He reads from one account in the wake of a storm 136 winters past. Nearly 4,000 in one 60-year stretch in the 1800s, when the schooners were built for speed, not for safety. Chronicling the life here and counting up the loss. TOLAN: Joe Garland has dug up old records, long-lost diaries, fishing reports, newspaper clippings. So I found a strange kind of brotherhood. Until I sort of discovered what these guys had been going through in Gloucester. You know, ordinary life that was comparable to it. GARLAND: And it was nothing that I had ever encountered or seen. Under constant shell fire, young men were going down. ![]() TOLAN: Joe Garland was on the winter line in Italy in '43 in a stalemate with the Germans, trench warfare up in the mountains. That evokes the kind of kinship that I had had as a soldier with my buddies. GARLAND: I immediately felt a kind of a kinship with the fishermen. That's one fisherman lost every 13 days for 375 years. Since 1623, when the British first set up their camp just across the harbor, perhaps 10,000 Gloucester men have gone down to the sea. In his 20 books, the old reporter turned historian has recorded the history here. For nearly 40 years, Joe Garland has sat amidst his ticking clocks and written it down. TOLAN: A frothing Atlantic lies beyond the breakwater to our left. (A grandfather clock ticks in the background) Then are they glad because they be quiet, so He bringest them unto their desired haven. He maketh the storm calm so that the waves thereof are still. Then they cry onto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distresses. GARLAND: They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end. TOLAN: In a house perched above the water's edge, Joe Garland reads from his book Down to the Sea. ![]() For he commandeth and raises the stormy wind. GARLAND: They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep. And then into rough waters to hunt for fish and go down. Ten thousand men, they say, sailing from a deep harbor out between 2 sheltering arms of land past a long finger of granite breakwater that absorbs the thunder of the North Atlantic. TOLAN: For 375 years Gloucester fisherman have been going to sea and never coming back. I keep telling to him, you know, I don't have to worry about your father being out there any more, why do I have to worry about you? Why can't you give me some peace? Why can you fish in shore? Why can't you go do something else? So after a long day I can go to bed and not worry, you out there. SANFILIPO: I'm very, I'm very angry at him. ![]() TOLAN: Angela Sanfilipo, born to the seventh generation of Sicilian fisher families, came to Gloucester in 1965 when she was 15. As we speak he is out on Georges Bank and a storm is coming. He did everything but his love is in the ocean. Every day I'd notice people parked along the boulevard just sitting in their cars, staring out to sea. Toward the field where the British set up the first fishing camp in the colonies. Past the old wooden houses with the rooftop widow's walks. TOLAN: When I first moved to Gloucester, I'd jog along a path at the water's edge, past the fisherman's memorial statue. In an encore installment of our series, Gloucester at the Crossroads, producer and Gloucester resident Sandy Tolan considers how an overriding sense of loss has shaped the lives of the people in this fishing port north of Boston. Many of them live in the nation's oldest fishery, Gloucester, Massachusetts. ![]() Even in times of bountiful harvests, thousands of families have had to endure the deaths of members of their community lost at sea. The crews of the Adriatic, the Cape Fear, and the Bethy Bob were after clams, much in demand for chowder and chum. The lives of 10 men just this past month, for instance, in the cold waters off the New Jersey and Massachusetts coasts. There is a price to pay for the seafood that graces your table. So wrote Sir Walter Scott in his 1860 novel The Antiquary. KNOY: It's no fish you're buyin', it's men's lives.
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