The men teased him hard, tossing fish guts at him, or giving him a big cod to lug home by the gills, a thirty-pound fish that would cause him to step on the tail and trip and fall in the snow, making them laugh. The big fish and its roe fed his family for days; his mother would make codfish cakes, and cut the jowls from the cod head for fish chowder. They also ate beef-like pieces of red meat from the heads of the big sturgeon that were caught in spring. “In them days, money was real scarce and food was cheap; fish, clams, scallops, farm crops, and always plenty of potatoes, cabbage, left over in the fields, and homemade canned fruits, pies, nothing but the finest. You lived better then than you do now because there was no preservatives, the stuff was good for you. The men used to go on Montauk two-three days grapin, the women would take what they wanted for grape jelly and the men would barrel up the rest and make their wine. This was the life, and time and money didn’t seem to matter as much as livin close together and bein friendly with everybody, not dog-eat-dog like it is today.”
For a number of years, such fishermen as Captain Elisha Osborn in Wainscott had been using small cedar-wood Jersey boats with one-cylinder engines to go through the surf, but many of the surfmen preferred dories.6 In 1929, when Captain Clint Edwards took Milt Miller with him on his dory crew, Milt was just fourteen years old. “I suppose no one could have had a happier moment in their lives than to be asked to be one of the boat crew with a captain you had always admired and respected … The honor soon became reality after the first day of rowin and pullin the large oars with every muscle put into use to make a good impression on the captain, the large blisters beginnin to appear in the palm of my hands, the achin, achin of every muscle, many that I didn’t even know I had, that I must endure without a word.” But endure he did, fishing all summer, helping lift the gillnets in the early autumn mornings before going to school, and running back to help out again at evening. “I don’t think that boys today have the opportunity I had to work around somebody who would help him out, try to give him some knowledge; and a kid can pick up a lot of knowledge by just watching. Today the grown people chase the kid away, sayin he might get hurt. I used to work right around with these grown men, and the Lester boys and others that come up in a fishing family in Amagansett was raised the same way.”
The following April, when spring fishing began, Cap’n Clint made Milt stroke oarsman, and Milt also tended Cap’n Gabe’s gill nets on a share basis: the old man, feeble and nearly blind, was over eighty. “Sometimes I’d go to see him, and there he’d be, mendin net in his yard, and he’d know me by my footsteps comin across the grass and call my name without even turnin around. Cap’n Gabe was like a father to me, and in the early thirties, when I was seventeen, I took over his rig for him.”
Cap’n Gabe still came down to the beach in his horse-drawn wagon, anxious as ever to go off in the boat. He would help shove off, then hang onto the stern, and once the dory was safely beyond the breakers, Milt would jump back aft and haul him aboard. Then one day Cap’n Gabe’s son Nat, a prosperous trap fisherman in Montauk, said, “Milt, I don’t want Father on that boat any more, but he wants to go, so you’ll have to try to get off before he gets to the beach. Don’t take him off.” But Cap’n Nat had not said this to his father, and the first time the old man came down with his horse and wagon to find Milt and another boy already out lifting his nets, he was very upset. The old whaler had not realized until then that his days of going off in a small boat through the ocean surf were at an end.
3.
The Edwards Brothers
and the Lester Boys
“The Lesters and Edwardses done most of the fishing around here,” according to Francis Ray Lester, Cap’n Frank, born in Amagansett in 1890. The Lesters were originally Leicesters from northern England, according to an East Hampton genealogy prepared by Cap’n Josh’s granddaughter,1 and John Lester came to Connecticut from England in 1654. At some time in the next century, certain Lesters settled at Northwest and became fishermen-farmers, and in the nineteenth century one Lester clan moved to the west end of Amagansett, a community handy to both the ocean and the bay, known today as Poseyville. Though still farmers, the ’Gansett Lesters followed the sea, and eventually became full-time commercial fishermen. “They were newcomers two hundred years ago,” Milt Miller says, “but the Lesters have carried on the tradition of ocean beach fishing more than any family around. Cap’n Frank, well, I remember, he used to be some fisherman, that guy!”
Frank Lester’s father, Nathan Talmage Lester (“a big kind of burly man, a lot of light hair, close to six foot four,” according to his grandson Francis, “a very very gentle man who loved children”) said he’d once helped catch a dozen whales a year, and he owned two whaleboats that were used for haul-seining–mostly for “scrap for the land”—and codfishing. Like all six sons of Cap’n Nathan, Frank was a surfman at an early age, and in 1907 he rowed on the Edwards crew that took the huge right whale that went to the American Museum. The Edwardses, whose frugal ways were commonly held accountable for their success, withheld his share, saying he did not count as crew, being too young, although for several years—ever since his father had been laid up with Bright’s disease—Frank and his brother Harry, two years older, had been providing for the family. With the breakup of the ice in the February thaw—traditionally, February 10—they set “a gang o’ fykes” (two men might tend one hundred fykes between them) as far away as Gardiners Island, rowing them all the way across the channel; these flatfish fykes caught three- or four-pound flounders, now long gone. In warmer weather, when crabs and horsefoots snarled the fykes, they tended two big fish traps at Barnes Hole that were frequently damaged, Frank recalled, by the coal-burning wooden bunker steamers of the Edwards Brothers. They netted weakfish “up Peconic Bay,” and sometimes in summer Frank went dragging out of Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, going as far east as Block Island in small open boats with one- or two-cylinder engines that were overhauled only every few years. These boats, rarely more than twenty feet in length, lacked winches and net reels; the heavy nets were hauled from the deep water by hand.
Frank Lester was anxious to tow in the last whaleboat that went offshore from Amagansett in 1918. “He was so sore they wouldn’t take him,” says his brother Bill, “that Pop said, ‘Well, I’ll let you have my share.’ Frank went up and bought himself some boots and oilers, but that whale was a small one, with no oil to speak of, what they called a dry skin, and Frank’s share never paid for that new gear.”
Frank Lester had two dollars to his name, he said, when in 1908 he married Sadie Eames, whose grandfather came over from Connecticut in the nineteenth century. Sadie was born down at Napeague in a community of about fifteen houses known at that time as Squatters Land. Later it was called Lazy Point, after a local tradition that most of the inhabitants were easy-going clam diggers who did little besides drink from November to May. All winter the Eames family worked supplying bait clams for the cod trawls, and Sadie helped dig clams and open scallops for her husband. She also bore him three daughters and five sons, and all five sons are fishermen today.
For two weeks each year Frank moved down to Napeague to shoot ducks and geese for the winter larder, and during the Depression, when the Lesters—and many other fishermen—lost most of their Amagansett land to unpaid taxes, Frank and Sadie returned to her family’s house at Lazy Point. They had no car, only a horse and wagon, and they used old-time kerosene lamps, but they had chickens, a garden, and a root cellar, and canned all sorts of vegetables and wild berries—blackberries, blueberries, cranberries—and smoked a lot of deer, rabbit, and squirrel. Frank Lester was a cheerful, optimistic man, and in his recollection, they lived “happy and good.” In their spare time, such as it was, they were apt to go fishing for fun, or go sit on the beach in a sociable way while mending net. As his eldest son Francis recalls, “In them days there wasn’t too much to do outside of that, so they spent quite a lot of time down around the beach. In the winter we’d all go down there and tak
e a little somethin to eat and drink, a little tea or lemonade. In them days there wasn’t many people on the beach.”
Like his father (“All he done was fish”), Frank Lester worked for others only when there was no other way to feed his family. One summer he cut cauliflower for a dollar fifty cents a day; another year he raised vegetables for a small store run by his wife. Both times he saw a fish truck go by with a good catch and went back fishing. “He wasn’t afraid of paid work, it wasn’t that; he didn’t like it,” Francis says. “Every time he went to work, somebody caught a lot of fish, so he decided he wouldn’t work any more for anybody.” For a time, Frank Lester wore glasses, but he never discovered a way to keep them clear, especially in the winter spray; he got so disgusted with the last pair he ever wore that he threw them overboard.
“In Pop’s time,” recalls Frank’s brother Bill, born in 1900, “they used a 660-foot net for haulin seine, and a horse cart, dump cart, with wide wheels, carried less than a pickup truck today. In them days Edwardses hauled seine some, too, but they were into bigger stuff, made a lot of money, had ocean traps out here tended by steamers. Anyway, a dump cart full was a good haul in them days. Took what they needed to eat, I guess, and spread the rest of ’em—evil fish and food fish, too—out on the fields. Sold some to the workers in the watchcase factory over Sag Harbor—no way of shippin ’em before the railroad come.” In those days menhaden, or mossbunkers, were eaten with as much enthusiasm as the incidental catch of striped bass, bluefish, weakfish, summer flounder (fluke), flounder, and shad. “We got some of them old people yet likes to eat bunkers. Feller come around just the other day, said his mother wanted bunker, took a mess home to eat.”
When Bill Lester married Sadie Spicer in 1918, he moved from Cap’n Nathan’s house north of Montauk Highway to his present house a hundred yards away. The wedding took place not long after the ship Kershaw went aground on the outer bar “off the bath house” at Main Beach, and flour from the salvaged cargo came in handy for the wedding cake. “People liked to say that our weddin cake was kind of sandy but of course it weren’t. That ship must have been three–four hundred foot, and they had to unload her to haul her off the bar, and the only thing they saved off her was the liquor. She were carryin everything, liquor, cigarettes, tobacco, hides, bolts of cloth, salt peanuts; we had peanuts around here by the tons, just went aboard and loaded up what we wanted. That ‘Kershaw cloth’ was around these parts for years. And one time after that, when Cap’n Josh’s son there, Doctor Dave, cut somethin out of me, he give me a glass of whiskey off the Kershaw to straighten me up.”
During Prohibition, local fishermen helped unload the contraband liquor all the way from Montauk to Westhampton, in a part-time profession known as bottle-fishing. “Had a Jersey skiff and a dory in them days, and used ’em both; we done very good with it,” Bill recalls. “Supposed to get five dollars a case for every one deliverd to the beach, but some of them cases never made it. One or two off every boatload might fall overboard behind the surf, y’know, and somebody might throw out a flag buoy in the middle of ’em, come along that way before daybreak ’n set around ’em. One of them hauls got thirty-five cases, from what I heard. Anyways, one night west of Main Beach we took off one thousand cases and one hundred barrels of malt before one of them rum-runners hollered ‘Finish up, there’s a boat a-comin out the east’rd!’ Well, next night a boat come, sure enough, government destroyer or somethin, and they was caught, but all they was seein that first night was the eastern star, low in the winter sky.”
Not all of the skirmishes were so peaceful. A state trooper was killed in a shoot-out at Montauk and an unlucky fisherman of Greenport “had his guts shot out,” according to Elisha Ammon. But most fishermen remember Prohibition with affection: Jarvis Wood of Springs, one of many who chanced upon jettisoned cargo, bought a new Ford in 1930 for $620. In those days, Jarvie says, there were liquor joints on Lily Hill, “beyond the bridge,” at the village end of Accabonac Road, and liquor was served at home square dances, or hoedowns, with accordion tunes by a man named Toonie Allen.
“Every week they had a dance somewhere, or a party somewhere, somebody’s house. Throw out the couch and the chairs and the stove sometimes, if it’s warm weather, take up the oilcloth and go dancin; have a keg of beer, probably, and most people had somethin to drink. We had square dancin, round dancin, someone played a fiddle or their accordion, dance all night, then put the stuff back in and go on home.”
With his older brothers Harry, Frank, and Charlie, Bill Lester set gill nets for sturgeon, which were sometimes as large as five hundred pounds. Sixteen nets, anchored at each end, were set out in a line extending from a half mile to two miles offshore. “Long about 1918, there was an abundance of ’em.” Bill recalls. “We skun them sturgeon off, got sixty cents a pound, which is near twice what we get for ’em today. Lots of trouble with sharks messin up the nets, but we done real good. Pop had his shack out there across Further Lane, and I guess there’s a pile of sturgeon scales in them dunes yet.” A thousand-pounder, caught by Nathan Lester around the turn of the century, is the largest sturgeon in local memory, and the only reason it did not bust through the net, Cap’n Nathan said, was because he had been short of good net anchors; where he had hitched on an old mower wheel, the net was slack and had entangled the huge fish.
Sometimes in rough weather, the sturgeon nets would be left untended for three days at a time, and would come up loaded with dead sharks and big barn-door skates of such violent odor that some of the fishermen actually got seasick. The rotting fish would attract huge lobsters, ten to twenty pounds, that were often worth more than the sturgeon. (“They used to get plenty of ’em,” says Frank Lester’s grandson, Walter Bennett. “Sometimes three or four hundred pounds. Used to break ’em open with a mallet cause they would tangle the nets up. Can you imagine that? If I ever saw a twenty-pound lobster now, I don’t think I’d break him with a mallet!”) A five-hundred-pound fish might have four and a half pounds of roe, and Nathan Lester taught his sons to make sturgeon caviar for the buyers who came down from New York, rolling the roe through a mesh screen to separate the eggs, then mixing them thoroughly with small-grained salt.
“Once we caught a small whale in them nets,” Bill says. “Went to lift, y’know, and we felt this awful heft down there, and next thing we knew that net was ripped right out of the boat! Could’ve ripped us right over with it! So we went and lifted them other nets, come back, tried her again, and that whale had drowned; had so much net wrapped around his fluke, couldn’t get to the surface. So we towed him down to Main Beach bathhouse, anchored him off. Our idea was to bring him ashore next mornin, throw a tent over him, y’know, charge ten—fifteen cents admission. But them anchors dragged, and he come ashore high and dry durin the night, so there wasn’t too much that we could charge for.”
When the spring sturgeon run came to an end, at the end of June, Nathan Lester’s sons went hand-lining for black sea bass on the wreck of the Panther off Shinnecock, taking as many as two thousand pounds a day, and usually they would harpoon one or two swordfish on the way up and down the coast, for in those days the swordfish came in close to shore. They also set gill nets in the bay and ocean. In windy weather, and in winter, they went “baitin” in the salt ponds, netting spearing or silverside minnows (called whitebait on the market) and white perch (a small bronzy relative of the striped bass) in Georgica or Montauk Great Pond. Sometimes they trot-lined for blue crabs, using one hundred baits on a long line and harvesting them by the barrel.2 They also set eelpots, and in certain years, speared eels through the ice. In fall and early winter they went scalloping, and raked or tonged clams when nothing else was handy.
Codfishing began right after Thanksgiving, when the ocean was still warm enough for the cod to approach shore; in the winter the fish moved off to deeper water. At least twenty crews kept gear in shacks along the beach, all the way from Napeague to Southampton. Among the cod fishermen were Captains Clint and Sam Edwards,
both of them captains of big bunker steamers in the summer. The Edwardses had no need to do this rough cold work, the Lesters knew, because their family had acquired a lot of good land in the early days and had already made a lot of money, but it was recognized that they were fishermen and must act accordingly.
The steep-sided Nova Scotia dory, a good surfboat, was used for codfishing as well as haul-seining, but increasingly the crews used Jersey skiffs, lapstrake “clinker-built” boats with one-cylinder inboard engines. “Steered awful hard, heavy, and cumbersome,” recalls Bill Lester, “but they were good sea boats, and they carried a good load. Moved ’em into the surf on planks and rollers and hauled ’em back up with capstans. Feller named Oscar Birg had one of the first ones. His shack was down there where that big motel is now, closest point to Napeague Harbor, so’s to have them piss clams handy for his baits. Went off one day and just never come back. Must have broke down, and the northwest wind blew him offshore, froze him to death. Never found a trace of him, nor that Jersey boat neither.
“That’s some empty place out there in winter. Them New England cod boats used to come down here, put out eight–ten dories. If a fog come in, they might find all their men or they might not—not hard to lose one.”
The trawls were run every winter day that a boat could go off safely in the surf. It was said that cod bit best in a nor’wester (“The bigger the bait, the bigger the fish,” Nathan Lester said). The best fishing could be had in a hard winter, with plenty of northwest blows to knock the surf down, so that the boats could go off safely and get back in. But that offshore wind bit hard on the long trip back, especially in later years when the cod moved farther and farther off the coast. The men piled on plenty of wool clothes and used big loose-knit wool mitts that, wet, kept the hands workable, especially when the mitts were caked with ice. In those days, the swift channel between Fireplace and Gardiners Island often froze over, permitting wagons to cross over the ice, and the air was so cold, it was said, that a big codfish, hauled aboard, would stiffen right out before it struck the bilges.