The Last Fish Tale(ISBN=9781594483745)pdf/txt下载_在线阅读全文

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　　"A heartfelt tribute...as beautifully-written as the fondest and best-crafted eulogy."
　　-Boston Globe
　　"A colorful history of Gloucester...rich, varied, and satisfying, just like a good chowder."
　　-Entertainment Weekly

内容简介

　　"A marvelous, compelling tale"(Rocky Mountain News) from the New York Times bestselling author of Salt and Cod.
　　Gloucester, Massachusetts, America's oldest fishing port, is defined by the culture of commercial fishing. But the threat of over-fishing, combined with climate change and pollution, is endangering a way of life, not only in Gloucester but in coastal cities all over the world. And yet, according to Kurlansky, it doesn't have to be this way. Engagingly written and filled with rich history, delicious anecdotes, colorful characters, and local recipes, The Last Fish Tale is Kurlansky's most urgent story, "an engrossing multi-layered portrait of a fishing community that can be read for pure pleasure as well as being a campaigning plea for the environment" (Financial Times).

作者简介

　　Mark Kurlansky is a New York Times bestselling and James A. Beard Award-winning author. He is the recipient of a Bon Appétit American Food and Entertaining Award for Food Writer of the Year, and the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Award for Food Book of the year.

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　　Chapter One
　　The First Gloucester Story
　　From hence doth stretch into the sea the fair headlandTragabigzanda fronted with three isles called the Three Turks’Heads.
　　—John Smith,
　　Description of New England, 1616
　　There are two kinds of stories told in gloucester: fish tales andGloucester stories. A fish tale exaggerates to make things lookbigger. It is triumphal. When in the early seventeenth centuryGeorge Waymouth reported that the cod caught off New England werefive feet long with a three-foot circumference, this may have beena fish tale. We don’t know. Surely the Reverend Francis Higginson’sreports from Salem in 1630 that lions had been seen running wild inCape Ann, or that the squirrels could fly from tree to tree, werefish tales.
　　A Gloucester story is just the opposite. It is a story ofmiserable irony in which things are shown in their worst light, astory with a sad ending.
　　Often the history of a place begins with the person who named it.But in the case of Gloucester, the story begins with the men whodidn’t— the ones who tried to name it and failed. The naming ofGloucester is an entire cycle of Gloucester stories.
　　The earliest Europeans to arrive at what is today Cape Ann arethought to have been the Vikings, who, according to the writtenIcelandic legends known as the Sagas, sailed in 1004 down the NorthAmerican coast from Labrador to Newfoundland to a place they calledVineland. For a long time it was debated whether to believe thisstory. But in 1961 the remains of eight Viking turf houses datingto the year 1000 were found in a place in Newfoundland known asL’Anse aux Meadows. Where, then, was Vineland? Today manyhistorians believe that it was the coastline of New England, namedafter the wild grapes that grew there. According to another story,in 1004, Leif Ericson’s brother Thorwald landed on Cape Ann andnamed it Cape of the Cross. But neither the name nor Thorwald wentfar. Thorwald died on the expedition and those historians whobelieve the story at all think that he is buried somewhere on CapeAnn. And that is the first Gloucester story.

Chapter One 
　　The First Gloucester Story 
　　From hence doth stretch into the sea the fair headland
Tragabigzanda fronted with three isles called the Three Turks’
Heads. 
　　—John Smith, 
　　Description of New England, 1616 
　　There are two kinds of stories told in gloucester: fish tales and
Gloucester stories. A fish tale exaggerates to make things look
bigger. It is triumphal. When in the early seventeenth century
George Waymouth reported that the cod caught off New England were
five feet long with a three-foot circumference, this may have been
a fish tale. We don’t know. Surely the Reverend Francis Higginson’s
reports from Salem in 1630 that lions had been seen running wild in
Cape Ann, or that the squirrels could fly from tree to tree, were
fish tales. 
　　A Gloucester story is just the opposite. It is a story of
miserable irony in which things are shown in their worst light, a
story with a sad ending. 
　　Often the history of a place begins with the person who named it.
But in the case of Gloucester, the story begins with the men who
didn’t— the ones who tried to name it and failed. The naming of
Gloucester is an entire cycle of Gloucester stories. 
　　The earliest Europeans to arrive at what is today Cape Ann are
thought to have been the Vikings, who, according to the written
Icelandic legends known as the Sagas, sailed in 1004 down the North
American coast from Labrador to Newfoundland to a place they called
Vineland. For a long time it was debated whether to believe this
story. But in 1961 the remains of eight Viking turf houses dating
to the year 1000 were found in a place in Newfoundland known as
L’Anse aux Meadows. Where, then, was Vineland? Today many
historians believe that it was the coastline of New England, named
after the wild grapes that grew there. According to another story,
in 1004, Leif Ericson’s brother Thorwald landed on Cape Ann and
named it Cape of the Cross. But neither the name nor Thorwald went
far. Thorwald died on the expedition and those historians who
believe the story at all think that he is buried somewhere on Cape
Ann. And that is the first Gloucester story. 
　　In 1606, Samuel de Champlain, a French explorer of the coast of
Maine, sailed down to Cape Ann, and seeing three islands off its
tip— now called Thachers, Milk, and Straitsmouth Islands—he named
the peninsula with the great gray granite boulders marking its
headlands, the Cape of Three Islands, which even if said in French,
Cap aux Trois ?les, is not much of a name. He noted that there were
actually two rocky headlands and a passage between them, which he
sailed through taking depth soundings as he went, thus charting the
course that fishermen home from the sea have been using ever
since—from Thachers around East Gloucester to Eastern Point, into
the harbor between West and East Gloucester. Champlain thought this
was an extraordinary harbor, deep and sheltered with ample mooring
space, and he spent three months charting it. He named it Le Beau
Port, which was a little more poetic than the Cape of Three
Islands, but was destined to be no more durable. Being a skilled
seaman, he found anchorage in the safest, most leeward cove in the
harbor, but that was not to bear his name either. Instead, the
sheltered nook is known today as Smith Cove, named after the young
English adventurer, thirty- four-year-old Captain John Smith, who
arrived eight years later, in 1614. 
　　This Englishman was very different from Champlain. Though they
both were prodigious writers, Champlain’s writing revealed little
about the man or his life. It is not even certain what year he was
born. But Smith’s writings are very much about himself, full of
praise for his own extraordinary deeds. Historians, distrustful of
Smith’s braggadocio, tended not to believe what he wrote. Only in
recent years has it come to be understood that most of his yarns of
daredevil adventures are true. 
　　Smith was a self-made man in more than one sense of that phrase.
He not only made his own way in the world—though always assisted by
his remarkable ability to attract the patronage of the wealthy—but
he also used his writings to establish a colorful persona for
himself. 
　　When he was still a teenager he went off to the Lowlands, as did
many adventurous young Englishmen, to help the Protestant Dutch
fight for their freedom from the despotic Roman Catholics of Spain.
The savage combat of that war produced many disillusioned young
veterans for the new colonies. But Smith, after three years of
fighting the Catholics, did not cross the Atlantic and instead
joined the Austrian army to fight the Turks, the true infidels, in
Hungary. 
　　According to his immodest but generally accurate journals, Smith
showed great cunning and courage and was rapidly promoted to the
rank of captain, but then was captured by the Turks, who sent him
into slavery in Turkey. There he found himself owned by an
aristocratic woman whom he called “the young Charatza
Tragabigzanda.” According to Smith, her name meant “girl from
Trebizond.” Smith and his “fair mistress,” as he put it, developed
some kind of friendship and it seemed a happy time until she gave
him to her brother. The exact nature of Smith’s relationship with
his fair mistress is unclear, but throughout his life he would be
rescued and befriended by young women of social standing. Many
historians believe that Tragabigzanda had sent him to her brother
to learn their language and customs—she had communicated with Smith
in Italian—and that her plan was then to marry him. But Smith
either did not understand or did not think much of this plan. He
murdered her brother and escaped, traveling by horse to the
Ukraine, then Poland, and on to Western Europe. 
　　colonialism was the great opportunity for young English
adventurers of the early seventeenth century. There were no
traditions and few rules, and a resourceful young man could invent
as he went along. Smith was personally involved in the two most
important British colonies in North America, Virginia and
Massachusetts. At the time, Virginia was seen as the more promising
and it was the one that attracted sponsors and investors. But Smith
believed that New England had better prospects for the future. The
reason for this, he argued, was its wealth of fish. Smith
maintained that New England fish were a natural resource worth more
than gold. “The sea is better than the richest mine known,” he
wrote. 
　　This stance was surprising in an age of exploration dominated by
highborn men who considered themselves above such activities as
fishing and bringing fish to market. The traditional source of
wealth for the great men of the Age of Exploration was gold. 
　　It was his 1614 voyage that had convinced Smith of the importance
of fishing. Having never been a man of affluence, one of the goals
of his voyage was to somehow get rich. He had hoped to find gold
but could find none. He then tried whaling, but did not encounter a
suitable species. The only thing left was fishing, an activity he
despised. So he ordered his men to go fishing, while he had himself
and a crew lowered in a small boat to begin charting the coast, an
activity he had developed a great fondness for in the Chesapeake.
The little boat would move into every inlet and measure its nooks
and turns, sounding depths so that their value for future ships
would be documented. 
　　Smith charted the coastline with great accuracy from the mouth of
the Kennebec in Maine to Cape Cod and tried to name everything as
he went. The British had simply referred to the area as part of
Virginia, and it was Smith who gave it the name New England. But
less successful were some of his other names. The island off
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that he dubbed Smyth’s Iles—his creative
spelling, farfetched even for its day, would become infamous among
latter historians—is today the Isles of Shoals. His name for the
granite- studded peninsula, today Cape Ann, was Tragabigzanda, and
he called the three islands the Three Turks’ Heads in remembrance
of three Turks whom he beheaded in duels six months before his
capture. 
　　Along the way, always looking for a little profit, he picked up
fur pelts. He identified and sounded twenty-five “excellent good
harbors,” but for reasons that are not clear he neglected to sound
the harbor on the tip of Tragabigzanda, perhaps because Champlain
had already done so. He did name the points along the tip of the
coast including Halibut Point, which still bears the name, though
while it is known as an excellent spot for catching striped bass
and sometimes bluefish, there is no record of its ever being a
place to land halibut. 
　　Smith returned to Europe not only with his charts but also with
seven thousand “green cod,” or salted fish, and forty thousand
stockfish, or dried cod, that his men had landed off of Monhegan
Island in southern Maine. England had recently opened trade with
Europe and Smith was able to sell the fish in Málaga, where the
price was high. Málaga also had a slave market, where he was able
to sell twenty- seven locals whom he had lured onto his ship in New
England. 
　　The slave sale did not receive wide attention, but the reputed
fortune he made on the fish became legendary. Some years later
Massachusetts Governor William Bradford heard that it had been
60,000 fish, a fish tale. The fish, the map, the name New
England—all made a strong impression back in England. In fact, it
was this story combined with Smith’s map that convinced the exiled
Pilgrims in Holland to start their colony in Smith’s New
England. 
　　It was not a moment too soon, according to Smith. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while explorers were searching
for gold and spice routes, fortunes were being made on fishing,
especially fishing cod. France and England were to fight repeated
wars to secure control of North America’s fish. 
　　In an age without refrigeration, the fis...

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