The Cod Fishing Fleet of the North
A look inside the grueling, monotonous, and dangerous lives of the men hauling cod from the icy waters of the Okhotsk and Bering seas.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The cod fishing fleet that will sail from this port to the Okhotsk and Behring seas and to the Choumain islands will be considerably larger this coming season than it was last year. Cod fishing on this coast has proved very profitable to those engaged in the business. William M. Mason, at North Beach, went north last season and described the work as akin to shepherding for its monotony. Each fisherman takes a dory and anchors in the deep, hauling lines for eight or nine hours a day. He catches halibut as well, which are often considered an interloper because they are difficult to haul into a small dory. Sometimes the fishers are forced to cut their lines to avoid losing their boat to a giant halibut or a whale. The men are absent from port about five months, and during that time each man's catch averages about 10,000 cod fish, for which he is paid at the rate of $7.50 per thousand, making his work worth about $300. The fish are then salted, washed, and sun-dried at drying places on islands or in California.
“The line fisherman has the privilege of humming and chewing tobacco, whistling, smelling and eating his lunch, and he has the pleasure during a portion of the time of seeing his usually lonesome mates in the distance.”
While cod fishing remains a cornerstone of North Pacific industry, the brutal, manual 'dory' fishing described here has been largely replaced by industrial trawling. The intense, lonely conditions of 19th-century maritime labor contrast sharply with the modern, high-tech, but still hazardous nature of commercial fishing in the Pacific Northwest.
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