If you had been a boy haunting the wharves of Marblehead, Gloucester, or Salem half a century or more ago, you might have been able to persuade your father (or some neighbor who owned a fishing schooner) to take you along on the dangerous but exciting voyage to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in pursuit of codfish.

If you were nine or ten years old, you would probably be signed on as the cook spending your free hours with your own line over the side, hauling up fighting cod, weighing anywhere from ten to fifty or more pounds.

If you were twelve or thirteen you might become a "salters' devil" filling baskets of salt for the men packing the cleaned fish in the hold.

But by the time you were fifteen or sixteen you were a man -- able to lay out a mile-long trawl line from a dory and haul it up again, straining to lift the big fish into the thirteen-foot craft, until it was loaded to the danger point with as much as 1700 pounds of cod.

Fog and ice were an almost constant menace on the Grand Banks. Although the schooner carried a big bell and a swivel fun to guide the loaded dories back to the ship through the blanket of fog, many of the little boats were lost and never heard from again. Towering icebergs, as well as considerable floating chunks of ice could smash or capsize a dory. It was, indeed, a solemn moment when wives saw their husbands and sons sail forth on a fishing voyage from which they might never return.

Once again Mary Ellen Chase has written a book which will hold the attention of any reader, young or old, who loves, respects, and fears the sea.

The attractive little volume which you hold in your hand is the third distinguished North Star which Mary Ellen Chase has written for this series. Collectors of her first editions, plus many thousands of young readers, have been delighted with the two previous volumes: Sailing the Seven Seas and Donald McKay and the Clipper Ships.

From the dust jacket

Several historians believe that before Columbus "discovered" America—possibly many years preceding that great event—fishermen from the ports of Europe were crossing the North Atlantic in search of cod. Catholic countries needed fish in great quantities, particularly during the season of Lent. And so, despite fear of fiends, demons and sea monsters; despite fog, icebergs and storms, little sailing ships, with many a prayer for safety, set forth on their westward voyage to drop their baited lines over the Grand Banks where cod in countless millions were waiting to take the hook. Francis Parkman says that in 1517 (more than a century before the first voyage of the Mayflower) "fifty Castilian, French and Portuguese vessels" were engaged in fishing these waters. And there has probably been no year since in which a gleaming harvest has not been reaped from beneath these fog-enshrouded seas. Mary Ellen Chase, a daughter of Maine and a lifelong student of seafaring, has written an intriguing history of codfishing over the past three hundred and fifty years. Here are the men who risked their lives scores of times during each fishing season to bring home their salted cargo-the intrepid fishermen who took their little schooners into the teeth of many a northeast gale, and all to often failed to return to New England village where wife and children awaited them. Those who have read Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling need no additional introduction to this volume. And for these, and all others who love sea adventure, here is another fascinating book dedicated to the courage and independence which has marked all fishermen of the New England Coast. Those who "go down to the sea in ships" will always have our envy and admiration.

Sterling North
General Editor

From the book