The Terrible Odyssey Of Howard Blackburn (February/March 1982 | Volume: 33, Issue: 2)

The Terrible Odyssey Of Howard Blackburn

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February/March 1982 | Volume 33, Issue 2

For well over two hundred years, the doryman was an integral part of American life, though rarely given his fair due. He was a fisherman, the hardiest of a hardy lot who went down to the sea in ships and from there, in tiny boats, to harvest both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. If it was a hard trade, it also was a proud one, so much so that an anonymous doryman at the turn of the century was driven to a splendid bit of doggerel: “I want no fuss with the pale-faced cuss—/ The clerk or piano tuner—/ Who spend their lives in those hives/ In the struggle for more mazuma./ But give me the wind-swept ocean’s space,/ Where the ‘flat ones’ flop in the dory’s waist,/ And the salt scud whips in your upturned face,/ As you pull for the side of your schooner.”

One of the doryman's principal fishing grounds was the Grand Banks, an enormous patch of the Atlantic that lies south of Newfoundland and nurtured the largest crop of cod and halibut in the world. Among the hundreds of thousands of dorymen who worked the Banks in those two hundred years were the Gloucestermen, the fishing folk of Gloucester, Massachusetts, who from generation to generation plied their trade in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth—the North Atlantic.

One of them was Howard Blackburn. He was born in Port Midway, Nova Scotia, in 1858 and emigrated to Gloucester in his teens, serving as a doryman on several Grand Banks schooners. In the middle of January, 1883, he signed on board the Grace L. Fears, bound for the Burgeo Bank off the southern coast of Newfoundland—beginning an adventure that would mark him for the rest of his life. That horrifying and courageous tale follows, told in Blackburn’s own words as taken down by a reporter for the Salem (Massachusetts) News in August and September, 1932:

After we had found an anchorage, we had hardly returned to the vessel the first morning, after setting our trawls [multiple-hook fishing lines attached to buoys], when Capt. Griffin said he feared a blizzard was coming on and told us we’d better go right back and haul them. This was Jan. 25.

Thomas Welch, a Newfoundland boy, somewhat younger than I was and newer at the trade, was my dory mate. I had never seen him before I met him on this trip. The wind was southeast and our trawls were all set in that direction, so we all pointed our bows to our outermost buoy. The journey home would be made with the wind. It was a long hard pull but we made the buoy, came about and squared away for the Fears.

Just as we pulled in the last of the trawl the wind fell away to a flat calm. I knew what this might mean and so was not a bit surprised when a few minutes later it breezed up from