In Great Waters The Story of the Portuguese Fishermen

It is a hard life. That is the way they put it, the dark, weather-worn fellows who go shuffling in their sea-boots up and down the streets of any Yankee fishing village. If you ask how they are getting along, that will be the stock answer. But if you go with them into the cold, the fog, and the fury of the waters where they spend most of their time, then from these men you will need no answer. The sea, and their own nightmarish struggle for a subsistence from it, will tell you what no word, no shrug of bent shoulder, no sigh of man's breath, can tell. Yes, a hard life, such as the sea has always held out to those who go down to it for their keep. If anyone should stack up all the ships' logs, the sailors' journals, the newspaper stories and other non-fiction - all the writings into the workaday record of the sea - gather them in one big pile and then compare them with anything that has ever been imagined of the doings of men ashore, that saltwater account would reveal more violence to the ton, more convincing hardship, more real human misery. But not enough has been set down about the kindliness of men, the bigness of heart, which is found against this same harsh background. My own experience has been limited to the trips I have made to the banks with Portuguese fishermen, but I have no reason to doubt that with other humble laborers of the sea it would be the same. There would come out the same open-handedness, the same humor and sympathy, which made it possible for me to find the makings of this book. Of all that has happened to these men and their families, I do not pretend to tell. There is over weight of hardship there, of struggle, and of death. Broken by jagged lines of dangerous living, the design of life itself becomes elusive. Rather than use up these pages, then, with the cataloguing of tragedy, or even for a full complement of the minor statistics, dates, and other matters of local knowledge, I am passing along the story as it has come to me, and as it must have come to anyone undertaking it at first hand. So, many of the incidents and characters in these pages are only samples, fragments of the story, included here to represent, rather than to account for in full. He who would tell this tale in full must have lived long - and must wait, yet a while longer. Jeremiah Digges Provincetown, Cape Cod