Laudator Temporis Acti

Excerpts from Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), "Dragger Captain," in Up in the Old Hotel (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 537-573 (on Captain Ellery Thompson):

p. 548:

"When I was sixteen, I got into first-year high school, but I couldn't stand it. I went to Pa and told him, 'One more day of that mess—amo, amas, amat—just one more day, and I'll drown myself.'"

pp. 564-565:

"When we brought the net in and emptied it on deck, the professors helped us sort. They squatted down and took right hold. There was all the difference in the world between them and the other scientists. They worked as hard as us, except for stopping now and then to jot down a note. And they didn't throw any Latin around. They used fishermen's fish names. They didn't call a squirrel hake a Hippogloppus hoppogloppus; they called it a snot head, the same as we do."

pp. 566-567:

In addition, one shelf of the canned-goods cupboard in the cabin is crammed with books, most of which are about fish. These belong to Ellery; he is building a scientific library of his own. He started it with Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, by Henry B. Bigelow and William W. Welsh, an old United States Bureau of Fisheries reference work that is a classic of American ichthyology. Mr. Merriman and Mr. Warfel found a copy for Ellery in a secondhand bookstore in Boston and gave it to him for Christmas in 1944. Ellery has great respect for it. He has read and reread it, he lends it to other captains, and he frequently quotes from it. Mr. Warfel believes that Ellery is no longer hostile to Latin and is quite sure that he has memorized the Latin fish names in Bigelow & Welsh. Ellery profanely denies this. He slips up every so often, however. Two sharks appear in multitudes in the Stonington grounds at certain seasons, the spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias) and the smooth dogfish (Mustelus canis). Not long ago, in conversation with Mr. Warfel, Ellery mentioned a big shark that swam up while the net was coming out of the water and tore a hole in it trying to get at the fish inside, and Mr. Warfel asked, "What was it—a spiny dog or a smooth dog?" "It was an acanthias," Ellery said.