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Author's 'Fish Tale' provides new insight into Gloucester

We have been measured by a sympathetic, yet probing eye - that of journalist-author Mark Kurlansky - and now by his hand and the publishing might of Random House, we are about to be redefined again in the popular imagination.

Most cities Gloucester's size don't warrant even one grand, written portrait, much less three. But then, only one town can be America's "most original town," as Kurlansky's subtitle proclaims Gloucester to be.

Kurlansky's latest book, "The Last Fish Tale," is out today. Given the bankable popularity of his previous book-studies, "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World", "Salt: A World History," and "The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell", his similar-feeling, eccentric but comprehensive, beach book on Gloucester very likely will freshen and revise how the reading world thinks of us.

And for once, altering how the world thinks of Gloucester was the author's primary purpose.

From 1897 through 1937, to the outside, it was the Gloucester of Rudyard Kipling's "Captains Courageous" that inflamed the imagination. For 60 years, Hollywood's adaptation of Kipling in a late Victorian coming-of-age story with an Oscar-winning Spencer Tracy as the Portuguese fisherman hero ruled, until the publication of "The Perfect Storm" rekindled fascination with the idea of Gloucester.

Many flights of imagination were truly inspired, perhaps, by the subject, such as the "ugling, sucking, dimpled water" of the Grand Banks that Kurlansky pulls for praise from Kipling's novel because they were things "Kipling never saw from his safe perch in Gloucester."

A new picture of us and our place does emerge from the pages of this modestly little book - in truth more of a travelogue cum New Yorker magazine feature, with a touch of Gourmet and plenty of geology, geography, history political and cultural criticism - a veritable Fra Diavalo with just enough political, economic and cultural history to put Gloucester in perspective.

How Gloucesterites respond is quite beside the point. Subjects are never good judges of their own portraits, and face it, adding together all we know, thinking as a superorganism, no reporter, chronicler or traveloguer could ever satisfy our standards on details.

The shrinking of relative distances that has drawn Gloucester into the vortex of the outside world and robbed us of our historical sense of entitlement to a reclusive existence - an insight at the core of Kurlansky's thesis about why we are so original - still has not yet made Boston the "half-hour commute" readers will wonder at.

There is also the infrequent lost wrestling match with the spelling of names of the Sicilian fishermen - but no one in town should cast that stone.

In any event, quibbles are beside the point.

Having fallen under our spell, Kurlansky came here first for the joy of being here as an adult from a landlocked childhood in Hartford in a family with a father from Boston, a life in which Gloucester seemed always in reach beyond the horizon.

The idea of a book on Gloucester was broached to the self-made sea person - Kurlansky, 59, and a resident of Manhattan island, learned from hiring himself onto commercial fishing boats - by another publisher, but for business reasons it ended up as a logical next step for Random House in his progression through watery subjects - cod to salt to oysters to Gloucester.

The imprint is Random House's Ballantine Books.

Through the entertaining traipse he leads past the ancient and early history is always the thread of fishing, the fishing for groundfish in the North Atlantic, the ways in which the world changed and Gloucester - separated and always fiercely independent, tried not to - and the unique price the city and its fishing people have paid for their sins, which in Kurlansky's journalistic court, were not great.

"While there is much overfishing in the world, it has not been practiced by Gloucester fishermen for more than a generation," he writes.

But Kurlansky's purpose is not judgmental, it is diagnostic - for the context he finds for our city is the entire planet, and our place in it. His thesis, spelled out in the complete subtitle makes it clear that the actual scope of the book is larger than the once and still great port of Gloucester; it is the once and still great ocean at our feet.

"The fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town" is "The Last Fish Tale."

Gloucester's "crime" has been to be the place that has put more of itself into that ocean for longer, relying on that ocean for its succor all the way to the border of stubborn and tragic, than any other group of people on earth.

Kurlansky is at his most powerful describing how market forces, focused in the North Sea before the discovery century, forged technologies such as dragging that made fishing so efficient that when eventually maximized by modern motors man threatened to finish off the fish in the same way the rifle and Manifest Destiny brought the buffalo to the brink.

The chapter "While Gloucester Burns" arrives in mid-book, teasingly preceded by a couple of recipes Kurlansky, who is also an award-winning food writer, decided to throw in before turning readers' stomachs with reporting of how clearly the disaster was anticipated.

His story of how dragging made its way over here and morphed into trawling, and by 1911 was understood by the Master Mariners Association of Gloucester as the killing force that it was to be.

This was not Kurlansky's discovery. It was Joe Garland's - a find for an aborted history of the fishery that he used as an insert to a 1997 softcover anthology of his Times columns - but he gave it to Kurlansky, and told the Times yesterday, his discovery so soured him it convinced him to give up the history.

Kurlansky gave gracious praise to Garland and put the horrified conclusion of the Master Mariners Association, as reported in the Oct. 3, 1911, edition of this newspaper, into his book as the linchpin. The meeting was "one of the most largely attended meetings in recent years," and went on record as "condemning as strongly as possible this method of fishing."

Kurlansky quoted further, telling current readers that long ago, the wisest fishing elders of the wisest fishing town described trawling as the "greatest danger the fisheries have ever faced along this coast."

Then Kurlansky responds. "The greatest danger," he writes in italics. "It was all understood a century ago."

Nothing was done, and now that lots of things are being done, largely "regulatory mistakes," to his mind, as bureaucrats make rules based on interpretations of a science that neither the fishermen nor Kurlansky particularly trust, the fishing people of Gloucester are fewer and fewer.

He ends with observations and draws conclusions.

One is that "one of the greatest problems in fishery management" is the insistence to see separate species and stocks and grounds rather than undertake "ecosystem-based management," but he is not optimistic.

A second is that everywhere in the world where fishing has subsided, tourism has risen, and for all of Gloucester's aged originality, the same pattern seems to be afoot here.

"Will the fishermen, the regulators and the scientists out of their raucous brawl eventually find the right formula, or will Gloucester's slow descent into another seaside resort be the final Gloucester story?" Kurlansky asks even as this affectionate and wise book of his works its magic making tourists of readers.

Richard Gaines can be reached at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.