The Sea Rovers

After a storm, two or three hundred schooners drift out of Gloucester Harbor, their white sails catching the first breeze. Beneath the beautiful scene lies a question the town knows too well: who will come home?

Rufus Rockwell Wilson’s early-20th-century portrait begins in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing town whose history has always followed the sea. From the Grand Banks to the rough waters off New England, fishermen chase cod, mackerel and halibut through fog, ice and sudden gales. Wilson brings their working lives close: the shared labor aboard a schooner, the tally of each man’s catch, and the families watching the storm-darkened horizon for a returning vessel. The sea offers a living, but it can take a crew without warning. What does it mean to make a home where every voyage may be the last?

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