606 MISCELLANEOUS 



their other fishing tackle. Soon a great number of boats are plying 

 in every direction about the bays and coves where the fish are 

 expected. These boats contain the fishermen who go to spread their 

 nets so as to intercept the shoals of herring, when seeking to approach 

 the shore at night for the purpose of spawning. 



" The nets used by our fishermen are generally thirty fathoms long 

 by five or six wide." 



They are set in the evening, and in the morning early the fisher- 

 men visit them, take out the fish, and if necessary take the net ashore 

 to clean it. Generally, in the spring, when the fishing is good, each 

 net will take from five to ten barrels of fish during one night. 



But there is a much more expeditious mode of taking herrings than 

 with nets, and that is with seines. Seines for this purpose must be 

 of large dimensions, say from one hundred to one hundred and fifty 

 fathoms long, by from eight to eleven fathoms wide, with braces of 

 two hundred fathoms long. These seines are expensive and require 

 many hands to work them, so that it is not every fisherman that can 

 have one. There are also the purse seines which are used to fish the 

 herrings on the banks, sometimes twenty and thirty miles from 

 the shore. 



Seine-fishing for herrings is chiefly carried on by fishermen of 

 Nova Scotia, in schooners of the same tonnage as those employed in 

 the cod fishery. 



Those who fish with nets, when once they have set them in places 

 where they think the greater number of fish will pass, wait for the 

 fish to come in and get entangled. Those who fish with seines, on the 

 contrary, go out in search of the fish along the coasts they expect them 

 to approach, with the seine in a large boat, manned by eight men. 

 A score of seamen, in smaller boats, precede and follow the seine boat 

 and look out in every direction for signs of the presence of shoals of 

 herrings. If the surface of the water is agitated at any particular 

 spot, they immediately proceed there. Their cruises are frequently 

 unsuccessful. Sometimes they row for whole days without seeing 

 a single fish; but they have also their strokes of good fortune, and 

 fishermen with seines of large dimensions often take at a single haul 

 of the seine herrings enough to fill 500, 1000, 2000 or even 3000 

 barrels. One need not be surprised at such great results when one 

 reflects that herrings in a shoal are so crowded together as to almost 

 form a compact mass from the surface of the water to the bottom. 



When the seine is so much loaded with fish it cannot be hauled 

 on shore without risk of breaking it and losing the riches it contains, 

 the braces are made fast on shore and the fishermen seine with small 

 seines inside of the large one; or if the fish are very thick, they are 

 taken out with scoop nets or landing nets. 



If the weather is calm or the wind off the land, the seine may be 

 left moored in this way for several days or until all the fish have been 

 taken out of it, but if, unfortunately, a sea breeze springs up and it 

 begins to blow hard, the seine must be taken up at once or it will be 

 torn to pieces by the violence of the waves. Many thousands of bar- 

 rels of fish are lost in this way. 



Herrings are salted either round or split and packed in barrels, 

 containing 200 pounds, to be sent to the United States and West 

 Indies markets. Only a small quantity is sent to the English 

 markets. 



