Wl 



Chapter Nine 



HIS OWN SHEEP 



HAT a curious sequence of events it had been ! Some years 

 before while preparing certain parts of the manuscript of 

 my large volume on our fishes, information was found to be lack- 

 ing about certain types of fish and related matters of the waters 

 of the South-west Cape, so I arranged to go out from Cape Town 

 with one of the trawlers of Messrs. Irvin and Johnson, a commer- 

 cial fishing company which had greatly assisted my work in many 

 ways. Their vessels had added greatly to the knowledge of our 

 fishes, constantly bringing rarities ashore ; indeed, it must not be 

 forgotten that it was a trawler of this firm which caught and saved 

 the first Coelacanth. 



This Cape trawler on which I was to go was the Godetia, one 

 of the two new vessels that were more or less experimental, since 

 they were very considerably larger than those previously used in 

 South Africa. They certainly were very much more luxurious 

 than anything of that type that I had ever seen before. I shared 

 the skipper's cabin and had a real bed, away from noise and smell. 

 After the other trawlers I had known, this one was almost incred- 

 ible. I could not help thinking of the lumpy mattresses in narrow 

 box-like bunks close under the iron deck. Just above one's head 

 were steering chains that rattled and crashed on the iron plates 

 every few seconds; indeed, unless the sea was smooth, without 

 any intermission day and night. Those were the trawlers on which 

 I had lived and suffered. To a landsman they spelled discomfort, 

 smell, and nausea. 



In this grand new vessel there was a real saloon and real lava- 

 tories, not just the heaving rail and the sea. It was an interesting 

 experience, and different in many ways from the life on a trawler 

 on our south coast, where the work goes on night and day, the 

 crew often without proper sleep for days on end if catches are good, 

 when they do not mind. In this cold Atlantic sea the trawling is 



