The Journal of a Sporting Nomad 
vacuum set up in cooling. You can hear them 
popping all around you by the dozen, yet the 
eagle-eye of John Chinaman sees a can the top 
of which remains convex instead of concave; 
this is put in the retort again until it performs its 
part satisfactorily. After the cans have cooled 
they are taken to a man in a long shed, who puts 
on the labels—I was going to say automatically, 
for he was almost more than human, the rate 
at which he pasted and stuck on the printed 
matter being extraordinary. He was surrounded 
by stacks of unlabelled cans. The pile by his side 
grew so rapidly that I think he astonished me 
by his activity more than all the rest of the 
processes put together, for he pasted labels at 
the rate of seventeen a minute, whilst I, unknown 
to him, timed him by my watch. There only 
remains to put the cans into cases for the opera- 
tion to be complete. At Snug Harbour there lay — 
a full-rigged sailing ship, which at the end of the 
short season was laden full up with the result of 
the catch. In this instance the cargo consisted 
of 36,500 cases; there were four dozen cans in 
a case, and each can contained one pound of 
salmon, or, roughly speaking, 1,752,000 pounds 
of fish altogether. This was the output of one 
cannery only; there were plenty more giving 
similar results. I could not help wondering if 
the fecundity of these salmon, enormous as it is, 
was sufficient to withstand this gigantic strain. 
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