Real Change News | A coastal town in need of a lifeboat

September 9, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 40

Arts & Entertainment

A coastal town in need of a lifeboat

by: Olivia Conner , Contributing Writer

A Currier & Ives postcard depicting “whale fishery.” Image courtesy wikimedia.org

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Down at the Docks
By Rory Nugent, Pantheon, Hardcover, 2009, 288 pages, $24.95

In the final pages of “Down at the Docks,” the narrator witnesses a 43-year-old wood boat, the Conquest, being scuttled, or put to rest beneath the ocean’s coffin-like waters. The reason for the burial is that after years of prosperous duty, a new owner “steered her into trouble,” and the bureaucratic difficulties that ensued left her to sit at harbor until she rotted into a worthless heap of wood. According to the thoughts of most of the characters in Rory Nugent’s book, this is also the fate for New Bedford, Mass., a small fishing town, which once harbored a large Portuguese immigrant population that is on the brink of mortality.

Nugent is a sailor who has an adept knowledge of the intricacies of sterns, keels, waves, nautical instruments and more importantly, the town of New Bedford (NB). In each chapter the reader is introduced to a different NB character — most named after a fish — who tells another yarn about his/her life in the small fishing town. Not surprisingly, each chapter is not only steeped in historical data, but also gives a cultural glimpse into the current atmosphere of NB.

For instance, you meet Hake (or Mr. Jinx), who is ostracized by the town for the black cloud that hangs over his head because he allegedly makes ships go down just by setting foot on them: “[N]o possible nothing to answer why boats go down when Hake’s abroad and why men always die near him.” Or Pink, who once made a living on fishing boats but now, unlike the other characters in the book, is gambling his way towards a comfy retirement: “Without his fifty-two friends, he’s pretty sure, he would’ve been a one act show, a fisherman from beginning to end.” And finally Pearl, who is a retired lesbian electrician that once did work for the infamous Patriarcas, a mob family who ran a drug cartel in NB throughout the 1960s and 70s.

While the chapters display an odd mélange of NB denizens, there is one thing that they all agree upon: NB, a once thriving fishing town, will never be what it once was. NB had its first wave of riches in the late 1760s when a group of wealthy pioneers from Nantucket moved there, to profit from a local whaling industry that had been flourishing due to a dire need for industrial lubricants. “Around the world, more and more machines were appearing, and budding industrialists everywhere were hooked like junkies on whale oil and it’s chief by-product, grease.”

This industry would have come to a crashing halt in NB had it not been for the strength and intelligence of recently widowed mothers — later called the “Petticoat Society” — who had to find a way to survive after a storm killed most of the fishermen in town. They decided to make the remaining handful of men do all the whaling while they handled the financial management of the business, spreading the profits among those left behind.

Amid Nugent’s character profiles, there is a complex historical text that meanders in directions that can leave a reader perplexed but intrigued. The data is not listed chronologically, so one is forced to piece the history together like a patchwork quilt. The women mentioned above are just one unexpected piece of fabric that make up the story and it is surprising to read, “Of all the entries in the logbook of commercial fishermen in America, none appears more important or deserving of high-line honors then the founding of the Petticoat Society.”

Fortunately, even after the Petticoat Society was just a tale passed down from grandmother to granddaughter, NB maintained its riches. After whale-based lubricants were replaced by petroleum ones, NB bounced back with two new industries: fishing and textiles. “By 1920, the area was host to nearly seventy textile mills, employing thirty-five thousand people.” However, one can surmise as to why, in this day and age, these two industries are waning and why NB is just a skeleton of what it was. Out-sourcing to China has left the once flourishing population of Portuguese immigrants penniless, and over-fishing, coupled with governmental regulations, has put the fishing industry under water.

Much like a sinking ship, NB is struggling to stay afloat. Maybe, like the Conquest, it will fight to the bitter end. As the characters note near the book’s close, that boat just will not go down because it was built with sturdy hands and quality parts, and the people who built it were “cut from the same cloth as those past generations who laid America’s foundation and cemented it to bedrock.”

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