"Gloucester of the Gulf"

"Gloucester of the Gulf". . Pensacola became a center for commercial fishing by the 1870s. The industry's primary export was red snapper (Lutjanus campechanus). Pensacola's fish houses, including E.E. Saunders and Co. on the Palafox Street wharf and the Warren Fish Company on the Baylen Street wharf, caught nearly five million pounds of red snapper each year. These massive catches eventually led to overfishing, forcing fishermen to roam as far as the coast of Mexico to find fish. , The last all-sail fishing fleet in the United States, Pensacola's red snapper fishing schooners were often called "smacks" because of the sound of water and fish splashing inside the vessels' live wells. These fishing smacks were a unique fixture of the city's waterfront until the decline of the industry in the mid-1900s. , Photo captions: , Top right: Out at sea in the early 190Os, a commercial fisherman from Pensacola shows off his recent red snaper catch. (Image courtesy of the UWF Historic Trust) , Bottom right: Archaeologists recovered this deck prism from a commercial fishing shipwreck in the near Blackwater River. Prisms like these helped disperse daylight to dark areas in a ship's cabin. (Image courtesy of UWF Archaeology Institute) , Background Image: Red Snapper fishing schooners lined up along one of Pensacola's wharves, c 1910. (Image courtesy of the UWF Historic Trust)