FISHING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 



The pilot-fish, as our sailors call it, resembles the 

 mackerel in size, marking, and flavour, and can be trawled 

 with more ease than anything except a herring, for, in 

 small batches, it will follow a ship for a thousand miles. 

 But fishermen have a superstition that there is a secret 

 understanding between itself and the shark, for where one 

 is the other is usually not far off. 



Almost all varieties of sharks, except the Greenlander, 

 are represented in these waters : the fox-shark, the 

 hammer-head, the white, the blue, etc. The last is the 

 fisherman's pet abomination, for it not only eats the fish 

 that he is wanting to catch, varying its diet with a human 

 meal when circumstances permit, but it will bite a mouth- 

 ful out of a full net (generally about half the catch), and 

 swallow fish and meshes with gusto. The shark is shot 

 and harpooned for the sake of his oil and the well-being 

 of the community, and the Levant traders make a con- 

 siderable sum annually over the sale of shagreen, which is 

 supposed to be shark-skin dressed, but is more often the 

 hide of camels, donkeys, and horses. 



Two other net-destroyers are the pristes, or saw-fish, 

 whose toothed snout is familiar to most of us ; and the 

 celebrated sword-fish. This giant his body is fourteen 

 feet long and his proboscis another seven is an un- 

 reasonable beast. He does not care about fish as food, in 

 fact, he lives on seaweed, yet is never so happy as when 

 breaking up a shoal and frightening fish away from his 

 neighbourhood ; and, when he happens to take up a 

 position in front of the net, this propensity of his has 

 rather a disastrous effect, for other fish dare not come 



152 



