THE ABUSE OF THE SCAPHANDER IN THE SPONGE FISHERIES. 
a 
By CH. FLEGEL, 
Member of the Austrian Fishery Society, Vienna. 
as 
{Translated from the German.] 
I have the honor to report to the Fourth International Fishery Congress 
in Washington the unfortunate condition of the sponge divers of the Mediter- 
ranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. I do this with the well-founded hope that 
I shall meet here the active sympathy these sufferers so badly need. 
A condition of this sort, of course, never arises without a precedent abuse 
or evil, and this rule is borne out in the sponge fisheries. The evil in this case 
lay and lies in inordinate greed of gain, uncontrolled by law, unchecked by 
any national regard for the general weal. Filled with this greed, which stops 
at nothing, men found it good forty-two years ago to adopt for the fishing of 
sponges the diving apparatus invented for quite other purposes. Although death 
and illness have ensued, these people continue this abuse at the present time 
so far as they are permitted. It is true that they did not succeed in winning 
the whole world over to their method; they met rather with strong resistance 
from their own compatriots, and thus a hot struggle began which has not yet 
ended, though fortunately the evil has lost ground before the good. 
While in the island of Kalymnos in 1892, I accidentally learned of the 
sufferings of the sponge divers by asking a cripple the cause of his condition. 
The evils and abuses disclosed by his reply and confirmed by subsequent inves- 
tigations of the subject led me to dedicate myself to the cause without in the 
least realizing that it would absorb years of my life. 
The sponge fishermen everywhere lived in health and happiness so long 
as they gathered sponges by means of the three time-honored methods, hygienic 
and consistent with the public welfare; i. e., by means of diving naked, and by 
fishing with the hook and the dragnet. Since the scaphander was introduced 
in Greece and Turkey in 1866 numerous evils have befallen these formerly 
well-conditioned fishing people. There have been frequent cases of sudden 
and premature death, as well as of chronic diseases, worse than death, of youths 
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