ON THE ENGLISH SEA FISHERIES. 83 
some crabs, a dozen flat fish. He considers that a single trawl 
destroys hundreds of tons of spawn yearly.” 
Another man who, for the last thirteen years, has regularly 
worked in a North Sea trawler, gave me the following evi- 
dence :—‘‘ When the trawl is hauled on board,the pockets 
will be full of soles, and a few haddocks—perhaps a turbot 
or two. Spawn will hang around the ground rope, stick out- 
side the net, and drop out of it as it is pulled up from the sea, 
and the water drains out. The bag, or cod end, will contain 
all sorts of. fish—shells, spawn, sea anemones, occasionally the 
dead body of a man, portions of bodies, some dead and stink- 
ing fish, which have been killed by other trawl nets previously 
passing over the ground. Tish, such as haddocks, gur- 
nets, &c., with their backs injured, their fins gone, their eyes 
out—plaice with their spots rubbed off. The larger the take, 
the more damaged the fish. He has sometimes thrown over- 
board as many as seven or eight baskets of fish after one haul— 
five or six hundred fish in a basket—some alive, some dead, 
some dying. At other times, there have been so many small 
and worthless fish that the bulwarks have had to be unshipped, 
and they have been swept overboard with brooms. Trawlers 
always gut turbots, soles, haddocks, and, in the summer time, 
plaice.” He stated that the fishing grounds in the North 
Sea are gradually becoming poorer. That the Silver Pits, near 
the Dogger Bank, one of the most prolific grounds in the 
English waters, do not produce one-third of the quantity they 
once did. Some grounds are altogether exhausted by the 
trawlers. Again, Mr. Dawson Campbell, of Folkestone, writes 
me:— When trawling near shore in spawning time, quantities 
of spawn are brought up by the trawl, and also large numbers 
of small fish, and these remain in the boats till the net is cleaned, 
when, of course, the greater part of them are dead. All fish, 
except flat fish, are very much disfigured by the meshes of the 
trawl; in fact, during the whiting season, these caught by the 
trawl do not fetch nearly the price that whiting caught by the 
hook and line do.” 
As regards the number of trawlers generally at work, it is 
SOL. VIAPT, I K 
