112 THE CATCH OF HAKE 



The Range of the Hake 



Le Danois puts the southern boundary of the European hake 

 in lat. 20° N. at Cape Blanco ; the northern hmit is, he says, 

 somewhere about 62° N. — that is somewhere to the north of the 

 Faeroe Islands and of Trondjhem Fjord. Mr. C. Curzon, of 

 Milford Haven, however, informs the writer that he has seen 

 large quantities of hake caught in the Bight of Benin, at about 

 5° N. ; and as a variety known to Science as Cape Hake 

 {Merluccius capensis) occurs off the Cape of Good Hope, it seems 

 possible that our hake species, or their close relations, extend 

 continuously right down the coast of Africa into the Southern 

 Hemisphere. The water temperature in the Bight of Benin at 

 50 fathoms is given by Helland Hansen at 57° F. to 60° F.^ 



Hjort, during the cruise of the S.S. Michael Sars in April and 

 May 1920, caught hake in the trawl as follows : 



(1) at 70 and 90 fathoms on the 'coast bank' west of the 

 Lizard in the neighbourhood of 10° W. and 49° NW. ; 



(2) off Vianna in Portugal on a bank, where a Boston trawler 

 was at work in 30-40 fathoms — temperature about 48° F. ; 



(3) at 70 fathoms on the coast bank below Cape Spartel, where 

 seven trawlers were fishing in the beginning of May ; 



(4) a short distance seaward of the last point in 300 fathoms 

 — temperature about 53*6° F. ; and 



(5) at 150 fathoms west of Cape Bojador — temperature about 

 57° F. 



At Bojador itself, about the 20th May, the Spanish fishermen 

 from the Grand Canary caught Dr. Hjort some hake fry in a 

 sardine seine worked from the shore. 



His general conclusion was that the hake and other ' coast 

 fishes ' do not inhabit grounds covered with much more than 

 300 fathoms of water, and as he trawled regularly at 500 fathoms 

 and over, and caught quantities of ' deep-water ' fish like 

 * Macrurus ' and ' Mora ' — which are, he tells us, commercially 

 about as valuable as torsk — below 300 fathoms his conclusions 

 are unlikely to be challenged. At 300 fathoms he found a fairly 

 uniform temperature of 50° F. The important thing from the 

 point of view of the fishermen is to know when hake may be 

 found in abundance on any particular bank in the huge ocean 

 area which it frequents. 



The Hake ' Seasons ' 



On p. 26 of his pamphlet Le Danois prints a table which gives 

 some useful information on this point as follows : 



' Depths of Ocean, p. 445, 



