2 - Fish Merchants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2009
Summary
I have heard of a certain Merchant in the west of England, who after many great losses, [was] walking upon the Sea-bank in a calm Sun-shining day; observing the smoothness of the Sea, coming in with a checkered or dimpled wave: ‘Ah (quoth he) thou flattering Element, many a time hast thou enticed me to throw myself and my fortunes into thy Arms; but thou hast hitherto proved treacherous; thinking to find thee a Mother of increase, I have found thee to be the Mother of mischief and wickedness; yea the Father of prodigies; therefore, being now secure, I will trust thee no more.’ But mark this man's resolution awhile after, periculum maris spes lucri superat [hope for money overcomes the danger of the sea].
The Gerry family in Marblehead, Massachusetts, owned and operated one of the most successful fish exporting businesses in eighteenth-century New England. Thomas Gerry (1702–1774), the patriarch, was born in Newton Abbot in Devonshire, located in England's West Country, a region with historic ties to the Atlantic cod trade. He came to colonial Massachusetts as a twenty-eight-year-old master of a merchant ship in 1730 and decided to settle in Marblehead, then an up-and-coming fishing port. Four years later, he married Elizabeth Greenleaf, the daughter of a Marblehead saddler and a relation of John Elbridge, who had been collector of customs in Bristol, England, before he died and left the Greenleaf family an estate in excess of one million pounds sterling.
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- The Fisherman's CauseAtlantic Commerce and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution, pp. 26 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
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