Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast

by Samuel Adams Drake

Champlain relates that the Indians, in this bay, fished for cod with lines made of bark, to which a bone hook was attached, the bone being fashioned like a harpoon, and fastened to a piece of wood with what he believed to be hemp, such as they had in France. Bass, blue-fish, and sturgeon were taken by spearing.

A fish dinner is eaten at least once a week by every family in New England. In Catholic countries the supply of dried fish is usually exhausted by the end of Lent. We have seen that Bradford received a Jesuit at his own table, and regaled him with a fish dinner because it was Friday, a piece of old-time courtesy some would have us think the Pilgrims incapable of. Somewhat later they had a law in Massachusetts banishing Jesuits or other Roman Catholic ecclesiastics out of their jurisdiction on pain of death.

In effect, the cod-fish is to New England what roast beef is to old Albion. The likeness of one is hanging in the State-house at Boston, as the symbol of a leading Massachusetts industry. Down East the girls carry bits of it in their pockets, and it is set on the bar-room counters for luncheon. A Yankee can fatten on it where an Englishman would starve. The statement is fortified by what we call the truth of history.

In 1714 her Majesty of England concluded a peace with her restless neighbor across the Channel; or, as Pope rhymes it,

"At length great Anna said, 'Let discord cease;'
She said, the world obey'd, and all was peace."

This was the famous treaty that Matthew Prior, the negotiator-poet, calls "the d—d Peace of Utrecht." Prior went to Paris with Bolingbroke. Having arrived there during Lent, he was, by an edict, permitted to have roast beef as a mark of royal favor, and on, I presume, his own application. I rescue this morceau from the abyss of state archives:

"Nous Baron de Breteuil et de Preuilly, premier Baron de Touraine, Con^r du Roy en ses Conseils, Introducteur des Ambassadeurs et Princes Etrangères pres de Sa Ma^tie; Enjoignons au Boucher de l'Hôtel de Dieu de fournir pendant le Carême au prix ordinaire, suivant l'ordre du Roy, toute la viande de Boucherie, et Rotisserie qui sera necessaire pour la subsistance de la maison de plenipotentiaire de la Reyne de la Grande Bretagne, M. Prior."[223]

If the great staple of New England is so firmly associated with the Cape, its claims in another direction deserve also to be remembered. The whale-fishery of New England had its beginning here. The hook caught those leviathans as the Penobscot weirs catch salmon. It was long afterward that Nantucket bristled with harpoons. That sea-girt isle borrowed her art of the Cape, and induced a professor in whale-craft, Ichabod Paddock by name, to come over and teach it to her. The Pilgrims would have begun on the instant, but they had not the gear. The Indians followed it in their primitive way, and the exploring parties saw them stripping blubber from a stranded blackfish exactly as now practiced.