Excerpted from
BIRDSEYE
by Mark Kurlansky Copyright © 2012 by Mark Kurlansky.Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rightsreserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission inwriting from the publisher
The lobster boats made in Deer Isle, Maine, in the
1940s
a
n
d
1950s
were cumbersome vessels with rounded wooden
hu
lls
that made them roll in the slightest swell. Even on a flat seathey were hard to direct, and a steady course could only beachieved by spinning the wheel far to starboard, then, wh
en
the bow started to shift, spinning it back far to port. If it wasdone right, the result could be a straight line, but this was
n
o
t
easy
to accomplish. Heading into the wind was impossible, sothe boat had to be steered at angles like a tacking
s
a
i
l
boa
t
.
In
1956,
Sarah Robbins had just bought such a boat a
n
d
kept it by her home in the old fishing port of
Gl
o
u
ce
s
t
er
,
Massachusetts. She had not in the least mastered the
s
t
ub
b
y
thirty-five-foot craft when she offered to take her friend C
l
a
r-
ence Birdseye on his last adventure. Though Birdseye wasmore than a generation older, their friendship had been
i
n
e
v
i
-
table. They both lived on the fog-swept opening of
Gl
o
u
ce
s-ter Harbor, an area called Eastern Point, and they were
bo
t
h
self-taught naturalists. She had bought the lobster boat to a
i
d
her in bird-watching, an interest she shared with Birdseye.
Birdseye,
a tiny man, smaller than many of the kids in
t
h
e
neighborhood, with a bland, gray appearance and the
d
u
ll
nickname Bob, was a source of endless fascination in affluentEastern Point. It was not just that he was famous. Or that
h
e
had lived a life of adventure and was full of stories about
t
h
e
Rocky Mountains and the Southwest at the beginning of
t
h
e
twentieth century and the wild frozen frontier of
L
a
b
r
ad
o
r
before World War I. It was that he seemed to be interested
i
n
almost everything and knew a great deal about most of
i
t
.
“
If I
see
a man skinning a fish, for example,
”
he wrote
abo
u
t
himself in
1951
in
Th
e
Am
e
r
i
c
a
n
Ma
ga
z
i
n
e
,
“
a host of
q
u
e
s
-
tions pop into my mind. Why is he skinning the
fish?
W
h
y
is he doing it by
ha
n
d
?
Is the skin good for a
n
y
t
h
i
n
g
?
If I a
m
in a restaurant and get biscuits, which I like, I ask the chef how he made them: What did he put in the
do
ug
h
?
How
d
i
d
he mix
it?
How long did the biscuits
ba
ke
?
At what
temp
er
a
-
t
u
r
e
?
When I visit a strange city, I go through the local
i
n
d
u
s-trial plants to see how they make things. I
do
n
’
t
care what
t
h
e
product is. I am just as much interested in the manufacture of chewing gum as of steel.
”
Birdseye died with more than two hundred patents to
h
i
s
name on more than fifty ideas, and though the
o
b
i
t
u
a
r
i
e
s
called him
“
the father of frozen food,
”
his inventions
r
a
n
g
e
d
from a whaling harpoon to electric lightbulbs. A few of
h
i
s
inventions changed the course of the twentieth century.
B
u
t
it is almost as telling to know that when this enthusiastic a
n
d
insatiably curious man died, his final mourners were not
t
h
e
captains of finance and industry with whom he worked,
n
o
r
fellow inventors and thinkers, but the children who grew
u
p
in his
ne
ig
hbo
r
h
ood
.
When Josephine
Swift
Boyer was a child in California,
h
e
r
family spent summers at their home on Eastern Point. Like a number of girls in the neighborhood, she took up an
i
n
ter
-
est in birds. When she found a dead rail, a rare specimen
f
o
r
Gloucester, she wanted to keep it, and not knowing what
t
o
do, she went to the curious Mr.
Birdseye.
Not surprisingly,
h
e
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