ni GREAT CATCHES 125 



It used sometimes to be said of great catches, 

 that there was a herring in every mesh, until it 

 occurred to some one to reckon up the meshes in a 

 sixty-fathom net (scale, thirty-two meshes to the 

 yard), and they were found to number not far 

 short of a million. With a fleet of a dozen such 

 nets, between ten and eleven million meshes are 

 shot out in order to catch — perhaps half-a-dozen 

 mackerel or herrings. Catch, I say, meaning it 

 in the active sense, just as one might say that a 

 hook catches fish, but in a landing net they are 

 caught; for drift nets do not simply enclose the 

 mackerel and herrings; they mesh them. Seine 

 nets, which are shot around the fish, enclose 

 them. Trawls scrape them up. Trammels, on 

 the other hand, consist of three walls of net 

 hanging closely side by side, the two outer walls 

 made of very large square meshes, the inside wall 

 of small-scale net, so that when a fish swims 

 through an outer mesh on one side, it hits the 

 small-scale net in the centre, carries it on through 

 a large mesh on the other side, and so finds 

 itself trapped in a narrow-necked pouch of small 

 net. But a trammel is moored near rocks, and 

 is seldom over fifty fathoms long, if so much; 

 whereas a fleet of drift-nets, on its way up and 



