Month: February 2012

Who Was the Solomon Jacobs of Solomon Jacobs Park?

Today he is almost forgotten. Yet the Boston Globe said that Capt. Solomon Jacobs was “known among the English speaking people of two continents as the most daring and intrepid master mariner that sails a fishing craft.” The Gloucester Daily Times said that he was “in Gloucester’s long list of fishing skippers, the most famous … around whom could be woven sea tales so full of dash and dare, of luck, pluck and chance, as to almost pass belief.”
Sol Jacobs, from an old Newfoundland fishing family, came down to Gloucester as a young man. Within three years he was a highline captain and, for the next forty years during the great schooner age, set records for fast trips and big catches, and was known in every port as “king of the mackerel killers.”
He was often controversial – like the time he waved a pistol to protect his seine, and his treaty rights. The dispute escalated into an international incident, but the British foreign secretary finally agreed that Sol was in the right, and overnight the skipper who had been called a disgrace to the Gloucester fleet became its hero.
Capt. Sol commissioned, owned and was master of three of the most remarkable vessels in the Gloucester fleet. He sent schooners around Cape Horn, and joined them to pioneer the halibut fishery of the Northwest Coast. Indirectly he launched Ireland’s mackerel export fishery.
He was first in the Gloucester fleet to adopt wireless telegraphy, first to commission a schooner with an auxiliary engine, first to build a seining steamer.

Sol was game for any adventure at sea. In his “clipper schooner, Ethel B. Jacobs,” he commanded a bird-watching expedition to the subarctic where, it was reported, he was “on friendly terms with many of the Indian and Eskimo chiefs.” He took passengers on mackerel trips. A Col. Russell from Minneapolis so enjoyed his cruise on the Ethel B., and the hospitality of the vessel’s master, that he was “eager to repeat” the experience. He brought his wife and son aboard for a trip the following year.
Ashore, Sol was devoted to family, church and community. He was elected a director of the Gloucester National Bank, and as an alternate delegate to a national presidential convention.
In World War I, when schooners manned by his old shipmates were being blown up by German submarines, Capt. Sol volunteered and – at age 70 – was sworn in as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy Coast Patrol. Right to the end he personified the undaunted Gloucester captain.
Thanks to a lady named Mary Favazza, we have the Solomon Jacobs Park on the inner harbor between the Coast Guard station and Maritime Gloucester. Mary had complained to her husband Sal that, while Howard Blackburn had a traffic circle  named after him, and Fitz Henry Lane’s house had been preserved, there was no memorial to “the most famous” Gloucester schooner captain. Mary died, but when Sal became Executive Secretary of the Gloucester Fisheries Commission, he campaigned relentlessly until the park in Sol’s name became a reality in 1975.
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Today we have the park, but Sol Jacobs remains a name known to few. In my new book, “On Opposite Tacks” (Whale’s Jaw Publishing, http://www.whalesjaw.com), I recount the captain’s astonishing career – with the hope that we can turn the corner in giving Capt. Sol the recognition he deserves. So that fewer people will be asking, “Hey, who is this park named after?”
Chet Brigham
chetbrig@yahoo.com