"I have seen as many as a hundred and twenty vessels lying below us here, getting ready for a cruise on the Banks," he said.
"And now?"
"Now there are not more than fifteen sail that hail out of here."
"So that fishing, as a business—"
"Is knocked higher than a kite."
Will it ever come down again?
We commiserate the situation of an individual out of business; what shall we, then, say of a town thrown out of employment? Before the Revolution, Marblehead was our principal fishing port. When the war came this industry was broken up for the seven years of the contest. Most of the men went into the army, one entire regiment being raised here. Many entered on board privateers or the public armed vessels of the revolted colonies. At the close of the war, great destitution prevailed by reason of the losses in men the town had sustained; and as usual a lottery was resorted to for the benefit of the survivors. The War of 1812 again drove the Marblehead fishermen from their peaceful calling to man our little navy. At its close five hundred of her sons were in British prisons.
Fisheries have often been called the agriculture of the seas. Sir Walter Raleigh attributed the wealth and power of Holland, not to its commerce or carrying trade, but to its fisheries. Captain John Smith was of this opinion; so were Mirabeau and De Witt. Franklin seemed to prefer the fisheries of America to agriculture; and Edmund Burke paid our fishermen the noblest panegyric of them all:
"No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people—a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."[152]