Artist Holden Wetherbee, who came to Block Island in the late 1940s, created murals and paintings for the Highview Hotel that portrayed an island-based fishing industry that would soon go away.

Based on observations both ashore and aboard the fishing boat STANLEY, Wetherbee shows us, in this litho from a series donated by Jack Lynch, author of "Wetherbee's Block Island - Paintings From the 1940s", how swordfish were hunted in Rhode Island waters with harpoons. Netting swordfish began to catch on in the 1950s, and by the ‘70s hunting swordfish with “sticks” was just a memory.