These fish will be shipped to Gloucester, Massachusetts, and sold from there fever ever raged more fiercely than the Wanderlust that caused Gloucester fishermen to sell or give away their boats, or even be thankful for a gale that wrecked the schooner they could neither leave behind nor take along-anything to cut loose and fare to this new country. But that was in the days when the West was sparsely settled, when transportation to other markets was slow and rates high, and many a Gloucester man lived to long for a boat wrecked on the Newfoundland rocks or sold for a railway ticket. In the early nineties another set of men, moved by a scarcity of the Gloucester markets, who grew up with the smell of fish in their nostrils and the lingo of fishermen in their ears; and they knew not only how fish are caught, but how they are bought and sold. Since that time the halibut fleet out of Boston has had to change sails for steam, and otherwise spend money and thought to land halibut in Boston or Gloucester in the same time that it can be put there from the Pacific. Less than six days is the time made from Tacoma and Seattle to Gloucester, the fish being shipped in refrigerator cars attached to enger trains. The steamers are out PACIFIC HALIBUT LANDED AT TACOMA car-load a day during the busiest months, But as autumn brings rough weather off Cape Flattery, the boats go farther north, and by midwinter the steamers lie by and the fishing is done by Indians and others off the Alaska coast, the fish being shipped in ice from regular stations at Juneau, Petersburg, and Wrangel on freight steamers. Always as the halibut are slung from. the dories to the decks of the fishing steamers they are cleaned, so that on being unloaded at the dock on Puget Sound they are packed in ice and trucked direct from the dock to the cars sidetracked outside the warehouse, and within UNLOADING SARDINES AT SAN PEDRO, CALIFORNIA years the Western market has been supplied with cod caught along the Alaskan coast, the bulk of it being handled at San Francisco. These newcomers, however, located on Puget Sound, with the Gloucester market in their minds. Bad seasons on the Grand Banks have afforded them a market there for twenty-five hun culty has been met, but on Puget Sound there is not to-day a machine for making cartons at a price that cod men can pay and offer their product in competition with Eastern cod under their own labels. For this reason they have been compelled to send it to Gloucester, and let it go from there as Grand Banks cod. |