There’s no internet connection in Bruce Collins’s house on Cooper Lane in East Hampton Village, not on the ground floor anyway, and at 94, he doesn’t go down to the basement anymore. So when he agreed to look again at some of his own photographs, taken about 70 years ago when he was a coast and harbor pilot and co-captain of the bunker steamer Shinnecock out of Promised Land, another setting for an interview had to be found.
The East Hampton Library, which houses his now-digitized photos in the Maritime Collection of its Long Island Room, was the logical choice. Mr. Collins is no stranger to the library: He is a longtime trustee (now emeritus) of its board of directors; a founder and major contributor to the Room itself, and one of the very first speakers called upon in 2015 when the library’s Tom Twomey lecture series began. Dennis Fabiszak, the library’s director, who introduced the former East Hampton Town Supervisor at that talk, called him “East Hampton’s version of Forrest Gump,” for his seeming ability to be, improbably, everywhere (as well as, perhaps, his earnest charm).
The Shinnecock was owned by the Edwards Brothers Company, which employed some 50 men on its 10 boats during the years Mr. Collins worked the water. Another 10 worked at Smith Meal’s Promised Land fish factory on Napeague, processing the catch into fish oil, fertilizer, and other valuable end products. In these parts, the season ran from May to October; after that, much of the fleet would head south — Smith Meal had factories all down the Atlantic Coast, from Maine even into Texas — stopping along Chesapeake Bay for repairs, in North Carolina for more fishing, and finally in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, trawling for shrimp.
Mr. Collins, tall and soft-spoken with a Bonac accent, sometimes carried a camera with him on his fishing and hunting trips — a Kodak and, later, a Leica. Here are a few images from that archive that speak of life on the water in a vanished America.
Bunker in the Hold
Above: Looking down from the masthead of the Shinnecock, onto the bow. “When you’re in the crow’s nest, you were about 85 feet above water. I loved it. You walked up the rigging, had a trap door you went through. They always said you could tell the first time in their life a person was up to the rigging, because they never had any buttons on their shirt when they came down — ’cause they were tight to the ladder going up! The captain and the mate would be up there looking for fish. I was a pilot, I was always in the wheelhouse.”
Below: Men working from the dock at the Smith Meal fish factory at Promised Land, Amagansett. “You can see they’re just starting to take fish out of the hold. As a matter of fact, that boat was loaded. Was about a million fish there. They’ve got a high-pressure hose, squirting water down into the hold, and the fish were then pumped out, sucked out with pumps. It would be a slurry of fish and water coming out, and it would go into — I want to call it an Archimedes screw — it was a long tunnel full of holes, and the fish would go into one end of the tunnel, and the water would drain out, and the fish would come out essentially dry and go onto a conveyor that would take them into the Promised Land factory. And the water coming out of that Archimedes screw would be loaded with scales, and the scales were separated from the water and sold. I mean, a lot of your buttons on your clothing are made out of fish scales! Nothing went to waste.”
South in Winter
David S. Miller — who was born in Amagansett in 1919 and died at sea off the Florida coast in 1983 — kneels to splice rope near the pilot house of the deep-sea trawler Mollela. Carl Erickson of Amagansett owned that boat, and Mr. Collins had “just turned 18 when Captain Erickson asked if I’d come to work for him. We fished up here in the summer and down to Morehead City, North Carolina, in the winter, and took the boat from there to Florida.” When Bruce was 20, and in Morehead City, “Carl called, and he said, ‘Bring the boat to Florida right away, they’ve discovered tremendous bodies of shrimp in the Gulf.’” “‘But Carl, I’m getting married next week!” The reply: “‘Tell Jane you’ll marry her next month, but bring that boat down here!’” So they got new shrimp nets and went over to the Dry Tortugas and came back with 120 boxes of shrimp, some 12,000 pounds. “I flew home a month later than I was supposed to and got married.”
At Morehead City
At the Bellhaven Fish and Oyster Company in Morehead City, N.C. “That’s Babe Erickson, Carl’s wife, a beautiful girl — woman — and her golden retriever, Leif, sitting on a dock.” Bellhaven was a world leader in crabmeat production right up to the 1980s; the pots and shedding houses are all gone now.
Gunning at Tangier
Gunning party on Tangier Island, 14 miles out in Chesapeake Bay from Crisfield, Maryland. “Tommy Bennett of Amagansett and Bill Jacobs, the chief of police, and I built a gunning camp on Tangier, gunning for wild ducks and geese. I guess we were the only people not from Tangier that owned property on the island. There were only 1,000 people who lived there,” Collins says — at last census there were just 480 — “and they speak the oldest form of the Elizabethan English that there is. The way we became involved with those people was, the crew of the Shinnecock was all Tangier people. There were two crews of Tangier people that came up here in the summer — Cap’n Dick Edwards, he had the other crew.”
The Crockett Brothers
Off Tangier Island. The launch being towed here belonged to Peter Crockett, a Tangier waterman (with cigarette). Crockett and his brother Bobby (left) took gunning parties out from the mainland in the winter. “In the summer they had crab pots,” Mr. Collins remembers, “and they had a shedding house up on stilts in Tangier Harbor. When they come in with the crabs, they’d pick out crabs they knew were getting ready to shed — they look at the back fin and there’s a little pink rim that goes around the back flipper — and they throw the ones that are gonna shed soon in the ‘buster’ float. And that’s how they have a harvest of soft-shell crabs.”
Below: Shrimp boats anchored in winter in a protected harbor in the Dry Tortugas. Bruce and Jane Collins lived in “a nice apartment in Fort Myers while I was fishing the shoals in the Tortugas, and we had our first child down there, Lesley. . . . We just fished shrimp at night. During the day, we’d run in the Fort Jefferson harbor and tie up.”
Above: With decoys at Crisfield, Md. William C. Jacobs of East Hampton (left) holds a preening pintail, Steve Ward of Crisfield’s famous Ward Brothers decoy-making company holds a goose.
Below: Skinning bottlefish off Morehead City, a little north of Cape Lookout. “ ’Course, bottlefish — that’s the same as blowfish — always brought a good price in New York City.”
Above: The drive-boat man sets up the purse seine. “[H]e rows out to the center of the net and sets the corks and ties them to the net to provide more buoyancy in case the fish strike the net.” Mr. Collins adds a personal note: “That’s Biff, Edward Moore. . . . A horse of a man. One of the nicest people I’ve ever known.”
Below: Jacobs compares the sizes of a blue crab with a wild duck on a boat in Tangier Sound.
Epilogue
Mr. Collins abruptly stopped fishing in 1960. As he talked about it with EAST, he often paused and sighed heavily before continuing, lost in memory. “The reason I quit fishing is because — I’m hesitant to say this. There was a fella that came on the bunker steamer for a trip, for a week. He was an attorney for Bumblebee Seafoods. And he spent a lot of time in the wheelhouse with me. And he said, ‘I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks, but I’m coming back.’ He said, ‘I’ve got to go to Hawaii.’ He was not only an attorney for Bumblebee, he was also one of the world’s leading experts on the use of monofilament gillnetting.’”
Here Collins stopped short and grimaced.
“I hate them!” he exclaimed suddenly. “I wish that monofilament gill-netting was prohibited from being used!”
“Because,” he went on after a while, “when monofilament is used by a big fishing boat, they might set a gillnet 10, 20 miles long, with the floats, corks — but if a storm comes up, or the ship runs through it and cuts part of it off, the net, if it breaks, there could be five miles of this monofilament gillnet. Never gonna rot. It’s gonna float around in the ocean forever, until it lands up on a beach someplace — and all the while it’s floating around in the ocean, it’s fishing. It’s one of the worst things that you could have.”
“But anyway,” he continued, returning to his story of the man from Bumblebee, “he come back. I’d taken the boat back down to Salisbury, Maryland, for winter work, and he come back, and I got a phone call and he said he wanted to take Jane and I to dinner. So we went to Ridgely’s, over in Wainscott. It was a steakhouse. Beautiful. You got prime ribs and baked potato and had a few drinks, that was it. We finished dinner, and he said, ‘Now,’ and he reached in his pocket and he came out with an envelope, and he says, ‘Bumblebee is building a brand-new super-seiner, tuna clipper, out on the West Coast.’ He says, ‘It’s gonna be the most modern tuna clipper in the world.’ He says, ‘It’s gonna have its own helicopter on it.’ And he said, ‘It’s gonna be launched in the middle of February.’”
“And this was, like, middle of October, I guess, and he said, ‘We’d like you to run it.’”
“I won’t tell you how much he offered, but he offered — unbelievable price. Wages. He said, ‘But the problem is, you’ll be gone ten months of the year.’ ”
“I said, ‘well, where would I fish?’
”‘Oh,’ he said, ‘American Samoa. The Mediterranean. Nigeria. Indian Ocean.’ He said, ‘Any place in the world where there’s tuna.’”
“I said, ‘But I don’t have a license. My license is only from Eastport, Maine, to Port Isabel, Texas, a 750-tons. I’d need a license showing any vessel of any gross tonnage on the ocean.’”
“And he said, ‘Let Bumblebee worry about that.’”
“Well, it wasn’t long after that I got so I couldn’t sleep at night. The doctors — Dr. Abel, Dr. Sucsy, and Dr. Medlar, was the three doctors that was here — it was so bad that they’d have to come and give me a shot in the middle of the night, at 2 o’clock in the morning to put me out. Then finally, Dr. Abel sent me to the hospital, and the hospital in Southampton was loaded, and it was just the children’s ward available, and Bob Vetault and I were in the children’s ward. And Dr. Abel said, ‘I’m going to send you to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. And the head doctor is going to be your doctor, and he says that if he can’t fix you, you can’t be fixed.’”
“And I said okay. I was there a week and had all kinds of tests, unbelievable. And the doctor, Dr. Vitelli — he had a house down here, in Amagansett, in the summer, so he was familiar with the area — came in the room, early in the morning, it was still dark — and he said, ‘There’s going to be a doctor to come in and talk to you.’ So I said okay. And the doctor happened to be a woman, and she come in, sit down, and that’s all we did, was talk. For about an hour and a half, maybe two hours. And she left.”
“And then along about 10 o’clock in the morning, he came in, Dr. Vitelli, and he said, ‘Get on the phone and call Jane. Talk about fishing. Talk about whether you’re going to go fishing [for Bumblebee] or whether you’re going to stay on dry land.’ And he said, ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’”
“And he came back.”
“‘You call Jane?’”
“‘Yes.’”
“‘What did you decide?’”
“And I said, ‘I decided that I’m gonna give up fishing.’”
“And he said, ‘Pack your clothes up, go down, your discharge papers are all ready, all you got to do is sign ’em. You can go home.’”
“But, he says, ‘I’ll tell you one thing. If I find out you’re fishing again, I’m gonna kick your ass right off of Gosman’s Dock.’”
“And I was through fishing.”
“And it was shortly after that, Bob Vetault came to where we were staying, down to my mother’s because we were building a house up here, and wanted to know if I would run on the ticket for Councilman. And I said yes.”