3524 THE SPONGES 



raiiean. In that year a member of a Paris firm of Mediterranean sponge merchants 

 was wrecked on one of the Bahamas, in the course of a passage from Jamaica to 

 Europe. He noticed that a great number of sponges were in use among the in- 

 habitants, and was told that they were obtained from the waters round the island. 

 On his return to Paris he arranged for consignments, and thus the Bahamas trade 

 became established. In 1849 a cargo of sponges from Key West, Florida, arrived 

 in New York, and was about to be thrown away as unsaleable; the cargo was. pur- 

 chased, however, by a firm, which established a branch at the new locality, and 

 thereby founded the Florida trade. 



When the inhabitants of the Bahamas and the Florida Keys found it would pay 

 to collect sponges, their spirit of enterprise was awakened, and putting off in search, 

 they continually found reefs overgrown with crops. Gradually the vessels increased 

 in number and tonnage, till the fleets amounted to seven or eight hundred craft, 

 mostly schooner rigged, and of from five to twenty-five tons burden. All over 

 this region one method alone is in use, that of hooking the sponges up with 

 a three-pronged fork provided with a very long wooden handle. Each boat 

 carries a varying number of small dingheys. Two men are apportioned to a 

 dinghey, one for sculling, the other for hooking. The hooker leans over the 

 side, and views the surface of the reefs through a sponge glass. Great skill is 

 required in sponge fishing; indeed, the difficulty of hooking up a small dark 

 object in twenty or thirty feet of water, and often in a strong current, can be 

 imagined. Once a week the fleet returns to some selected locality to unload its 

 cargo into a crawl, a staked inclosure covered with a few feet of water. The 

 preceding week's catch, with the skin and fleshy matter almost rotted off, is now 

 beaten, squeezed, hung in strings to dry in the sun, and finally packed in bales, 

 and sent to Nassau and Key West. Sponges used to be sold by weight, but owing 

 to the tendency to absorb moisture, and to the prevalence of the fraudulent 

 practice of weighting them with sand, they are now valued according to size, 

 shape, quality of fibre, etc. The fine toilet sponge is found chiefly along the 

 eastern shores of the Mediterranean, from Trieste round by the Levant to Tripoli. 

 The distribution of the bath sponge extends from East Greece, along the Levant 

 and the North- African shore, and the zimocca sponge from the Levant to Tripoli. 

 Good qualities of commercial sponges grow in the Red Sea; the Great Barrier 

 Reef off the northeast of Australia would probably yield a large supply. The 

 bulk of the harvest of sponges from Bahamas and Florida consists of common 

 bath sponges. 



