1682 AWARD OF THE FISHERY COMMISSION. 



tradesmen are hard-working men, and they gain their wealth and pros- 

 perity on the terms of being bard-working men. The Gloucester mer-' 

 chants, if you see fit to call them so (they do not call themselves u mer- 

 chants^ but " fish-dealers"), are men who go to their counting-rooms 

 earlv and stay late. If they go up to Boston on business, they take a 

 very early train, breakfast before daylight, and return in season to do 

 a day's work, though Boston is twenty-five or thirty miles distant. And 

 when their vessels come in they are down upon the wharves, they 

 stand by the large barges and they cull the mackerel with their own 

 hands ; they count them with their own hands ; they turn them 

 with their own hands into the barrels and cooper them, and scuttle 

 the barrels, and put in the brine and pickle the fish and roll them 

 into the proper places ; and when they have a moment's leisure they 

 will go to their counting-rooms and carry on their correspondence 

 by telegraph and otherwise with all parts of the United States, and 

 learn the value of these mackerel. They are ready to sell them to 

 the buyers, who are auotber class of persons, or they are ready to 

 keep and sell them in the larger market of Boston. By their patient 

 industry, by their simple hard days' works, they have made Gloucester 

 an important place ; but they have not added much to the mackerel 

 fishery of the United States. Gloucester has grown at the expense 

 of every other fishing town in Xew England. We have laid before 

 your honors, through Mr. Low, I think it was, or Mr. Babson, the sta- 

 tistics of the entire falling off of all the fishing towns of Xew England ; 

 those that had dealt in mackerel fishing. 



Where are Plymouth, Bamstable, where Marblehead, which was 

 known the world over as a fishing-town ? There are no more fishing- 

 vessels there. The people have all gone into the business of making 

 shoes and other domestic manufactures. So with Beverly, so with Man- 

 chester, so with Xewburyport, and so with the entire State of Maine, 

 with the exception of a very few vessels on the coast. Two or three of 

 the last witnesses gave us a most melancholy account of the entire fall- 

 ing off of fishing in Castiue, Bucksport, and all up and down that bay 

 and river, so that there is hardly any fishing left. When they were 

 fishing-towns people employed their industry in it; their harbors were 

 enlivened by the coming and going of fishing-schooners ; and now there 

 is an occasional weekly steamer or an occasional vessel there owned, 

 but doing all its business in Boston or New York. But the fishing ousi- 

 ness of all the towns of Xew England, except the cod fishery of Prov- 

 incetown and of the towns near, has concentrated in Gloucester. It 

 seems to be a law that certain kinds of busiuess, though carried on 

 sparsely at periods, must be eventually concentrated. When they are 

 concentrated they cannot be profitably carried on anywhere else. " The 

 result is, that the mackerel fishery and cod fishery, with the exception 

 of the remote points of Cape Cod, have concentrated in Gloucester. 

 There is the capital ; there is the skill; there are the marine railways; 

 there is that fishing insurance company, which they have devised from 

 their own skill and experience, by which they insure themselves cheaper 

 than any people in the world ever did insure themselves against marine 

 risks: so much so, that merchants of Gloucester have told us that if 

 they had to pay the rates that are paid in stock companies the fishing, 

 business could not be carried on by merchants who own their ships; 

 the difference would be enough to turn the scale. Xow, it appears to 

 be the fact I will not trouble your honors by going over the testimony 

 to which every Gloucester man swore ; it turns out to be the fact that 

 the prosperity of Gloucester, while it has additional resources in its 



