Product Description

Like countless Gloucester fishermen before and since, Howard Blackburn and Tom Welch were trawling for halibut on the Newfoundland banks in an open dory in 1883 when a sudden blizzard separated them from their mother ship. Alone on the empty North Atlantic, they battled towering waves and frozen spray to stay afloat. Welch soon succumbed to exposure, and Blackburn did the only thing he could: He rowed for shore. He rowed five days without food or water, with his hands frozen to the oars, to reach the coast of Newfoundland. Yet his tests had only begun.

So begins Joe Garland's extraordinary account of the hero fisherman of Gloucester. Incredibly, though Blackburn lost his fingers to his icy misadventure, he went on to set a record for swiftest solo sailing voyage across the Atlantic that stood for decades. Lone Voyager is a Homeric saga of survival at sea and a thrilling portrait of the world's most fabled fishing port in the age of sail.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #461561 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-07
• Released on: 2000-07-07
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .96 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
Sebastian Junger author of The Perfect Storm Brings alive the struggles of the Gloucester men at seas in the era of fishing under sail like no other book I've ever read....A wonderful, beautifully written book.

Mark Kurlansky author of Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World The only name I can think of that is more Gloucester than Howard Blackburn is Joe Garland. This is the great New England fishing legend definitively told.

Henry Beetle Hough The New York Times Book Review One of the most remarkable feats of survival in the history of seafaring....It is one for all whose interest runs to the never-ending conflict between man and the sea.

Richard Adams Carey author of Against the Tide: The Fate of the New England Fisherman Howard Blackburn is legendary even today among North Atlantic fishermen, and Joe Garland's lyrical book reveals the even more astonishing man behind the legend. A terrific read: brisk, poetic, and full of the sea.

About the Author
Joseph E. Garland, a former newspaperman, has written extensively on social, maritime and medical history, including thirteen books about Gloucester and Boston's North Shore and some 350 columns in the Gloucester Daily Times. A longtime sailor, he and his wife, Helen, live on the Eastern Point shore of Gloucester's outer harbor.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: Dorymates

She sliced through the North Atlantic, nodding her head with the swell. The wind thundered off the taut curve of her sails, and she heeled away. Spray boomed from her plunging bow in cascades of exploding water. The sea poured over the rail and frothed along her lee deck and fell off past her quarters. The white wake boiled up under her counter as she surged on, and it simmered and faded astern, and the ocean was whole again.

The Gloucester schooner Grace L. Fears, queen of the fresh halibut fleet, was beating past the south shore of Nova Scotia. She was snug-rigged against the winter weather, her stately topmasts having been lowered and left home, along with her topsails and fisherman's staysail. But even her shortened canvas -- jib, jumbo, foresail and main -- was enough to put her deck under, and she rushed toward the fishing banks with a power that flung spume high into her rigging, where it froze and sparkled like crystal in the sun.

This two-masted beauty with the lines of a clipper ship was eighty-one feet from stem to stern, yet the proud lift of her bowsprit and the rakish slant of her fifty-six-foot mainboom made her look twice as long. With her sails flying and the ocean leaping from her forefoot, she was a sight to make the heart beat faster.

The master of this mistress, Captain Nathaniel Greenleaf, was the king of the halibut killers. The previous spring he and the Fears had brought home to Gloucester a fare of upwards of fifty tons in one record five weeks at sea, and it fetched the biggest money ever stocked on a single halibut trip in the history of the fisheries. The giant flounder, which sometimes attained a weight of 350 pounds, was in premium demand; competition among the schooners to be the first into market for the highest prices was fierce, and fierce risks were taken in its name. First fare meant top money for all hands, and a highliner like Greenleaf could hand-pick his crew from the ablest men on the coast.

But Skipper Nat was not aboard this trip. A few days earlier he had sailed the Fears into Liverpool, down below Halifax, to put an ailing member of the crew ashore; then he decided to swallow the anchor himself for a trip, at least, and turned the command over to Alec Griffin, his first mate and cook. Looking for new hands to make up his complement, Griffin met up with a young fisherman he had known from Gloucester who was spending the holidays in his home town of Port Medway down the coast. His name was Howard Blackburn, and he signed him on.

With a few thousand herring for bait and a load of ice in her hold to keep the catch fresh, the schooner cleared Liverpool on the twenty-first of January. Captain Griffin set a northeast course along the coast past Halifax and Cape Canso, around the cliffs of Cape Breton Island and into Cabot Strait, where the Gulf of St. Lawrence loses itself in the Atlantic off Newfoundland's south shore. The hunting ground he sought was Burgeo Bank, a mound on the ocean floor, dwarfed by the broad underwater mesa of the Grand Banks directly to the eastward and bigger than Newfoundland itself.

At the swirling junctions of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current the wandering silt had settled to build the shallow banks; the mixing of the waters, warm and cold, created on the ocean's bottom a feeding farm for fish by the billion, and on its surface a turbulent wilderness, now white from the lash of the gale, now black with the stealth of the fog.

Burgeo Bank lay sixty miles south of the fjords of Newfoundland, and on Burgeo lurked the prey.

The Fears sailed over the southern slope of Burgeo during the night of the twenty-fourth, three days out of Nova Scotia. Alec Griffin hove the lead rhythmically, fingering his way along the floor a hundred fathoms below. The lead line chopped off the chart depth. But only the tallow told where the fish would be. As the bob plunked to the bottom, a sticky plug of it picked up samples of mud and sand so typical that when it was hand-over-handed back aboard, an old salt -- eyeing, feeling, smelling, tasting the soil of the sea -- could lay his mark on infinity and not miss by a hundred yards.

By daybreak the skipper had found his spot below. He threw the wheel hard over and brought the schooner into the wind. The anchor splashed off the bow, and the men, heavy in their oilskins, pulled down the wings of snapping canvas.

Amidships, the fishing dories were nested in stacks to port and starboard. A hoist from the mainmast was snapped to the rope handle, the becket, in the stern of the topmost, another from the foremast to the becket of the painter; with a heave the men swung the dory up and out of the nest and lowered it to the deck.

These eighteen-foot dories were double-ended, slope-sided, flat-bottomed, open boats -- mighty tippy-looking to brave the waves. The thwarts (seats) were removable so they could be "nested" -- stacked on either side of the deck to save space -- and the heavy oars of stiff spruce were ten feet long. The bank dory was built to take a beating.

Trawl tubs and gear were hove aboard, and with one more haul on the hoists and a shove from the deck, the dory swung over the rail, dropped into the sea and bobbed, like a cork until its crew of two jumped in, cast off the lines and bent to the oars. Their weight gave it stability, and a load of fish would give it even more; yet it was steadiest when it was tipping, and the farther it leaned -- even to the gunwale -- the more stable it would be...a strange boat.

Five more dories were loaded and lowered away. The six crews had drawn lots for position and rowed out from the Fears across the wind, which was coming light from the southeast. The sea ran easy. The dawn of the north was about to leap from the night. The cold was bitter.

Tom Welch, a husky Newfoundland lad with tousled hair and a broad, cheerful face, had been assigned the newcomer Blackburn as his dorymate. As they swung away from the schooner, rowing in powerful unison, he watched with satisfaction the sweep of the oars in the big man's hands.

When each dory had reached its position on the line, the crew shipped their oars and prepared to set the trawl. All were fishing against the light breeze in parallel lanes. This way, when it came time to haul, they would pick up the far end of the trawl first, and the wind would help them back to the ship.

One man went forward and dropped the trawl anchor overboard, paying the trawl out of the first tub until the anchor hit bottom. Next went the keg buoy, topped with a flag and attached to the anchor by a separate line. The trawl was a tarred cotton rope the thickness of a pencil, coiled in the tubs in fifty-fathom sections called skates, six skates to a tub, four tubs to a dory. At fifteen-foot intervals ganging lines were tied to the trawl, four feet long, a baited hook at the end of each. The hooks were flicked out of the tub with a supple stick as the trawl spun off the coil. As each skate went over the side, the ends were knotted, one to the next, from tub to tub, until nearly a mile and a half of trawl and 480 hooks lay on the ocean floor. When the last of the trawl was reached, a second anchor and buoy were dropped over.

After setting, the men rowed their dories back to the schooner for a mug-up. The rest was up to the fish; twenty-nine hundred innocent-looking dinners were awaiting them in the murk of Burgeo Bank.

But in only two hours Skipper Alec ordered his crew back over the side. There was a feel to the heavy air and a look to the sky that meant wind. Fish or no, the trawls would have to be hauled before their time. The catch would be thin, but he wanted none of his dories caught in a nasty sea away from their vessel.

Just as the boats shoved off, the first snowflakes fluttered down. The wind had died to a breath. The sky was leaden and faded into the smooth gray sea at the horizon. For the second time this morning the men left the schooner astern, heading now for the outermost buoys.

Welch and Blackburn drove their dory with surging strokes through the glassy sea. The snow was coming a little thicker. Some of the others had already reached their markers and were commencing to haul as the two men passed. A few more strokes, and they glided up to the keg and pulled it aboard. Up came the buoy rope, then the anchor and the end of the trawl. Welch hove the heavy line up on the gurdy, a metal roller set on a pin in the port gunwale of the bow. Blackburn stood in the waist, his killer club at the ready.

The gurdy twirled and the water spun from the line as Welch hauled in the straining trawl. It jerked and jumped in his grip. A thrashing halibut broke the surface. Blackburn seized the ganging line, yanked the big, flat, flapping fish to the gunwale and clubbed it on the head. He dragged it over the side, worked the hook from its mouth with his killer and dropped the quivering body in the bottom. Then he coiled the freed line in the tub, while his dorymate turned back to the trawl.

When half a mile of trawl was back aboard, and a few fish slithered in the bilge, the two paused to remark that the southeast breeze was freshening. But this was all right, since it favored them all the more as they worked their way toward the Fears. They could see the nearest dories through the snow, ahead of them with the hauling. They returned to their task.

Just as they fetched the second buoy, the wind fell back to a flat calm, ominously. The other men were already pulling for the schooner. Blackburn and Welch got the last of the trawl aboard, grabbed the oars and headed for their ship.

Then the squall hit. But it came from the wrong direction, from the northwest, as they had feared. Now they were to leeward of the vessel, fighting the wind. In an instant the schooner was out of sight in the flying snow...they weren't sure where; the sudden shift had fouled their bearings.

As the snow thickened, the wind increased. It kicked the sea into a chop, flicking spindrift from the whitecaps. The wind-driven snow and spray blasted against their oilskins. A few d...