1903] FISHING OPERATIONS 137 



millions, and eat things up with extraordinary rapidity ; they 

 are submarine locusts, and vast armies of them settle on the 

 bait, or even on the live fish, and in a few hours not a remnant 

 remains of what they have attacked. 



' The small bottom fish which we catch are very ugly little 

 creatures; they have an enormous head, a protruding under 

 lip, and a gradually tapering body — rather the shape of a 

 whiting, only exaggerated. They are extremely good eating, 

 but unfortunately the majority are very small ; it takes two of 

 the largest to make a decent meal for one person, and of the 

 average size four or five will scarcely suffice. They are of the 

 genus Notathe7ita^ and I believe there is more than one species ; 

 the Weddell seals feed principally on these, but they also catch 

 other sorts, whose present habitat we cannot discover by any 

 of our fishing methods. Besides what we may call the Ant- 

 arctic whiting, our people caught a quantity of a surface fish 

 that frequented the pools and cracks in the ice during the 

 summer. This was whilst I was absent from the ship, and I 

 have neither seen nor tasted this fish, but I hear that it gave 

 very good sport. Some of the men would go out for an hour 

 or two with quite a short line and bread for bait, returning 

 with a dozen or two decent-sized fish, which report declares to 

 have been much better eating than even the whiting. Now 

 that all the cracks are frozen over we do not get a glimpse of 

 these fish, except when they are brought to view from the 

 interior of a seal. We know that there must be lots of fish 

 about from the continuance of the seals in our region, and we 

 have strong reason for supposing that there must be some of a 

 much greater size than any we have caught, but we have tried 

 all sorts of methods and all sorts of baits without success in 

 capturing anything but our whiting. 



' The seal is certainly the best fisherman, and very frequently 

 when one is captured our people have the benefit of its latest 

 prey as well as the animal itself. 



' As far as our fish-traps are concerned, I'm afraid as the 

 darkness deepens our catches are likely to get smaller and 

 smaller. Recently we have been saving up, so that the mess- 



