Holy Mackerel!

by Marius B. Péladeau

In most dictionaries a "plow" is defined as a farm implement "for turning up the soil in preparation for planting." Only by reading further do we discover that it can also mean "any machine that works in a similar way, by cutting, shoving, furrowing, etc." So why would anyone want to "plow" a mackerel with a mackerel plow? 1 To best answer that question it helps to learn a little about the mackerel, a once popular market fish along the northern Atlantic coast—Nova Scotia, Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.

Most everyone knows the history and background of weathervanes, scrimshaw, Nantucket baskets, and other manifestations of folk art. Since mackerel plows are a very regional item and are rather unknown esoteric objects, the reader will please indulge this author while he provides a little background context.

Mackerel winter in the south, along the coast of the Delmarva Peninsula and Chesapeake Bay. As they migrate north in the spring to their feeding and breeding grounds off the New England coast, they are thin and leathery, not ideal for eating. After a summer in the Gulf of Maine, the fish became fat and meaty. As these plump fish were split open, the flesh of the belly would crack open and swell up spontaneously when the fish were cleaned. Obviously, the fattest fish commanded premium prices in the marketplace. Before the days of refrigeration most mackerel were salted, so it was impossible to tell when in the season they were caught.

To make the thin spring mackerel (called "leather bellies") more presentable they were "plowed" with a special tool. Plowing the cut open fish furrowed the meat, causing it to look plump and fat, in other words, more like the fish caught later in the season.

Up to the second quarter of the 19th century mackerel were caught by lowering and raising hooks (jigs) in the water onto which chum or toll had been tossed to attract the school of fish. By the 1840's purse seining started to replace jigging, and the large resultant catches made mackerel a valuable market item. Ten to 12 men in a two-masted schooner could catch a considerable number of fish. To this end, any efficiency in the catching, processing, and bringing to market of the catch assumed important economic implications. Thus, fishermen developed a tool that immediately became known as a mackerel plow.2

Once the seine net full of fish had been brought to the side of the vessel, the mackerel were thrown onto the deck. The first fisherman split them lengthwise with a large knife, the operation performed with one sweep of the hand. The next fisherman then cleaned (eviscerated) them.

The next step was to "plow" the mackerel. As it was described, "two or three deft slashes less than an eighth of an inch deep parallel to the backbone open the flesh in such a manner that it looks like a superabundance of fat had burst the mackerel.…"3 The final steps were to wash and salt the fish, so they could be stored in the schooner's hull ready for a return trip to port.

We know that men who went to sea relieved endless hours of boredom by doing scrimshanding, carving, whittling, nautical macramé or ropework, and so forth. It is logical that men on board fishing schooners, like other sailors, had long periods of down time, and that while making their mackerel plows they were liable to carve them with initials and various symbols or decorate them with pewter, bone, ivory, or wax inlays. The vast majority were handmade by the fishermen, although toward the end of the 19th century some were manufactured and sold commercially (at a cost of about 25¢ each).

Mackerel plows are rather unusual objects to collect, and while this author knows of a few in museums devoted to maritime history, it is always rewarding to find a person with a single-minded focus who has searched the northern Atlantic coastline for these unusual, uncommon, and unrecognized folk objects. And they are just that—works of folk art—that fall into the same category as anything else that is carved and decorated in a naïve or primitive manner. What is the difference between a scrimshawed whale's tooth and a mackerel plow? Basically nothing—one is a carved, colored, and inlaid item made of whalebone or a tooth; the other is a carved, colored, and inlaid wooden object. Fortunately, a collector of these plows, Gordon R. Stanley of Sedgwick, Maine, is willing to share his collection through this article in M.A.D., augmented by a few others from museum holdings.

An examination of any number of plows shows that no two are alike, although all are variations to a basic design since they all had to be made to fit into the fisherman's hand in a certain manner. Although they were all held in the same way, the opening for the hand could vary in size depending on the hand size of the man, and, as Stanley believes, some were made to fit the hands of women and children who helped out the menfolk.

Just as anything else that can be called folk, naïve, or primitive, the hallmark of mackerel plows is their individuality, befitting the artistic outlook of their creators. Each reflects some intellectual need in the maker's psyche. One may carry the initials of himself and/or a loved one; another may bear a Masonic or other fraternal symbol; another may simply bespeak the maker's love of color through wax or metallic inlays; and some may be symbolic in other ways-a woman's leg, a sea serpent, an eagle, or a simple fish.

Like anything else in the broad (and poorly defined) world of folk art, there is a broad range of sophistication or lack of it. Some fishermen lavished a great deal of time and attention on their plows, laying out the design in a pleasing and symmetrical manner; others quickly made a plain utilitarian object and did no more than carve their initials into it. Some show a pleasing sense of design and color; others look as if they were made with no forethought at all. Obviously, these latter will be passed over here, and only those with redeeming features of design, color, or some other hallmarks will be illustrated.

Like any other serious connoisseur, Stanley has refined his collection so that only the finest examples survived periodic reexaminations. While not all are equal in merit, all have some features that set them apart from others.

The geographic range of the plows is the northern Atlantic coastline from southeast Massachusetts, northward to New Hampshire and Maine, and across the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia in the Canadian Maritimes. Boothbay Harbor and Swans Island in Maine hosted the largest commercial mackerel fishing fleets. Stanley has found mackerel plows in all these areas except Nova Scotia, although he has seen examples from that area in provincial museums, most notably at the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.4

Allow the illustrations and captions to speak for themselves. Plows in the photographs have been grouped according to several general styles or types of design. The better quality plows are made of a hardwood, such as maple or birch, although most are of pine or poplar. Occasionally, a more exotic wood can be found, like black walnut or mahogany. Some plows are made with blunt blades that would be used to clean out the entrails, while those with sharper blades were used to plow the flesh.

ENDNOTES

1. These objects were also called rimmers, reamers, splitters, fatters, or fatting knives, but "plow" is by far the most common appellation. The author, and the owner of the collection, Gordon R. Stanley, thank the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, and the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath for their assistance.

2. The introduction of the plow is uncertain. Some sources date them to the years after the 1840's when purse seining replaced jigging, while others date their widespread use to the 1870's. For the latter date see "Mackerel Plow Useful Article," an article from a Boston newspaper reprinted in the Lunenburg (N.S.) Progress Enterprise, December 22, 1909.

3. ibid. A very thorough and detailed report on how mackerel were caught, cleaned, and brought to market is found in the sections titled "The Mackerel Purse Seine Fishery" and "The Mackerel Hook Fishery" to be found in G. Brown Goode, The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States... (Washington, D.C., G.P.O., 1884 87, 8 volumes, Sec. III V, specifically pp. 267, 289 92). Goode was one of those who tends to date the introduction of plows to the early 1840's.

4. Not only is this museum of the highest quality, but those who have not visited Lunenburg itself (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) are missing a wonderful experience.

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