FISHING IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 



near. He is a wonderfully fast swimmer, as may be seen 

 when he is fleeing from a shark, and is perhaps the most 

 powerful of all fish. He will swim straight through a 

 full net, tearing up the anchors or snapping the tow-lines ; 

 sometimes he is shot, and his flesh is supposed to be par- 

 ticularly nutritious, especially if he is young. 



Passing downwards to Sicily and Sardinia we find the 

 inhabitants possessing a monopoly in tunny-fishing. That 

 monopoly, by the way, is only of recent date, for these 

 curiosities used to be caught in great numbers by the 

 Andalusian fishermen and also by the Turks. 



The tunny (Greek thuno, to dart along) is a giant 

 mackerel, dark blue above, white below, and silver on the 

 sides, measuring anything from ten to twenty feet long, 

 and sometimes weighing as much as half a ton. It is not 

 quite peculiar to the Mediterranean, for there is a species 

 found off the east coast of the United States which the 

 Americans call the albicore and the horse-mackerel. 



In Sicily and Sardinia it is caught very much as the 

 Sicilian Greeks captured it, seven hundred years B.C., only 

 with perhaps less assiduity, by means of nets and 

 harpoons. Like other creatures that shoal, they can- 

 not do without betraying their whereabouts, and a man 

 perched on an eminence can detect from a great distance 

 the pale brown blotches which a crowd of them would 

 create on the water-surface. In spring and summer the 

 fish come within a mile of the shore for spawning, and it 

 is then that the tunny-harvest is made. 



A coarse-meshed net, more than a mile long, is carried 

 out to sea, and one end of it moored, the other being 



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