This is the third book produced by Deer Island author John Gillman on the region’s sardine industry. The two previous books, Canned, Part 1 and Masts and Masters, A History of the Sardine Carriers and Boatmen, outlined the American herring canning industry and the many wooden boats that serviced the many canneries. Canned, Part 2 tells the Canadian side of the story, whose rise postdated the American industry, and whose tenure carried on past the end of American canning, as borne out in recent years by the closing of all but three Maine canneries, with those Canadian owned. This third book is written in much the same style as the previous two, in John Gillman’s comprehensive yet familiar style, and produced locally in a simple paper cover. The text is complemented by working shots in black and white of the graceful carriers loaded or underway, and pictures of old wharf-side buildings that invite any local reader to examine them at close range for familiar landmarks, and many samples of the wonderful diversity and imagination of the sardine can tops.
The book is sometimes exhaustive in the way of reference books in the lists of named weirs (11 pages worth), and the individual smokehouses (175 on Grand Manan Island alone) and the 29 chapters, each on a particular cannery or business. While these lists may seem to be of interest only to the enthusiast or the local historian, the total product the writer has created truly adds up to more than just the sum of the parts. Author Gillman manages to stitch from this whole cloth of industrial records a colorful tapestry of thousands of working lives spent in an industry that put food on tables around the world for over 100 years, and integrated the economies and families of both Mainers and Canadians all along the coast. The text is enlivened by a number of poems, songs, and anecdotes, including the bitter “Packer’s Eulogy,” a 1981 verse complaining of the management, and the Labeler’s Song, with the lines:
Now here comes Rheta, all in a hurry,
The floor is wet with slime and gurry
Down she falls so nice and neat
And all the birdies sing tweet, tweet, tweet.
One can sense the hope and risk of fishermen investing money in a weir that might or might not produce, and the gratifying satisfaction of occasionally reaping a maritime bonanza of hundreds or thousands of hogsheads of valuable, glittering little fish. The industrial optimism is revealed in the 1913 poem “The Chamcook Factory,” a massive project that employed 600 workmen in the construction, finishing with a sardine cannery that was
A building indestructible,
To stand while time shall last
A masterpiece of workmanship,
A pleasure to the eye,
Reflecting credit on the builders,
When viewed by passers-by.
The boom and bust of the industry is revealed in the book in the later history of this factory, which packed fish for only a few years before sliding into the Depression, and then never really managed to regain a footing. Money was both made and lost, with lives both enriched and broken in sardine canning, with all of it built on ephemeral shoals of shimmering herring. The sweat and grit of the life is evident, from the conditions for the predominantly women packers in the factories to the salt and scale encrusted decks of the vessels, but suffused with the sweat is the blood of sustenance the industry provided, economically carrying the local communities and residents, and under that an unstated but powerful reverence for the ocean that provided it all. John Gillman has in these three books put an important regional industry to paper, and now, with the factories mostly gone along the American side, this chronicle of the lives, boats, businesses and gear of thousands of coastal residents truly serves as a unique history to this chapter of our shared coast.
This book, along with his previous two books, is available from the author: John Gillman, 10 Cokeco Lane, Lambertville, Deer Island, NB E5V 1A5, (506) 747-2192, or from Archipelago, located at the Island Institute, 386 Main Street, Rockland.