CHAPTER SIX 



ROUNDFISH 



ONLY by catching them did he get to know them. The raucous 

 choirs of gulls that painted the fish-market white with their drop- 

 pings, the shite-hawks of the seamen, perhaps they too knew 

 something of the fish he was after. But most men did not. They 

 knew names, and some of them were even able to go so far as to 

 associate a particular name with a particular smell from the kit- 

 chen, but only fishermen and a few scientists had more than a nod- 

 ding acquaintance with the more important commercial species. 

 And when Jan tried to learn about fish by looking at their carcasses 

 displayed on ice he soon found the reason for this general ignor- 

 ance. 



There were so many of them. Had they all been exotic and 

 tropical, had they differed from one another in all their basic di- 

 mensions, then it would have been easier to classify and to remem- 

 ber them. But thirty yards of boxed haddock looked very much 

 like thirty yards of boxed whiting. Yet the differences between 

 the fish, their prices, their habits of life, their food, were so fun- 

 damental that the fishing industry was built upon these differences 

 rather than upon the many similarities. A boy brought up in a 

 fishing community would have recognised them apart as easily as 

 he could have told the difference between his father and his mother. 

 But Jan had not had this advantage. It took him years to learn 

 about fish, years at sea and years in libraries. It sometimes even 

 struck him that a visitant from another planet might find it almost 

 as difficult to distinguish between the human sexes. 



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