The Great Lines 



voice went down a note or two and his eyes hazed sUghtly, but 

 Jan was himself too weary to trust his judgement about such 

 subtleties. 



Yet, through all this weariness, he could not afford to pass a 

 bruised inch of hemp or coil a snood in the wrong place. He had 

 to keep himself warily alert for the strain on the hauler when a 

 fish was coming up. Especially he had to be careful about this 

 when he reached the Denmark Straits. They found halibut there 

 in numbers that surprised even Radcliffe, but they also found 

 sharks. Twice Jan actually saw a shark lean on its side to tear out 

 the belly of a large halibut. The first time it succeeded, but on 

 the second occasion Jan was more wakeful and flicked his catch 

 out of harm's way. The shark rose to the surface to make another 

 attack but the mate and two of the other sharemen poked at it 

 with their clips and beat it ofF till the halibut could be brought 

 over the side. But twenty fish were spoiled by sharks that attacked 

 them when they were further from the surface. In every case it 

 was the belly of the halibut that was lost, with the large rich liver, 

 and in every case it meant that the market value of the catch was 

 reduced to something very like nil. 



The sharks, though, were not the worst of the sea pests. They 

 took only the belly. The remainder of the fish could not, indeed, 

 be sold, but it could be eaten by the Honor's crew. When the 

 sea-lice attacked, they took everything. Sometimes there was 

 only a skeleton as clean as a fossil to be hauled aboard. These lice 

 were little crustaceans, similar to fresh- water shrimps and they 

 lived on the sea-bottom in immense numbers. The numbers must 

 have been immense for them to be able to gnaw away the entire 

 body of an eight-stone halibut in a few hours. They were one of 

 the things that Jan wanted to study when he got into University ; 

 they, and the feathers, and tatties, and the food of the herring, 

 and the herring itself with its complicated systems of migration, 

 and all the other vertebrates and invertebrates of the sea. He was 

 very sure that his experience as a fisherman would be useful to 

 him in his career as a scientist. 



231 



