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"Saline, saline, over the bounding main..."
Gloucester as every schoolboy worth his salt knows, is known the world over as the saltiest port on the coast.
But how did we get that way? Well, pull up a bos'n's chair and I'll tell you. It all started on the windy and bitterly cold night of December the ninth, eighteen hundred and seventy-two.
At the head of the wharf of William Parson's 2nd & Co. in East Gloucester, where the freezer is now, lay the barque Sandy Hook. On the southerly side was the fulled rigged ship John Bunyan. Three fishing schooners were ganged up on the north side.
The gale whistled and screeched through their rigging, and the surge of the harbor and the wind pushed and shoved them against the spiles, and they creaked and groaned and nudged and shouldered the wharf until a person could feel it shake and quiver and shudder like a thing alive.
The towering barque and windship had been discharging salt onto the wharf all day, tons of Spanish Cadiz salt loose out of their holds for preserving and curing the fish caught by the great Gloucester fleet of 400 schooners. It was piled, ton after ton of it, in the brand new warehouse which the Gloucester Salt Company leased on the Parsons wharf.
All the night the gale blew without letup. On the morning of December tenth the unloading was resumed, though in a rather gingerly fashion, because there were signs that the floor was settling slightly under the weight of what was now calculated to be 2,500 tons of salt.
At mid morning four of the owners went down to inspect the vast structure, 120 by fifty-five feet, which was trembling and swaying in a most alarming manner. At ten minutes of eleven they ordered the workmen out of it and went onshore themselves.
At eleven o'clock a splitting crack resounded around the inner harbor like a thunderbolt, and the entire warehouse spread apart as a ripe melon would from the blow of an axe. With a stupendous crash, ten thousand hogshead by volume of Cadiz salt, taking floor and all, descended into the dock, sending up flumes of spray and a shock wave of water across the cove. Over head the roof buckled and danced, but somehow remained aloft.
The spiles that had finally stood all they could now spouted from a mountain of salt every which way ... bent, busted and bestrewed.
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Well, well, here was a fine fix. Twenty-five hundred tons of the finest Cadiz salt, salted away for the fleet's spring call, 10,000 hogsheads of it lying half in the tide and half out ... and what to do?
Luckily the water was on the half ebb or there would have been a local tidal wave. And lucky, too, that it gave them 6 hours to salvage what they could before this white gold was taken back by the sea.
The salt company offered all comers half the value of anything they could save, and down came the fisherman and locals from all over East Gloucester with wheelbarrows and baskets and shovels, and they tackled the job in the flats with a will, scarcely daunted by the fierce cold and the biting wind.
Working in gangs, some got permission to store their salvage on board one of the schooners that lay against the north side of the wharf. The rest wheeled and toted it up to the undamaged section, to be measured there for their credit, scattering for the open every time the roof gave a particularly crazy lurch.
When the salt plunged, it took with it 400 quintals of fish that was on the wharf, so the mad scene of men working against time amongst the spiles and piles of white stuff was made even more feverish by a fleet of dorymen gaffing aboard 40,000 pounds of fish that had plummetted from the sky like manna.
In the meanwhile, to free more room for these salvage operations and to insure their safety, the tug S.E. Wetherell and the stone steamer Phoenix moved the ship and the barque that had been responsible for it all out to the anchorage.
What more can we say? Time and tide await no man. By early afternoon it was low water, and then it started to come again. By dusk, at five, it was back at the base of the spile-spickled hill of white.
Three more hours, at eight in the evening, and the tide was full. The salt had lost it's savor and was forever useless. The salvagers had given up, having been able to save only 400 hogsheads out of 10,000. The crowd of kibitzers had long since gone home to their firesides, and the dazed owners were toting up their losses - nearly $20,000 in slowly dissolving assets and $10,000 worth of crumpled wharf.
And that, patient reader, is how Gloucester came to be the saltiest port on the coast.
January 10, 1969
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