Last Fish Tale

Chapter One The First Gloucester Story From hence doth stretch into the sea the fair headland Tragabigzanda fronted with three isles called the Three Turks' Heads. John Smith, Description of New England, 1616 There are two kinds of stories told in gloucester: fish tales and Gloucester stories. A fish tale exaggerates to make things look bigger. It is triumphal. When in the early seventeenth century George Waymouth reported that the cod caught off New England were five feet long with a three-foot circumference, this may have been a fish tale. We don't know. Surely the Reverend Francis Higginson's reports from Salem in 1630 that lions had been seen running wild in Cape Ann, or that the squirrels could fly from tree to tree, were fish tales. A Gloucester story is just the opposite. It is a story of miserable irony in which things are shown in their worst light, a story with a sad ending. Often the history of a place begins with the person who named it. But in the case of Gloucester, the story begins with the men who didn't the ones who tried to name it and failed. The naming of Gloucester is an entire cycle of Gloucester stories. The earliest Europeans to arrive at what is today Cape Ann are thought to have been the Vikings, who, according to the written Icelandic legends known as the Sagas, sailed in 1004 down the North American coast from Labrador to Newfoundland to a place they called Vineland. For a long time it was debated whether to believe this story. But in 1961 the remains of eight Viking turf houses dating to the year 1000 were found in a place in Newfoundland known as L'Anse aux Meadows. Where, then, was Vineland? Today many historians believe that it was the coastline of New England, named after the wild grapes that grew there. According to another story, in 1004, Leif Ericson's brother Thorwald landed on Cape Ann and named it Cape of the Cross. But neither the name nor Thorwald went far. Thorwald died on the expedition and those historians who believe the story at all think that he is buried somewhere on Cape Ann. And that is the first Gloucester story. In 1606, Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer of the coast of Maine, sailed down to Cape Ann, and seeing three islands off its tip now called Thachers, Milk, and Straitsmouth Islandshe named the peninsula with the great gray granite boulders marking its headlands, the Cape of Three Islands, which even if said in French, Cap aux Trois Iles, is not much of a name. He noted that there were actually two rocky headlands and a passage between them, which he sailed through taking depth soundings as he went, thus charting the course that fishermen home from the sea have been using ever sincefrom Thachers around East Gloucester to Eastern Point, into the harbor between West and East Gloucester. Champlain thought this was an extraordinary harbor, deep and sheltered with ample mooring space, and he spent three months charting it. He named it Le Beau Port, which was a little more poetic than the Cape of Three Islands, but was destined to be no more durable. Being a skilled seaman, he found anchorage in the safest, most leeward cove in the harbor, but that was not to bear his name either. Instead, the sheltered nook is known today as Smith Cove, named after the young English adventurer, thirty- four-year-old Captain John Smith, who arrived eight years later, in 1614. This Englishman was very different from Champlain. Though they both were prodigious writers, Champlain's writing revealed little about the man or his life. It is not even certain what year he was born. But Smith's writings are very much about himself, full of praise for his own extraordinary deeds. Historians, distrustful of Smith's braggadocio, tended not to believe what he wrote. Only in recent yeaKurlansky, Mark is the author of 'Last Fish Tale' with ISBN 9780345487278 and ISBN 0345487273.