by Mark Kurlansky.

Ballantine Books. 269 pages. $25.

BY TONY LEWIS
Special to the Journal

In 1614, Captain John Smith gave the name “Tragabigzanda” to what we know today as Cape Ann, that scenic Massachusetts peninsula anchored by Rockport in the north and Gloucester in the south. The colorful Smith was remembering an aristocratic woman to whom he was sold as a slave in Turkey, or at least that’s the best guess scholars have offered.

That bizarre bit of background info is the first of many odd stories in The Last Fish Tale, Mark Kurlansky’s fascinating and comprehensive look at Gloucester, described by the book’s subtitle as “America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town.” Kurlansky, who wrote Cod and Salt, manages not only to give readers a history of the town and a real feel for the place, but to provide a primer on ocean ecology, a detailed description of the worldwide fishing industry, and a rather glum assessment of where Gloucester and its ilk might be headed. In the end, he lets us know why most North Atlantic fishing towns that took centuries to develop in idiosyncratic splendor “could all be lost in a few decades.”

From its Puritan origins to the 21st century, Kurlansky argues, “Gloucester remained a community almost entirely dedicated to its fishery,” unlike, say, those towns that expanded inland and diversified, their intimate relation to fishing all but atrophying. The wonder of it all is that even tourism has failed to turn Gloucester into a kind of Disney-by-the-sea, as it has other Atlantic communities, like Mystic, Conn., or Penzance on the Cornish peninsula of England. What happens when tourism wins “the struggle for the character and culture of coastlines,” Kurlansky explains, is that everything becomes ersatz, the restaurants, the knickknacks, even the fish themselves — often imported — that the tourists pay big bucks for.

What helped to make Gloucester so special as a fishing community is the fact that until the Route 128 bridge was built, the city was a kind of an island, separated from the rest of the state by a narrow canal that links the Annisquam River to Gloucester harbor. The insular attitudes were reinforced throughout its history by influxes of people who came from similarly insular places, Portuguese from Cape Verde and Sicilians primarily from one town, the fishing village of Terrasini. Distinct neighborhoods developed with their stores, languages, and recipes (of which Kurlansky provides several).

Then, too, Gloucester attracted artists, from Marsden Hartley to Edward Hopper, people who came for the views and for the light, painters who settled in and managed to thrive without turning the town into, well, another Rockport, where the fishing died off and the artsy types took over.

Gloucester seems to be hanging on, but the prognosis isn’t good. “The nature of coastal society,” Kurlansky writes with an almost perceptible sigh, “is changing in ways it never has in this country for centuries, and in Europe for millennia.” THE LAST FISH TALE: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America’s Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town,

antjlewis@yahoo.com