Life With A Fisherman

It was months later when I decided to look for the things that my old friend left me. I pulled the letter out of my box and sat down at my kitchen table. It was early morning, and Maggie was still sleeping. She was going in to her fourth month of carry our child. It was early spring, and I stoked the fires to rid the house of the morning chill. I looked at the piece of paper Ben had stuffed in the envelope that had “Map” written on top of it. I had looked at this many times before but couldn’t figure it out. I read it again. It read: “This is the door map to my bounty. Take heed, young Cappy. Look to my rum maker. Salty will show you the way. Beware the hands of the sea and stay to the point.” And that’s all there was. I told myself that this is the day I figure this out. Captain Ben always talked of his bounty, and I had no idea what his bounty meant. I went to his old barn and stood in front of his old still where he made his rum. His door that he talks about in the letter must be here somewhere. It’s time to tear this place apart. I started moving all the rum barrels. The only thing I could think was that there is a door in the floor. A hiding room under the barn. I looked for hours that morning. I tore that place apart. I finally sat down on the floor facing the rum still. There was a chair that the captain made from a rum barrel. He used to sit in it all the time and tell me stories of the sea.

As I was looking at his rum barrel chair, I noticed a hinge at the top of it. “What’s this?” I said to myself. I took the pillow off the top that he used to sit on. It was a cover to the barrel and hinged. It was a door. It had a screw at the opposite side of the hinge. I unscrewed it with my knife. I opened the top of the barrel, and it squeaked open. It had been sealed for many years. I looked into the barrel, and sure enough there was a rolled-up piece of rawhide at the bottom. “This is it!” I shouted. I unfolded it, and sure enough, it was a map that the captain made on an old deer hide. I rolled it back up and ran back to my house. “Maggie! Maggie!” I yelled as I went running through the door. “I found the captain’s map. He had it hiding in his rum barrel chair.” We unfolded the map on the table. He had burnt the pictures into the rawhide, making a map on it. It showed a long island in the middle with a pirate’s ship with the skull and crossbones just off the south point of the island. Between the ship and the point of the island on the islands shore was a X marking the spot. At the top of the map was a sign showing the points north and south. And to the right of the direction points was a hand pointing at the island. Under the pointing hand, the word “bounty” was burned in the hide. “Maggie,” I said, “the captain always talked about his bounty. I never knew what he meant by it growing up. But every time we would make any kind of money or get anything of worth, he would call it abounty.” I starting laughing. “Bounty is Captain Ben’s treasure.” Who knows what that old man buried on that island, but it was his bounty, his treasure, and I needed to find out what my old friend buried there. Now I knew Captain Ben very well, and I knew he wasn’t worth very much money, so I knew it wasn’t a treasure of worth. But it was his bounty that he had left me, and he wanted me to have it. So it put me on a quest to find it. I had no idea what or where the island on the map was located. It could be anywhere in the Atlantic. That man sailed all over the place in his lifetime.

(Picture of the map on the table) Sarahs Art

For the next two months, I looked for clues at his old house of where that island could be. I could not come up with anything. I kept the map a secret, telling no one of it. I knew someday I would figure it out. At least twice a week, I would pull it out and study it. The map was a mystery that I could not figure out. I kept thinking, “Why would he leave me a map in the middle of the ocean and not give me any idea where the island is located?” That was not like the captain that I knew. There has got to be a clue somewhere. It was driving me nuts. Well, a few months passed, and Maggie was really showing. Our baby wasn‘t far from coming in to the world. She was getting to the point of not being able to go out and check traps with me. I had to get a mate to help me on the boat. So I put the word out that I was looking for a mate. It didn’t take long to find one, as about 10 people came looking for work. I decided to hire three people: one for the dock and the other two would be for mates on Crawl One and Two. I knew it was time for this. I knew Maggie would be taking care of our babe soon. She would not be able to go out on the trap line with me. I picked three people and told them they would have jobs with me for as long as I was a fisherman. I shook their hands, and that was that. Leo was to become my mate. He was a very skinny guy in his 40s and wasn’t afraid of the rough seas. He was the son of a fisherman. He had a family to take care of and was a very hard worker, doing whatever he could to put food on the table for them. I picked Molly for working the dock. Her job was to take care of everything on the dock and at the trading post. She was the daughter of a fisherman and a good friend of Maggie’s. And she was no slouch on a boat. I would put her up against any seaman out there. Then there was Joe, we called him Joey. He was one of Dad’s shipmates, and dad and him worked together for years. He loved the idea of working the boats with Dad, and Dad had trusted him with his life.

Leo and I made a great team out pulling the traps. We worked day and night many times over the next few months. He was learning the way of the sea from me, just the way I learned it from Captain Ben. We were out pulling traps one day and were getting very little crawls. I told Leo that it was time to move the lines to new waters. He agreed with me. We were getting sick of pulling empty traps up with no bait in them. We spent the whole day out there and only pulled in about 100 pounds of lobsters. We headed back to the dock, and I told my mate to get a good night’s rest, that we are moving some traps to rough waters in the morning. I was thinking about a spot that Captain Ben had showed me many years ago. The waters there are very dangerous, and I had never set a trap there before. Something told me that we would do good there. And I knew that my boat Ben’s Crawl One could take the rough waters. My mate and I met early that next day and set out to pull 50 traps and move them. As we pulled the empty traps and stacked them on the deck, I told Leo that we can only move 30 of the traps right now. “Why only 30?” Leo asked. “There is plenty of room for more on the deck if I stack them, Captain.” I replied, “We don’t want to overload; we are going into rough waters.” He didn’t ask where we were going. He just looked at me and I smiled. We pulled the last 10 traps and off I went full throttle to Nomans Island. As we reached that little island, I thought of Captain Ben and how he told me to be careful at the farthest point of it. I stayed just off the point as we started setting the trap lines. We were in 25 to 30 feet of water as the eight-foot waves broke over the bow. And the sea was calm. I could just imagine what it was like out here in a storm with winds. It took us about two hours to get the traps in the water around that point.

Today the island is known as Nomans Land Island National Wildlife Refuge, which is 628 acres and is located in Dukes County, three miles south of Martha’s Vineyard. The island is 1.6 miles long east to west and about 1 mile north to south. Nomans Land Island was used for aerial gunnery by the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1996. The USFWS managed an “overlay” refuge on the eastern third of the island under a Joint Management Agreement between the Department of Interior and the U.S. Navy since 1975. Following an extensive surface clearance of ordnance in 1997 and 1998, the island was transferred to the USFWS to become Nomans Land Island National Wildlife Refuge. It was established ” … for use as an inviolate sanctuary, or for any other management purpose, for migratory birds” (Migratory Bird Conservation Act).

Nomans Land Island is surrounded entirely by the Atlantic Ocean. About 30 percent of the island is composed of wetlands, which range from emergent marshes to permanently flooded-open water. There are four artificial ponds (that were impounded many years ago by early settlers), two large freshwater ponds and a number of smaller ponds that dot the island. Common wetland plants include Virginia chain fern, cranberry, sphagnum moss, broad-leaved cattail and common reed.

Well anyhow, we headed back to the bluff I told Leo we were going to wait three days, then check this new trap line.