1912] on The JVorth Sea and its Fishprips. 415 



Dutch the sjreatest of all. In the days of Queen Elizabeth, before 

 ever a herrina; was caught by our own people, the Dutch sent to our 

 coasts a yearly herring-fleet of 8000 sail. It was Dutch colonists, 

 under William of Oi^ange, who first taught Englishmen to trawl at 

 Bi-ixhani ; and to that lirixham fishery, and the direct influence and 

 participation of the men who conducted it, all our modern trawling 

 industry harks back. And again, in Scotland, our prosperous east 

 coast fishery, far different from the struggling efforts of the western 

 Celt, owes 'its origin to those Dutch and Frisian settlers who (as 

 history and tradition tell us) came over under Mary Queen of Scots 

 and her son, and who still retain no small trace of their origin in 

 speech and custom and costume. These good people present a problem 

 to the administrator, when (as oftentimes) they cling not only to their 

 old ways, but, resisting all economic tendencies to concentration, 

 cleave to the ancient homes of their forefathers, and make heroic 

 efl^orts, and demand the like heroism on the part of His Majesty's 

 Treasury, to fit their multitudinous petty havens to the needs of an 

 enlarged and altered industry. 



It is different with the great centres of the modern trawl- 

 lishery, the site of which is determined by deep-water harbours, by 

 proximity to a great capital, or by convenient railway facilities. 

 These conditions greatly limit the number of trawling centres, of 

 which Grimsby and Hull, Aberdeen and Granton, Ostende and 

 Ymuiden, Geestemunde and Cuxhaven, are the chief. Proximity to 

 the fishing-grounds matters less to these distant voyagers than to 

 the herring-fisher. With him, ports contiguous to the successive sea- 

 sonal fishing-grounds are a prime necessity, and railway facilities are 

 of minor importance ; for the fish must be cured in haste— and may 

 be exported at leisure, generally (because most cheaply) by sea. And 

 so it is that all down our east coast the herring ports are numerous, 

 and are often remote from the greater centres of population. 



The North Sea is a very shallow^ sea. We can sail from here to 

 Hamburg, save for one little bit, in water under 20 fathoms deep, 

 and from here to the north of Denmark in water that never exceeds 

 30 fathoms. Suppose the bottom of the North Sea to be raised 

 up by successive stages — raise it by 10 fathoms, or 12 paces (just 

 the breadth of this street from wall to wall), and immediately 

 the islands of the Frisian shore are linked together in an 

 even coast line, while a broad belt ten miles broad or more is 

 added to the Danish coast ; a multitude of low islands spring 

 up off the Belgian and East Anglian coasts, and a greater island 

 rises up in the Dogger Bank, wiiere even now in heavy storms 

 the waves break upon the sunken land. Let the North Sea rise but 

 20 fathoms, and from Flamborough Head eastward dry land fills the 

 southern North Sea, save for a sliallow inlet parallel with our coast, 

 that has been scoured out a little deeper than the rest by the tidal 

 inflow from the Channel ; the Dogger Bank is now a great low island 



