THE INADEQUACY OF THE THREE-MILE LIMIT 739 



banks will, in course of time, materially reduce their produc- 

 tiveness; and the rapidity of the impoverishment will very 

 largely depend upon the intensity of the fishing and the extent 

 of the grounds. That being so, it may well be said that a 

 measure of protection on the banks which are still productive 

 along foreign coasts would be in the permanent interest of 

 the English trawling industry itself, as well as in the interest 

 of the coast population. 1 



On some of those coasts the local population are dependent 

 on the fish they catch on the neighbouring grounds, which 

 are often of limited extent, and it is reasonable and just that 

 they should endeavour to preserve this supply for their own 

 use and advantage. At Iceland, for example, the area of the 

 possible fishing-grounds between the ordinary three-mile limit 

 and a depth of 200 metres (or 109 fathoms), including places 

 where trawling is not practicable, amounts to about 36,600 

 square miles, compared with nearly 312,000 square miles be- 

 tween the same limits off the British Isles. 2 It was recently 

 stated in the House of Lords, by Lord Heneage, that the Ice- 

 landers, with the view of preserving their fishing-grounds, 

 a few years ago brought forward a law in the Althing, or 

 local Parliament, to extend the limit of exclusive fishing to 

 seven miles around their coast. It was also said that in 

 1901 they passed laws for enclosing extra-territorial waters. 



1 Mr G. L. Alward, one of the leading and most experienced trawl-owners 

 of Grimsby, who was invited to take part in a discussion on sea fisheries in the 

 Zoological Section of the British Association in 1906, thus referred to the subjcet. 

 He said : " There was no doubt that the North Sea was deteriorated as a fishing- 

 ground, and in order to maintain an adequate supply they had had to explore fresh 

 fields. They had shifted the trawling-grounds to the coasts of Faroe, Iceland, and 

 Norway, while others had had to go out into the Atlantic, to the Bay of Biscay, 

 and to the coast of Morocco. But if they had exhausted the 147,000 square miles 

 of the North Sea, every mile of which had been fished, and they fished out the 

 area between Norway and Faroe and Iceland, not more than forty or fifty thou- 

 sand square miles, with the same rapidity, they had to look forward to nothing 

 short of a dearth of fish and a rise in value to famine prices." Aberdeen Free Press, 

 9th August 1906. 



2 According to an interesting table on a chart appended to the A nnual Report of 

 the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries for 1906 (see fig. 28), the areas, in square 

 miles, between the three-mile limit and the 200-metre line, are as follows : North 

 Sea, 152,473 ; North of Scotland (Orkney and Shetland), 18,096; West of Scot- 

 land, 32,099 ; West of Ireland, 9066 ; Irish Sea, 15,743 ; Southwards of Ireland, 

 50,416 ; Bristol Channel, 8613 ; English Channel, 25,238. The area at Iceland is 

 36,608, and at the Faroes, 4949 square miles. 



