Living Silver 



if they wanted to retain their famihar proportions of the total 

 catch. Instead of equipping an expedition elaborate enough to go 

 whaling in the Antarctic, a mother ship accompanied by about 

 twenty catchers, the seamen of Lowestoft had enlarged upon the 

 simple Scottish idea of a dual purpose vessel and had beaten the 

 Scotsmen at their own game. 



The Stanislaw herself was one of these boats equipped equally 

 for drifting and seine-netting. But the English were only just be- 

 ginning to take to the idea of seine-netting and many of them were 

 busy learning the somewhat primitive Danish anchor techniques 

 which were uneconomic everywhere except in Denmark's home 

 waters . So the English dual purpose vessels were not seine-netters . 

 Their two professions were drifting, as in Scotland, and trawling. 

 This gave them one great advantage over the Scottish craft -size. 

 And size on a fishing boat meant space. And this space was used 

 as refrigerated storage space. Neither when drifting nor when 

 seining could the little boats of Aberdeen and the Moray coast 

 afford to carry ice. They, therefore, had to make short trips to 

 the grounds and back. Only by curtailing their time at sea could 

 they ensure fresh catches. But the smallest of the trawlers that 

 worked from Lowestoft on the east and Fleetwood on the west, 

 stayed at sea for periods of about ten days or two weeks. Ice was 

 necessary to them, and space to carry ice : and a fish-hold large 

 enough to contain a cargo worth icing. When they refitted for drift- 

 ing this space was in no way diminished and, therefore, they were 

 able to preserve herring as they had preserved white fish. They could 

 undertake journeys across the North Sea, shoot their nets over the 

 rich Norwegian Deeps and return to Britain with a few hundred 

 aluminium boxes filled with fresh herring. Jan well remembered 

 the consternation in Aberdeen fish-market when the first of these 

 dual purpose vessels landed. The Shetland season had been a wash- 

 out. The north-east-coast one, which had just begun, promised 

 to be little better. The Scots driftermen were in no mood to take 

 kindly to a grinning Englishman who had just deposited thirty tons 

 of good hard kippering herrings on a market that, in spite of all 



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