From Gazette editions of February, 1937:

With the sale of Capt. Isaac Norton’s fast schooner, Malvina B., less than a year since the B.T. Hillman, Capt. Horace Hillman, gave her parting salute to her home port, Edgartown’s schooner fleet has only two representatives, the Liberty, Capt. Claude Wagner, and the Hazel M. Jackson, Capt. Robert L. Jackson. Youngest of the fleet, the Malvina B. first entered Edgartown harbor April 1, 1930, after a speedy trip of twenty hours from Damariscotta, Me., where she was built by J. D. Morse. She can pack down 55,000 pounds of fish and is a beautiful craft with fine lines, though of sturdy construction.

 

“Even the gulls can’t take it anymore.” So says Cap’n Everett Poole of Menemsha Creek, as he sits in his lookout window, observing the activities of the flocks of sea gulls that swoop over the village and harbor. The gulls have developed peculiar habits. They either can’t stand the cold or have discovered that such hardship is entirely unnecessary. When they develop a case of chillblains or simple cold feet, they perch on an open chimney top until they have become warmed through and through. Sizing up the weather and casting a keen glance to windward, a gull will take off and select a chimney that seems to suit his purpose; he will settle on it, resting his feet on the warm bricks and ever and anon turning his body, so that his chest and tail feathers receive equal benefits.

There are coal, wood and oil burners at Menemsha. Some of the gulls’ breasts are dark with hickory smoke. They will roost only on a wood-burning house chimney. Others prefer the coal and are believed to become slightly intoxicated by the gas. One elderly man, famed for his truthfulness, says that he has seen gulls with the hicccoughs after roosting, and that occasionally they will descend to earth and walk with a pronounced stagger and a heavy list to port.

But the adherents of the oil burners have evinced the strongest signs of intelligence. These birds have discovered the source of the heat, kerosene, and therefore have reasoned that where there is kerosene there must be warmth. A gull was seen roosting on a kerosene tank a few days ago and the bird revealed signs of irritation when its feet failed to become warm. It pecked on the tank and attempted to turn the faucet with its beak. The old, reliable, one-legged gull that has lived in Menemsha for years was seen to pick up a match and try to scratch it and ignite a can of kerosene that had been left standing by the side of the road. Only the fact that the match had already been lighted prevented the bird from carrying out its purpose. And Menemsha people are very careful these days to leave no unlighted matches where the gulls can reach them.

 

No one yet knows, apparently, whether the eelgrass will come back. Until five years ago there seemed limitless meadows of the trailing green grass along our shores; one could see the grass floating in the sunlight at low tide, and storms brought up great windrows of it to be collected by farmers for various uses. Then, all at once, the eelgrass disappeared, and all the marine life which it used to shelter had to move on. Shore birds which used to feed on the eelgrass were sore afflicted. Why the present epidemic, almost world wide, would have ocurred remains mysterious. Meantime, the United States Biological Survey has made transplantings from the Pacific to the Atlantic. We should like to see such transplanting tried in the waters of the Vineyard, for a return of eelgrass would be a boon to scallop fishermen and to many wild fowl. But what an amazing drama this is which has been enacted beneath the tides, and how far its effects have been felt!

 

More than once we have remarked upon the benighted condition of certain cooks on the mainland who use tomatoes and carrots in making clam chowder. As if a real clam chowder could be made in any such way! Vegetable soup is what it is, with a few pathetically naked clams floating around in it.

Now we read a recipe for clam chowder which lists as ingredients salt pork, potatoes, onions, canned tomatoes, and then — wonder of wonders — cooked elbow macaroni! This is mixing things up with a vengeance. Since when did the Italian influence get to work on the American institution of clam chowder? We grieve over these cans of tomatoes and this macaroni.

But then the recipe goes on to specify cherrystone clams! It does not have clams — it has quahaugs. We have a high opionion of quahaug chowder when properly prepared, not made with cherrystones, which are too delicious to be eaten any way but raw. Imagine cooking a cherrystone! Every connoisseur on earth will agree with us that the gentler flavor of the clam is better than the flavor of the quahaug, although each is good in its place. But what a high crime to confuse the two!

Plainly, one thing wrong with our country is the inability to cook seafood properly, and to know the difference between clams and quahaugs. Why not have some agency send representatives from every city in the country to the Vineyard to get at the true inwardness of this vital matter.

Compiled by Cynthia Meisner

library@mvgazette.com