b'C H A P T E R N I N ECountless Years of AbundanceLong before Bartholomew Gosnold anchored off the Lower Cape in 1602, fishing had gone on for generations to feed the Monomoyick Indians. In the mist of unrecorded time, they mastered the skills of using weirs and wide-spread nets; the corrugations of the Capes landscape have revealed their tribal mounds of discolored clam shells. Chatham founder William Nickerson and his heirs learned a lot from these farmers of coastal waters.1By late in the Colonial period,Chatham had joined Barnstable and Harwich as the main fishing ports on the Cape. Venturers with money might have breasted blue waterJohn Pappalardo is one of the in round-bottomed, two-masted schooners,Cape Cod Commercial Hook but most men shoved off in chunky sloopsFishermens Associations most or whaleboats. When Georges Banks cameknowledgeable sources of inforwithin reach in the 1820s, enterprisingmation on the length and breadth of restrictions on fishing.Big Chatham fishermen began plowing acrossJohn has been an FCW director.that terrain, pursuing cod and halibut. Courtesy of CCCHFANearer to shore, men like Captain Isaiah Baker experimented in the 1850s by drawing shut a purse seine around an unsuspecting school of fish. It worked.In those days, catches were measured in quintals; one quintal equaled 220 pounds. In 1837, Chatham fishermen, working the waters in 22 vessels, brought in 15,500 quintals of cod, as well as 1,200 barrels of mackerel. Three decades later, the cod catch had fattened to 25,361 quintals, or almost 2,790 tons. The curve certainly was up. The same held true for mackerel harvesting. Measured by the number of inspections, Town authorities checked out 240 barrels in all of 1840, 3,000 in 1854, and, twenty years later, 10,765 barrels.2For Chatham, commercial fishing has kept on being of real importance ever since. True, there have been ups and downs; there were years when fishermen packed up and left in search of richer grounds. But when Debby Ecker of FCW went public with her economic study in January 1997, her figures showed that landings in Chatham and Provincetown accounted for more than two-thirds152'