Living Silvei 



guys. From each side of the leading kite a giiy led to one of the 

 butterflies while the lower kite was similarly attached to the legs 

 that ran ahead on either side of it. This final refinement of the 

 herring trawl more than justified its complexity by the results it 

 achieved, catching, on the average, more than twenty times as 

 many herring as ordinary VD gear when fishing over the same 

 ground. 



It was still never as effective as a drifter could be, but it had the 

 advantage of being more consistently efficient. It did not have to 

 wait on the whimsies of the herring. It could go down and catch 

 them, four thousand baskets of herring, herring of a sort. For 

 quality was not its strong point. Apart from the biological fact 

 that, except on Fladen, the herring were not usually in their best 

 condition when they were lying on the bottom in trawlable con- 

 centrations, the trawl itself was apt to damage its delicate prey 

 and render it useless for certain forms of preservation, like kipper- 

 ing. As the fish were dragged along a rugged bottom, and the 

 bottom was often rugged since a good deal of trawling was done 

 over spawning grounds, they lost their scales and their fragile skin 

 was exposed to every buffet of the ground and the coarse abrasion 

 of the sisal threads of the cod-end. The flesh, thus exposed, was 

 easily desiccated by preservatives, like salt, though it rotted more 

 quickly if it was not preserved. The Germans, however, did not 

 seem to worry about this damage though it shocked the drifter- 

 men of Moray and East Anglia. 



Jan, who hated Germans, was very worried about the state of 

 the herring industry. The British fleet was indubitably backsliding 

 and only Germany and one other country supported anything that 

 could take its place. And that country was the one that he hated 

 even more than Germany. Yet he was forced to admit that the 

 Russians showed more respect for the herring than the Germans. 

 Not only did trawling destroy the quality of thousands of indivi- 

 dual herring but it promised to extinguish the fishery altogether. 

 The continual exploitation of the spawning grounds would go a 

 long way towards doing this. But that was far from being the end 



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