| This painting is about the Isle Of Shoals. Europeans came here to fish as early as the sixteenth century. By the early seventeen hundreds it was a major trade and fishing port between the old and the new worlds. The painting reflects the simple shacks the early fisherman built when they came ashore to cure fish and seek shelter. In 1635, colonial leader Richard Mather wrote about the harshness of living on the islands in his telling of a treacherous gale. "Another strange catastrophe of that storm on these islands was the blowing into the sea of a little cabin of a Mr. Tucker, a tailor, on Smuttynose Island. Apparently, before the cabin had drifted to the mainland the wind shifted to the northwest, for the cabin was found later on Cape Cod, seventy-five miles away." {7 Mass. Hist. Coll., p.252.} |
