36 



These interesting and important questions will be more 

 fully investigated and reported on. 



2,8. But when the development of fisheries elsewhere 



Probable development ^^ viewed historically and its 



of West Coast fishing in- economic coiiditions considered 



dustrv, viz., from the „^r 11 ■- • ^1 ^ 



independent fisherman and caretully, it IS Seen that progress 

 small boat to the capitalist has been and, in the present form 



and labourer. „r ' •^• ^' . 1 r ^^ 



01 Civilisation, must be, from the 

 independent fisherman with a single small boat and petty 

 local trade to the capitalist-employer with his Beet of 

 large boats and his wages-paid crews ; and it will be so 

 in this country, the more so that the actual sea-faring 

 fishing population is, in India, born and not made ; if 

 not a caste, it carries on a business into which only 

 certain castes or races will enter, and it will dy itself 

 never provide the essentials of development, namely, 

 knowledge, enterprise and capital. These people are all 

 poor, ignorant and personally wanting both in the capital 

 and in the business capacity and initiative necessary for 

 a real exploitation of the harvest of the sea ; the boats, 

 gear, curing houses, trade organisation necessary to give 

 proper efficiency to the men and development to the 

 industry, can only be provided by large capital and 

 business brains ; if the seas are to be worked properly, 

 if cheap and good food and manure are to be distributed 

 over the country, then large, well-found boats possibly 

 aided by power, modern gear, swift carriers, cheap 

 preservatives, clean, rapid and varying curing processes, 

 concentration and economical methods, utilisation of by- 

 products, carefully arranged transport, organised business 

 ramifications, must take the place of the present 

 primitive haphazard methods ; the independent boatman 

 with his catamaran or canoe, the petty individual 

 curer with his pinch of capital and half a dozen 

 baskets of fish, the small market dealer or buyer, the 

 fresh-fish runner, will, if they do not altogether dis- 

 appear, take a new and perhaps individually inferior 

 place as the employes of capital. In this country the 

 difficulty or shock of transition will be slight ; the 

 indigenous industry is not that still to be found in England 

 and Scotland where some of the finest men of the 

 kingdom, thrifty, shrewd, fairly educated, hardened in 

 fibre and highly skilled by toil and danger, owning their 

 own somewhat costly smacks and gear, independent 



