 |
|
|
Historic
Timeline |
|
|
|
 |
FISHING |
|
|
Even the most casual stroll along the Monterey Bay’s shoreline reveals a hint of the bounty concealed by the waves. The first settlers here, the Ohlone, Rumsien and Coastanoan Indian tribes, feasted on shellfish including meaty, dinner-plate-sized abalone. From the 1850s, Asian fishermen dried and canned abalone for export back to China and Japan. In the 1920s, the abalone provided the main course of beachside picnics of artists and writers such as Jack London, as recounted in his novel, “Valley of the Moon.” (
Read a typical abalone-pounding poem >) Today, several abalone farms nurture the tasty mollusks in the clean waters of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Far more bounty than abalone has been caught and canned out of Monterey’s busy Fisherman’s Wharf (or its neighbor up the coast, Moss Landing). The website of the Maritime Museum of Monterey and the City of Monterey’s Waterfront History web pages offer an overview of Monterey’s fisheries — from whaling to salmon and albacore tuna to squid and sardines, the fish that made Monterey famous.
New kinds of fishing boats called purse-seiners brought in vast catches of sardines, and through out World War II, a billion tons of sardines a year passed through the canneries and reduction plants. The seemingly bottomless oceanful of sardines proved more fragile than anyone but perhaps Ed Ricketts believed possible. By 1950, the canning industry had crashed, never to recover.
John Steinbeck immortalized Cannery Row in his novel of that name; today the grimy, workaday world he described has been transformed into shops, restaurants and galleries. The most famous tenant of any old cannery building, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, anchors one end of the Row. And the fish on the menu is far more likely to be fresh than canned.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
An Abalone Song (from the 1930s)
“Oh some like ham and some like jam
And some like macaroni.
But our tom-cat, he lives on fat
And juicy abalone.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From the introductory pages of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck:
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and shore houses, and little crowded groceries and labratories and flophouses....”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
