History
Book Club
Wednesday,
November 25, 2020
Gloucester and
The Sea
Wednesday, November 25, 2020. Gloucester and the Sea.
Gloucester has
throughout four centuries cast its lot with the North Atlantic, remaining a
maritime port for better or worse. The maritime culture of Cape Ann is the mix
of a noble maritime heritage; ubiquitous sea influences that reach as far as
the quarries behind Rockport and into the haunted tracks of Dogtown Common; seductive
but capricious natural splendors; and untidy independence that repels some but
converts other visitors into lifetime devotees. Read any book about the
maritime history of Gloucester and Cape Ann.
[Suggested by Richard Verrengia]
Joseph E. Garland, Lone Voyager: The Extraordinary Adventures
of Howard Blackburn, Hero Fisherman of Gloucester, New York: Simon &
Schuster; Touchstone Edition 2000; Paper, 330 pp.
Joe Garland
(1922-2011) Was born in Boston. He was attending Harvard when World War II
broke out and he enlisted and served in Europe with the 45th
Infantry Division. After the war he
became a newspaper writer, working at the Minneapolis Tribune, Boston
Herald, and the Providence Journal.
In the 1950s he made his home in Gloucester, following three generations
who lived here. Then he became a leading voice in the city, writing columns in
the Gloucester Daily Times, sailing, building sailboats and writing 25
books. He published Lone Voyager in 1963.
If you live on Cape Ann, you have practically
rubbed elbows with Howard Blackburn. You’ve probably had a bowl of Italian fish
soup and a beer at Halibut Point, a legendary pub that has closed during this
year; and you’ve seen the Blackburn Building, at the foot of Main Street.
Joe Garland
tells the story of Blackburn in Lone Voyager. Blackburn was born in Port
Medway a little fishing village on the south coast of Nova Scotia February 19,
1859. He quit school when he was ten, and took all kinds of jobs, including fishing.
He eventually made his way down to Gloucester, MA.
In January 1883
Grace L. Fears, a fishing schooner, was gathering a crew for a trip up
to the Burgeo Bank, off Newfoundland. Blackburn by then was a strong, solid
young man who knew his way aboard fishing ships. Fears carried a load of dories
and put two fishermen into each 18-foot dory and lowered it over the side to
string out nets to catch fish, mostly halibut.
Blackburn and
Tom Welch manned one dory and rowed away from Fears to begin putting out lines
with hooks and lines. As you might
guess, the weather on Burgeo Bank in January might be a bit unpleasant, and the
wind came up, and the temperature went down. One bad thing after another
happened to the two fishermen, and they became separated from the Fears.
Blackburn and Welch fought the tremendous
waves, bailing out the dory furiously. They lost their gloves; the cold was
lethal. Eventually Welch passed out and froze to death and Blackburn rowed on,
trying to reach land. His hands had frozen, and still her rowed. After three
days he finally made landfall, with the frozen corpse still in the boat. He made
his way to this fisherman’s house.
The tiny
village where he landed was having their own problems, cut off from a food
supply and having hard times. However, the household who took him in nursed
him, even using ancient remedies to peel away the frozen, dead flesh from his
hands and healing what was left. When summer came, Blackburn, with stumps for
hands, made his way back to Gloucester, and to a hero’s welcome, since the
story of his remarkable escape from death had preceded him.
That should be enough adventure for a lifetime, yes?
Well, Blackburn
opened up a saloon in Gloucester, right down among all the fishermen, and the
coins came rolling in. He started to be a philanthropist, helping out needy
fishermen’s families. New was coming in about fields of gold in the Klondike,
and Blackburn organized a group of friends who each provided shares to mount an
expedition to Alaska. Blackburn bought Hattie
L. Phillips, a schooner, and fitted her out to sail around Cape Horn to San
Francisco. He also built a shallow-draft steamer that the group would use to
steam up into the rivers of Alaska and hired a team of carpenters and mechanics
to put the vessel together once they reached San Francisco.
So here we had
Howard Blackburn, the captain with no fingers, just stubs for hands, taking
this team of prospective gold diggers around the Horn to the Pacific.
They finally made
it to San Francisco, but shortly afterward, when they were arguing how to make
it northward to Alaska, Blackburn discovered that he really didn’t like commanding
a ship with people in her. He left the
group and caught a train back to Gloucester.
That should be
enough adventure for a lifetime, yes?
Blackburn then
went back to running his saloon, but he began cooking up his next trip. He
bought a 30-foot sloop, Great Western, and fitted her out for a
transatlantic voyage. Alone. By now the
press called him The Fingerless Navigator. The whole city of Gloucester came out to see
him sail for Gloucester, England.
In Gloucester after
62 days alone at sea, he was celebrated again, and then sailed to London. It
was 1899.
That should be
enough adventure for a lifetime, yes?
If you were
tracking Blackburn at this point, you might wonder what would be next. Next came another lonely cruise, this time a
race sponsored by Eastern Point yacht club, to Funchal, Portugal, sailing a new
yacht, built for him—Great Republic. He made this trip in 39 days.
After this came
an inland voyage, in 1902. Blackburn sailed Great Republic up the Hudson River,
through the Erie Canal and to Lake Erie, Lake Michigan, down six miles of a new
channel intended especially for dumping all of Chicago’s sewage into the
Illinois river. Not pleasant sailing!
After that into the Mississippi, whose banks were shedding cornfields
and tall trees as the river relocated its path. Then down to New Orleans, then
out along the Gulf Coast to Florida, where he sold his yacht and picked up another
boat and sailed back to Gloucester, in 1903.
Blackburn died
back in Gloucester on November 4, 1932, age 73.
-end-
HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2020-2021
There will be no
meeting in December
2021
Yalta
meeting of Churchill, FDR and Stalin
Wednesday, February 24, 2021.
A History of
United States alliances with the rest of the world. From its very beginning, the United States has
forged alliances with other countries, from France, eager to oppose Great
Britain in 1776; Great Britain’s assistance for the Confederate States during
the Civil War; President Wilson’s attempt to form and join the League of
Nations; our alliance with Great Britain, China, France and the Soviet Union in
World War II; formation of the United Nations; the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization. How helpful have these alliances been? Home in on an agreement in
our past, or one that exists today, and discover its benefits and costs. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]
Wednesday, March 31, 2021. The Quest for Truth in History. How do we know it’s true? We’ve just gone through a difficult time in our
national history, when what you may have believed may have been false, and what
was “false” depended upon your political orientation. Propaganda and deception
have always been used by governments against the outside world and for their
own people. How can the intelligent
individual figure out what is true and what is false? [Proposed by Sam
Coulbourn]
Wednesday, April
28, 2021. History of North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, and including
Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Mauritania and
more. Pick a nation or a group
of nations in the northern tier of Africa and learn how they interact, how they
came to be, what problems are they having, or had, that attracted world
attention in the past. Some examples:
The Barbary Pirates and how America’s President Jefferson took them on; The
Italian Colonial history in Abyssinia and Somaliland; World War II—Field
Marshal Rommel in North Africa; “Carthago delenda est!” The Punic War
between Rome and Carthage; Tunisia and the Start of Arab Spring. [Proposed by
Sam Coulbourn]
Wednesday, May
26, 2021. Mass Refugee movements in History. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]
LET
US HAVE YOUR IDEAS FOR AN INTERESTING TOPIC FOR 2021!
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