OUR FISHERIES 77 



VII. Destruction of competitors, such as black-backed 

 gulls, cormorants, porpoises, sharks, etc. 



Each and all of these measures, preventive or otherwise, 

 may be regarded as open to criticism. 



I. The closure of inshore areas is subject to three serious 

 objections. In the first place, there is insufficient policing as it 

 is, and whenever any suggestion is made for utilising gunboats 

 for the purpose, naval men raise an outcry that it is beneath the 

 dignity of His Majesty's Navy to protect flat-fish. Again, even 

 if trawlers were debarred from these inshore areas, the ground 

 would be simply covered with long-lines, which are at present 

 kept away solely by fear of the trawl tearing up and entangling 

 their gear. There would be nothing to prevent them using much 

 smaller hooks than they do at present, and thus catching many 

 of the small flat-fish that now die uselessly in the trawl. Lastly, 

 it is found by experience that inshore grounds closed to trawling 

 are, after a few years, ruined as fish nurseries by the accumu- 

 lation of rubbish and debris of every kind. A familiar instance 

 of this result of prohibiting trawling may be found in Plymouth 

 Sound, where, thanks partly to the mud-hoppers which, quite 

 against all rule, deposit the dredged mud only a short distance 

 from the breakwater, there has of late years been so great an 

 accummulation that the water is yearly more and more shallow, 

 the young fish are choked by the mud, and there is a most 

 unpleasant ground swell which was unknown there twenty 

 years ago. 



II. The extension of the three-mile limit would not merely 

 increase the difficulty, already too great, of efficient policing, 

 besides being open to both the other objections cited in the 

 foregoing paragraph, but it would be a dead letter unless 

 supported by the other Governments concerned. Nay, it 

 would, as has been strikingly illustrated in the case of a wide 

 zone closed to Scotch (but not, of course, to foreign) trawlers 

 by the Fishery Board of that country, be exceedingly unjust to 

 our own men. Unless, that is to say, the French and Dutch 



