CHAPTER XIII 

 The Sea Fisheries 



The British Isles are situated in the midst of seas un- 

 rivalled for their productivity of fish life. Around their 

 coasts lie the greatest sea fisheries of the world. In 1924 

 the value of the sea fisheries to Great Britain and Ireland 

 reached the immense sum of twenty-one million pounds — 

 three times as great as that yielded by the fisheries of any 

 other northern European nation, France coming next with 

 a total of seven million. In fact the value of our fisheries 

 amounted to nearly half of the total value of those of all 

 the northern European countries put together. But 

 seeing that practically the whole of this fishing area lies 

 outside territorial limits these great sea fisheries should be 

 regarded as international in character, and as such their 

 total value exceeds that of any other region of the world. 

 Compared with Great Britain and Ireland the next great 

 sea-fishing nation is Japan, the land of another island race. 

 Whereas in our country only some 80,000 men are employed, 

 in Japan something like two million men are engaged in 

 catching fish, but this inequality is due to the fact that 

 while in our seas the greatest catches come from powerful 

 steam trawlers with their small crews, the Japanese are 

 dependent for their supply on the efforts of large numbers 

 of men fishing from small boats around their coasts. 



The sea fisheries may be divided roughly into deep-sea 

 and inshore fisheries, and of these the deep-sea are by far 



the more valuable. Amongst the inshore fisheries are 



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