The Great Home of the Cod 279 



the tanks. When the cart is loaded (it looks a singu- 

 larly disgusting cargo) the purchaser rattles off with 

 it to his shop, and in due time the dreadfully dirty 

 mass of fish passes through a series of operations 

 in back premises, often mere hovels a few feet square, 

 and reappears as windrows of bright * smoked 'addicks ' 

 on the sloping boards of the front shop. But the 

 intermediate process does not bear thinking about, 

 if we would ever eat smoked Haddock again in 

 comfort. 



But to find the Cod in all his glory it is necessary 

 to cross the Atlantic. On the north-east coasts of 

 the United States and right along the Nova Scotian 

 littoral are found great areas of comparatively shallow 

 sea, the broad Atlantic here allowing the land to rise 

 to within less than a dozen fathoms of the surface 

 in many places, and in one, the terrible Sable Island, 

 which has well been named an ocean graveyard, a long 

 snarling bank rises some few feet above the surface 

 and constitutes one of the chief dangers of the stormy 

 Nova Scotian coast. These banks vary in area from 

 a tiny patch of some ten or fifteen square miles to the 

 immense breadths of the Grand Bank off Newfound- 

 land, as large as that great island, and at one spot 

 culminating in the world famous Virgin Rocks which 

 break in a gale of wind, so nearly do they approach 

 to the surface. I do not know that any calculation 

 has ever been made of the aggregate area of all these 

 North American banks, but it must be some thousands 

 of square miles. And over the whole of them, varying 

 of course according to season, roam the placid Cod in 

 almost undisputed possession of the greatest and most 

 prolific fishing grounds in the whole world. Of course 

 other fish are found around there too, the lordly halibut 

 for instance, but as the proportion of any other fish 



