12 



seldom has sails but, when the wind is favourable, 

 adopts the crude method of fastening a couple of oars 

 upright with three or four of the boatmen's garments 

 as sails. The result is that the nets in use are neces- 

 sarily of limited capacity ; limited by the small carrying 

 power of the boats and by the manual power of the men 

 acting on these awkward platforms, while only one set 

 of nets can be taken out at a time so that if men are 

 fishins: for one class of fish and shoals of different sized 

 fish appear, they are often unable to take them ; more- 

 over, since it passes men's endurance to spend more than 

 a few hours at a time daily in such craft, the duration and 

 distance of the voyages are limited. Yet again, the 

 small size and capacity of the boats forbids any attempt 

 to keep fish alive by wells or water chests, or to salt the 

 fish down in the boat even if cheap salt were available 

 which is not the case ; hence fish have often been dead 

 for several hours before reaching shore, and deep-sea 

 catches are frequently tainted and seldom really fresh, 

 so that fish cannot be taken far inland, while the portion 

 which goes to the curing yards, often after considerable 

 further delay on the beach or in preparation for the 

 curing yard, is often tainted before the curing process 

 begins, a fact necessarily detrimental both to the whole- 

 someness and market value of the product. Conversely, 

 the want of knowledge how to keep fish alive and 

 fresh in wells or chests and the inability to obtain cheap 

 salt for the proper salting down of the fish at sea and 

 the ignorance of the methods or the absence of the 

 practice of preserving fish wet in pickle, tend to keep 

 the boats small and the voyages short. There are in 

 practice the germs of the carrier system by which special 

 boats bargain at sea with the fishing boats and bring 

 the catches somewhat sooner to shore, but this only takes 

 the form of small canoes of neither speed nor capacity, 

 usually chartered or owned by small fish dealers with 

 a little ready cash : they seldom go out above a mile 

 or two. 



8. A regrettable result of the smallness of the boats 

 is that shoals are obviously missed, as 



The failure to dis- . , . , , ,-' 



cover shoals, possibly HI this year, because the boats cannot 

 due to smallness of nrQ out to sea to look for them ; the men 



boats. ^ . , 1 1 r 



wait on or near shore and hope tor 

 shoals : if shoals are not seen it is concluded that they have 



