The Great Lines 



that he too could easily end up with a similar injury if the rope 

 snarled. That, he now realised, was why the sharemen had been 

 so keen for him to practise filling a basket with line. 



Then, too, it was like watching the roots of a harvest pulling 

 themselves up toward the sun, to stand on the hauling platform 

 and look deep into the sea as the lines came up again. Hooks 

 whirred in at intervals of three and a half fathoms. The line al- 

 most tinkled over one grooved wheel, under another, and on to a 

 small idling roller, and Jan would curl it roughly into a 

 basket. Most of the hooks would be mere bright steel but a wrig- 

 gle of the hemp and a feel of strain would warn him to expect a 

 fish on the next one. If it were small he could take it aboard him- 

 self, hardly interrupting the rhythm of the mechanical hauler; but 

 a large fish had to be held just under the surface of the water while 

 one of his mates clipped it with a long spear-like gafF. Then it 

 would be swxmg over the rail and on to the deck where it would 

 lie till the hook had been taken out of it and the nine foot snood 

 that had held it to the ground-line was again free. These skate 

 were like huge fruit attached unexpectedly to a tall creeping ten- 

 dril and the tendril had grown through two hundred fathoms of 

 brine before it ripened into slabs of living flesh on the Honor's 

 deck. 



Once his line was in, Jan would retire under the high whale- 

 back prow to brood over it and sort the snoods back into their 

 proper order, replacing every hook carefully in the cork rim of 

 the basket, and examining each inch of his half mile of hemp. If 

 there were a flaw, due perhaps to the tugging of a half-ton fish or 

 the rub of currents against a rough surface, the faulty part of the 

 line had to be cut out. By the time he had made this minute in- 

 spection and whatever repairs were necessary, it was his turn to 

 go back to the hauler and bring in his next half-mile of fruitful 

 hemp. 



All the sharemen worked like that, and it was a hard grind. It 

 left them not a moment for the gutting of fish. That job was done 

 by junior members of the crew, the single apprentice, the cook, 



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