THE HISTORY OF DUTCH SEA FISHERIES. 283 



contracts upon which this share is determined are now, as 

 we have found them in former centuries,* intricate and 

 apt to give rise to many disputes. Part of the crew's 

 shares in the returns is under the habitual contracts not 

 paid in money, but prepaid in fish ; and this of course 

 promotes the men's tendency to help themselves to all 

 they can get. It would be highly interesting fully to 

 investigate the effects of socialism, as embodied in this 

 system, upon the fishing population, both from a moral 

 and an economical point of view. As regards the effects 

 of the sailors' behaviour upon the business, they have for 

 a series of years been highly deleterious, and have seriously 

 retarded the several fisheries' progress. Instances of vessels 

 kept at home in the height of a favourable season by the 

 crews' desertion have been frequent of late years ; and the 

 lawlessness prevailing in the connections between fishing 

 shipowners and men might have ended in the ruin of both 

 employed and employers, had not the legislative power 

 intervened, upon the urgent representations of all ship- 

 owners and of the Board appointed to second their interests. 

 There is a law on discipline in merchant shipping, dated 

 1857, on the Netherlands statute-book; but this law has 

 been pronounced by the supreme judicial authority not to 

 apply to fishing-vessels. The new Penal Code enacts 

 penalties against desertion by fishermen ; but this Code, 

 although now a law of the realm, has not yet been put to 

 execution, owing to several combined circumstances ; and 

 a special law upon the subject was therefore enacted on 

 June 2Oth, iSSi (Staatsblad No. 98). Imprisonment for 

 from one to thirty days now attends desertion, consisting 

 in non-fulfilment of contracts of service in Dutch sea-fishing 



* Part iii. chapter iii. 



U 2 



