Sunday August 9
4:00 at Sargentville Chapel

523 Reach Road
Sargentville, Maine 04614

co-sponsored by Sargentville Library

 

The several dozen sardine canneries operating on the Maine coast in 1955 were hungry for herring, and fishermen were catching them hand-over-fist here in Penobscot Bay. Captain Erland Quinn of Eagle Island ran a herring-pumper—a specially-rigged boat that wandered the coast pumping herring out of the fishermen’s nets and into the beautiful carrier-vessels that brought the fish to the canneries.

The captain and crew of a herring-pumper weren’t paid for their services, neither by the herring fishermen nor by the cannery boats. They made their living instead on a valuable by-product: the glittering scales that sloughed off from the fish as they were pumped across the herring-pumper’s deck and into the carrier’s holds. The “pearl-essence” that coated these scales was in high demand among manufacturers of fake pearls, cosmetics, sports-car paint, and other gleaming commodities of a midcentury USA.

Like any good captain, Erland Quinn kept a log, and in The Log of the Herring-Pumper BERYL we find that fascinating log richly annotated by Ian Ludders, in collaboration with his friend and captain Bob Quinn—Erland’s son. For most of the past decade, Ludders has worked with Bob Quinn on Eagle Island and in its surrounding waters, and he’s absorbed Bob’s living memory of a bygone fishery.

 

A. O. Scott will discuss The Log of the Herring-Pumper BERYL with its editor and annotator, and then Scott and Ludders will round out our Sunday afternoon by taking up their mandolin and banjo and assuming their other guise—a saltwater folk duo called The Outhouse Association—and sharing a handful of songs about herring, boats, lobster-fishing, and, yes, outhouses.