnacle-speckled buoys heaped any old way on the dock caught Ellery’s eye and he did a painting of them. He did three paintings of animals—two fishhouse cats hatefully eying each other at the mouth of an overturned bait barrel, a cormorant of a kind known locally as the black shag roosting on a mooring stake, a herd of rats scampering single file along the ridge of a breakwater in the moonlight. The breakwater rats are notorious around Stonington, and Ellery did a series of pencil sketches as well as the painting of them. They are wharf rats that migrated to the outer breakwater in Stonington harbor, where they nest in the riprap and grow enormous on dead fish washed up by the tide. Some draggermen keep a supply of rocks and brickbats aboard and, passing the breakwater on their way to and from the grounds, amuse themselves by harassing the rats. Presently, Ellery began using the Eleanor as his subject. He painted her in rough water with her net down, and he painted her with a haul of flounders dumped on her deck and a flock of gulls hovering above, and he painted her at Bindloss’s dock with her net drying in the wind and a red sun going down behind her. He worked meticulously, putting in every detail he could find room for. One of the pilothouse windows has a zigzag crack across it; he always put this crack in, with the identical zigs and zags. “I like to show everything,” he says. “If I had my way, I’d show the nailheads in the planks and the knots in the ropes and the stitches in the flag, but Ma thinks that makes a picture look tacky.” In about a year, he did sixteen paintings of the Eleanor.