DESPATCHES, REPORTS, CORRESPONDENCE, ETC. 333 



for them, has led to the importation of large quantities from England, whence 

 the future supply will probably come. While purse seines and bag-nets are 

 allowed without restriction, I can see no reasonable hope of any improvement 

 ia the mackerel fishery. My present conviction is that there should be a close 

 time to cover the spawning season, and that purse seines should be prohibited 

 in Canadian waters. I have seen our salmon, shad, bass, alewives, oysters and 

 lobsters all dwindling away for want of protective laws, and now the most 

 valuable fisli of all is being exterminated by the unrestricted use of destructive 

 implements and the wanton waste of spawning fish. 



Lieutenant A. R. Gordon, R. N.. in his report for 1888, Fifth An- 

 nual Report, Department of Fisheries, 1888, Appendix "A," said: 



The purse seine is a large fine mesh net, made out of tarred cotton twine. 

 These nets were at first both clumsy and costly, but of late years not only has 

 the net been made simply perfect, but the price has been put at such a figure 

 that they have been adopted by Canadians more extensively, and entirely by 

 United States fishermen. The basis of this fishery is a schooner carrying two 

 seines and two seine boats; the seines are called the deep and shallow seines, 

 the one being about 15 and the other abowt 10 fathoms deep. 



The relation betweeen the reduced productiveness of our mackerel fishery 

 and the adoption of the purse seine is one of the problems now most urgently 

 presented for solution. 



In protecting a fishery the required conditions are : 1st. Proper means must 

 be used for the capture of fish; 2nd. These means must only be used at a 

 proper time, and the question then arises : Is the purse seine a proper means 

 of prosecuting the fishery, when used as it now is? 



In order to prevent the harrassing of the schools of unspawned fish on the 

 United States coast, a law was passed by Congress prohibiting the landing in 

 the United States of mackerel caught with a purse seine before the 1st June 

 in any year thus in practice admitting that the use of the purse spine prior 

 to that date was liable to injure the fishery. The condition of the fish which 

 prevails on the United States coast up to the 1st June is precisely that of the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence up to, say, 20th July, and therefore this date of prohibi- 

 tion, which may afford adequate protection to the fish on the United States coast, 

 affords none to those on ours. But the point is none the less established that 

 a Government, whose ruling principle of fishery legislation has been to 

 202 interfere as little as possible with the liberty of the fishermen, has defi- 

 nitely concluded that the purse seine, used prior to the spawning season, 

 is injurious to the fishery. 



Again, having further reference to this subject, Lieutenant Gordon, 

 R. N., in a special report in 1888, said : 



It frequently happens that large numbers of undersized and unmerchantable 

 fish are thus enclosed with a small percentage of good fish, so that in order to 

 save the few the large numbers which might have grown into real value are 

 uselessly and ruthlessly destroyed. In this way also quantities of herring have 

 frequently been destroyed, as they are of no use to the fishermen. 



The most serious damage which the purse seine does to the fish is, however, 

 not the capture of young and immature fish, but the killing of the parent fish 

 by fishing at improper times, before spawning. If all the parent fish which 

 come into the Gulf annually were allowed to spawn peacefully, the damage done 

 to our fishery . . . would be greatly minimized 



I am myself of opinion that nearly half of the catch made by seines in the 

 Gulf is that of unspawned fish, and this destruction of parent fish at improper 

 times, together with the wholesale and useless destruction of immature fish is 

 what has brought about the present depleted state of the mackerel fishery. 



That the use of the purse seine at improper times lies at the root of the 

 evil is the belief of nine out of ten of those whom I have interviewed, and 

 who have the means of judging; and this fishing, instead of being a steady 

 working fishery, such as it used to be in the old hook-and-line days, has now 

 become a sort of steeple chase and lottery business, in which there are few 

 prizes and many blanks; and the feeling among those men was well expressed 

 to me by the captain of one of our Nova Scotian vessels, who said : "All I want, 

 Sir is one day at the fish with these prices; I ask no more." The majority 

 of those interested are in favour of the total abolition of the purse seine, but 



