Rory Nugent’s writing has taken him all around the world, but he found the material for his latest book right here in New England.The Eastport author’s “Down at the Docks” (Pantheon) uses the decline of New Bedford, Mass., once one of the country’s wealthiest cities and a center of fisheries and manufacturing, to illustrate the 300-year journey of the American economy.
“Remember, the fishery was a major component of the American industry until the Machine Age ramped up after the Civil War,” said Nugent. “Manufacturing then took center stage. And now we’re onto something else new and unaccommodating to holdovers from the past. The age of Emersonian self-reliance is behind us.”
“Down at the Docks” is the third book by Nugent, whom one critic called “a cross between Rudyard Kipling and Hunter Thompson.” His 1991 book “In Search of the Pink-Headed Duck” followed his quest through India looking for a bird that hadn’t been seen in more than 50 years. His 1993 book “Drums Along the Congo” tracked his journey through Africa in search of the last living dinosaur.
New Bedford, America’s largest fishing port, was a natural place to which Nugent, 56, would gravitate, for he figuratively and literally has water in his blood. His dad first took Rory to sea at age 3 months. After graduating from college, Nugent went to work on freighters. He later sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean 4½ times. On that last trip, in 1980, he ended up being rescued from the middle of the ocean five days later and 28 pounds lighter, which cured his need for that type of sailing.
Nugent found the material for “Down at the Docks” in his backyard, as he lived in New Bedford for 17 years, in a 60,000-square-foot loft built in an old mill. He collected the stories of the city and its people while working as a freelance “overseas war hack,” writing about the IRA, Islam fundamentalism and the war in Sudan, among other topics, for national magazines.
“In 1987, the city was in a nose-dive economically, and remnants of the old engines, the mill buildings and the mansions were still around,” Nugent said. “The place had fantastic wealth, then you wonder what happened.”
Nugent recalled the “light-bulb” moment when the book really jelled.
He was having a drink in a New York City apartment with his old friend George Trow, a longtime New Yorker writer who resigned from that magazine during the ascendancy of editor Tina Brown and celebrity journalism. In seeking a new direction, Nugent recalled Trow saying, “What we need to do is write dirges. The two of us must declare the old dead.”
“At that moment, I started to gather notes for a book,” Nugent said.
“Down at the Docks” tells the stories of several longtime residents, including a “jinx” who had survived several wrecks, a lesbian pillar of the community and a fisherman-drug runner, with city history woven in for perspective.
Nugent sees New Bedford largely as a victim of global economic evolution.
“What happened was part and parcel of a global sea change,” he said. “New Bedford was a union town, so the looms went south and the sewing machines went south and to the Pacific Rim [for cheaper labor]. With the blossoming of the electronic age, New Bedford found itself on the wrong side of the equation. There was a shortsightedness on the part of local education to meet these changes. Its population was ill-prepared, and didn’t know how to deal with anything else.”
In terms of the decline of independent fisheries, “It was a combination of greed by fishermen and mismanagement by the federal government.”
While fishing still produces around $300 million in revenues each year in New Bedford, the kind of fishermen have changed, Nugent said.
“Fishing is still one vital piece of the machinery, but everyone’s afraid that that could disappear overnight, with one court order,” he said. “The independent fisherman is a vanishing species, just like the working waterfront. The vast majority of the fleet are part of minifleets belonging to corporations.”
Nugent moved to Eastport in 2004, after the mill he was living in was sold to developers. He and companion Elizabeth McFadden landed Down East because “it was the cheapest place we could find near water.”
Nugent, who has an article in June’s Atlantic Monthly, is now working on a new book, “Bright Red Lights,” about leftists at the turn of the 20th century and the debate then over the accumulation and distribution of wealth.
He found a couple of New Bedford residents in their 90s who could recall those days. One special find was the stash from a local bookie at that time: “He used to take bets on whose heads would get smashed by the Pinkertons on a given day. Talk at the time was all about the union movement.”
Nugent sees some signs for hope for New Bedford, thanks to the Whaling National Historic Park and an infusion of students from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s School of Marine Science and Technology. “Those provide a life preserver that wasn’t there,” he said, but cautioned, “The lines of demarcation between the haves and the have-nots are as clear as ever.”