The Provincetown fleet rafts up in 1979 at MacMillan Wharf. The Charlotte G, built in 1952 and owned by Henry Duarte, was one of the most successful Provincetown draggers. Like most of these wooden boats, it was big and sturdy, drawing more than nine feet. The fleet of more than 70 boats was so big then they had to tie up side-by-side, called “rafting.”

Milton Moore's Photography Explores Cape Cod's Dying Fishing Industry

by Milton Moore

Moore's "Working Men, Working Boats" exhibition is on display in the lobby of the American University in Bulgaria's Main Building.

Time holds both the photograph and the photographer. I made these photographs more than 30 years ago, and time has added permanence to them, as if they are family heirlooms I have always known. It is just as easy for me to imagine these photographs as records from the 1930s as to conjure the cold winds and shifting light of the days when I made them. Time has swept much away. Most of these boats have sunk. Many of these men are gone. The fisheries I photographed exist now as shadows of what they were, wrecked by environmental disaster, overregulation and over-fishing. Even the cameras and the film with which I made these pictures have been supplanted; the darkroom, too, has passed the way of wooden boats.


On a cold March day, the skipper stays warm in the pilot house driving the boat while the young crewman does the heavy lifting as Bivalve drags for sea clams on the flats east of the town of Wellfleet in 1980.	After dunking the bag to wash the scallops clean, Chris Davis carries his catch to his truck at Stage Harbor in Chatham in November 1979. Bay scallops grow to maturity in just a year, so the annual scallop season was like a harvest.

In a foggy, autumn drizzle, men clear the day’s debris from a motorized scow used to tend an oyster grant – an area of river bottom where they were deeded rights to grow oysters. The scow is tied up at the work shanties Oyster River in West Chatham, October 1976. The shanties have lined this stretch of river for more than a century.

If the quohog – a variety of clam favored by seafood lovers – passes through the ring, a measuring device fishermen receive with their commercial license, then it’s too small and has to be tossed back.


Inshore shellfisherman William Montague, working with a long-handled rake called a bullrake, dumps the rake’s basket onto the culling board of his boat. It was stuffed with all sorts of shellfish and shells — oysters, conches, scallops, razor clams and hard-shell clams (quohogs) clawed up from the sandy bottom of Pleasant Bay.	With several bags of scallops already filled, Stuart Moore hauls a bulging dredge onto the culling board of his 18-foot skiff in Oyster River in Chatham just after dawn on the opening day of scallop season in 1977.

Cape Cod had two very different fisheries: The small-boat, solitary Yankee endeavor that was Chatham inshore fishery, and the ancestral dragger fleet of Provincetown, their boats manned by brothers, cousins, and the father-in-law visiting from Madeira.

The classic wooden trawler Divine Criador, captained by Francisco Soares, motors slowly through Provincetown inner harbor.

After one side of the weir net has been untied from the supporting poles, the net is hauled by hand, making the enclosure in the water smaller and smaller to concentrate the fish in a small area. Fish are taken from the weir using dipnets. The quality of weir-caught fish was its big selling point. The fish are taken alive and virtually unmarked.

John Miller steers his lobster boat, the 40-foot Judi-Lin, from trap to trap, and Tom Marshall hauls each trap, clears it of whatever life it has attracted, baits it and returns it to the bottom. Fish often swim into the traps, and lobstermen often keep the prime haddock or cod. But a fish like the toothy and aggressive wolffish, shown here, is too troublesome to have onboard.


The catch weighed and loaded on the truck and the boats secured, Francis Jones has lunch in large shanty that acts as a warehouse and office for the trap company. Work gloves hang on a line to dry behind him.	On a hot August day, the cool spot on Reneva is in the hold, loaded with a ton of crushed ice, where David Gonsalves waits for baskets of fish to be lowered to him.

The crew of Reneva hauls the trawl net slowly by hand until it is positioned directly below the boat so that the winch can lift “the bag” containing the catch. The 55-foot wooden trawler Reneva, owned by Raymond Duarte, was spending the day dragging off Stellwagen Bank. Left to right: Russell Perry, Duarte, David Gonsalves and (partly hidden) David Carreiro.


A 900-pound tuna, landed on a hand-line on the dragger Jimmy Boy, is hoisted up to the Fishermen’s Cooperative packing house on McMillan Wharf on October 31, 1979. Even back then, this one fish was worth about $2,000.	Gene Peters, center, and fish packers called “lumpers” handle incoming catches of with spiny dogfish landed at the Fishermen’s Cooperative packing house on McMillan Wharf in 1979.

The men in these photographs were uniquely independent and chose this often-solitary life because of a need to be self-sufficient. All risks they assumed, both physical and financial, were defined by their stubbornness. Some were born to it, as natives or as the sons of immigrant Portuguese fishermen. Some came of age in the Sixties and saw fishing as a coastal version of the counter-culture commune, beyond the reach of regulation. Each fisherman had a narrative that carried him forward, a well-considered if unspoken ethos steering his life choices. The boat, the sea, the narrative enclosed him, and I believe that he understood there was a perfection to his day. No matter how taciturn he seemed, when I asked to come on board and to take his picture, he never said no.

Liberty, a beautiful 1940 vintage wooden dragger owned by Norbert Macara, motors from Provincetown’s MacMillan Wharf in a wash on morning sunlight across Cape Cod Bay. The large fish-packing plant on the wharf is gone today – as is the fishing fleet.

All photos by Milton Moore/Cape Cod Times.

To order a large format, hardbound copy of the book “Working Men, Working Boats” with more than 80 photographs and essays on the fate of the fishery, visit Blurb.