A small boat with a big job
The dory is a small, flat-bottomed boat with high, flaring sides, a narrow bottom board and a pointed bow, usually with a narrow transom at the stern. It is closely associated with the cod fisheries of the North Atlantic, where it served as the working boat carried by a larger vessel. Rather than fish from the parent ship, fishermen climbed into dories, rowed away, and fished from them in the vicinity.
The dory was not designed for open-sea voyaging. It was a tender for a larger ship, a tool for putting a few people on the fishing grounds, and its design reflects that role.
Origins
The dory type developed in the coastal communities of the North Atlantic, and its early history is not well documented. The word appears in English records in the 18th century, and the form is generally associated with New England and the Canadian Maritimes. The standard American and Canadian banks dory is traditionally traced to the early 18th century, although the earlier development of flat-bottomed boats of this kind in different places makes it difficult to pin down a single point of origin.
Flat-bottomed boats of simple construction were already common in many places, including in the working boats of Europe. The dory’s distinctive design reflects local needs: it could be built quickly and cheaply from planks, with a minimum of curved timber.
The Grand Banks fishery
The Grand Banks off Newfoundland are shallow fishing grounds where cold and warm currents meet, and they supported a huge cod fishery for centuries. European fishermen came to these waters from the late 15th and 16th centuries, drawn by the abundance of cod. Over time, schooner fleets from New England, particularly Gloucester in Massachusetts, and from Nova Scotia, such as Lunenburg, developed a style of fishing that relied on the dory. This was part of the wider history of Atlantic crossings and trade, in which salt cod was a major commodity.
A fishing schooner would carry a number of dories, nested one inside another on deck, a space-saving arrangement made possible by their flared sides. When the schooner reached the grounds, the dories were lowered into the water, each with one or two men aboard. They would row out to fish, using handlines or longer lines with many baited hooks set from the boat, then return to the schooner to unload their catch. The schooner itself was typically one of the multi-masted schooner types that dominated North Atlantic fisheries in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Design and why it suited the work
Several features suited the dory to this work:
- Nesting: flared sides let boats stack tightly on a crowded deck.
- Simple build: flat bottoms and straight planks made dories cheap to build in large numbers.
- Load capacity: a dory could carry a good load of fish for its size.
- Stability: wide flaring sides gave a reasonable degree of stability when loaded, though the boat could be tippy when empty or when the load shifted.
Rowing was the means of propulsion, with a pair of oars, and the shape of the hull is a good illustration of oared boat design applied to a hard-working purpose. A dory could also carry a small sail in some cases.
Danger on the banks
The work was hard and dangerous. Dories often went out in fog, which on the Banks is frequent, and a dory could easily lose sight of its parent vessel. A boat that drifted away might be lost, and men were often at risk from changes in weather. The fishing communities of Gloucester and the Maritimes lost many men to the sea in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the fishery is remembered in monuments and memorials. Fishermen reportedly carried simple equipment such as a horn, a compass and some food and water, although the details depended on the vessel and period.
Famous Grand Banks schooners include the Bluenose, launched in 1921 in Nova Scotia, which was both a working fishing schooner and a celebrated racing vessel. Its fame illustrates the wider culture of the fishery. The old practice of fishing from dories declined in the 20th century as trawlers and other methods took over, and the labour-intensive dory fishery largely ended.
Later life of the dory
The dory did not disappear with the schooners. It was adopted as a small, seaworthy rowing boat and a boat for sheltered waters, and the shape was used for recreational rowing and for river trips. The design has been used and adapted by different builders, and some modern boats keep the name and the basic lines. Nautical skills such as rope work and sea sense still have a place in this tradition, much as the sailors’ knots of earlier fishermen did.
Above all, the dory shows how a small and inexpensive boat, fitted to a particular method of fishing, can become an icon of a whole industry.