VIEW OF THE OLD FORT AND HARBOR IN 1837, WITH GRAND BANKER 

 AND P1NKEY AT ANCHOR. 



CHAPTER 2. 



EARLY FISHERIES NEW SETTLEMENT FISHING LOSSES FISHERIES 



PREVIOUS TO THE REVOLUTION. 



Nature has marked out the principal emplo3 r ments to which the 

 people who dwell on Cape Ann must resort for the means of sub- 

 sistence. When they want bread they may, indeed, according as 

 the demand for granite is great or small, get it from stone ; but 

 their chief reliance must be upon the occupations which call upon 

 men to go down to the sea in ships. We have alread3 r seen that 

 the first of the English race who occupied its shores were attracted 

 by the advantages here offered for carding on " the great sea busi- 

 ness of fishing." 



About twenty years before the period just alluded to, Gosnold, 

 the first navigator known to have visited the coast, so "pestered his 

 ships" with codfish, while lying off one of its capes, that that head- 

 land, from this circumstance, then . received the name it has ever 

 since borne Cape Cod. Twelve years later (1614) another Eng- 

 lish captain, the famous John Smith, found about Monhegan, on the 

 coast of Maine, " within a square of two or three leagues," the 

 " strangest fish-pond" he ever saw ; where, in 1619, an English ship 

 got a fare that yielded twent3*-one hundred pounds in money ; and 

 where, the next year, several ships did even better than that. His 

 account of the abundance offish in those waters has even a touch of 



