356 CHANNEL ISLANDS OF CALIFORNIA 



self, as he cannot match cleverness with the Japanese. 

 He is too fat to dive, too clumsy to swim, and he would 

 freeze if in the water five or six hours; again, he is 

 afraid of the sharks that never come. So he goes 

 out with a chisel on the end of a long pole, and 

 looks down into the water from a comfortable boat 

 through a water glass, the kind the Japanese carry. 

 He sees a shell, pries it off, then stabs it with a 

 barbed hook, and lifts it up. This is the American 

 plan, — slow, ten times as slow as the system of the 

 Japanese, who, until the American discovered it, 

 went down in a regular armor and walked into the 

 zone of the abalone; then he took them by the 

 armful, literally looting the entire Pacific coast. What 

 they are taking now is the remnant after years of 

 looting. 



Twenty years ago I landed at San Clemente Island 

 and found that a clever old Chinese genius was carry- 

 ing on a twofold business, making it pay both going 

 and coming. The old Chinaman was a smuggler, but 

 on the surface he was an abalone fisherm.an. He made 

 his headquarters on San Clemente Island, a place 

 rarely visited in winter. Some one who owned a little 

 schooner brought Chinamen up the coast from Mexico 

 and landed them at San Clemente — an easy thing to 

 do when the Government had only one revenue cutter 

 on the coast, and that up north all the time. As soon 

 as the men were landed they began to collect aba- 

 lones, and the day I stumbled on their camp they 

 had hundreds piled up in heaps — shells and meat. 

 Upon seeing me a number of men ran for a big tent. 

 I ran after them, and when I reached the tent I threw 

 open the fly. They were a demoralized lot of smug- 



