Drifting 



of the evils perpetrated by this new version of the marine dunce. 

 It also caught the young herring that had never had a chance to 

 spawn and caught them in such enormous numbers that the men 

 he worked with were almost unanimous in believing the entire 

 North Sea population of potential spawners was being decimated. 

 The Russians, at least, were more careful in their methods. They, 

 too, drifted. 



Yet the Russian herring fleet was expanding almost as quickly 

 as the German one had done since the end of the war : and some 

 of the Russian ships were very large, much larger than the biggest 

 of the German trawlers. But these huge Russian ships were not 

 for catching herring. They were mother ships, floating factories, 

 perhaps, each attached to a family of small drifters. The small 

 boats did the catching and brought their takes to the mother vessel. 

 What happened aboard her remained highly uncertain but they 

 were so big that Jan would not have been surprised if each of them 

 had contained a couple of kippering kilns. More probably, how- 

 ever, the bulk of the catches were barrelled along with a generous 

 supply of Siberian salt. By using these large ships for the storage 

 of a perishable cargo the Russians were able to escape from the 

 restrictions of their home grounds and wander at large in the 

 North Sea, the Atlantic, and, for all Jan knew, in the Pacific. Off 

 Shetland one day, the mother would round up her children if they 

 were failing to justify her faith in them, and the whole family 

 would appear later in the same week on the famous Iceland ground 

 where the largest and the best herring in the world were some- 

 times to be found. Compared to this global vagabondage, the 

 British fishermen, moving with the calendar round their own 

 coasts, were unenterprising stay-at-homes. 



Yet, even in Britain, there was a growing tendency to break 

 with the depleted waters of the home grounds . On a much smaller 

 scale, it was still a move in the right direction; for it was obvious 

 that, since all kinds and numbers of foreign vessels were going to 

 compete with British boats on the very edge of the three mile 

 limit, the British fishermen would have to invade European waters 



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