PREFACE 



In the late Eighties I made my first trip to the 

 North Sea iishiug-grounds in a Grimsby smack, a 

 beam-trawler which sailed and joined her fleet, 

 working around Heligoland, at that time a British 

 possession. For some days and nights we shot and 

 hauled our gear within sight and quite easy reach 

 of that freak island, with a handful of fisherfolk 

 and lodging-house keepers as inhabitants — a lonely 

 lump of land which jutted out of the sea and re- 

 sembled the dismantled hull of a gigantic battle- 

 ship. What I saw and heard then, thirty years ago, 

 remains with undimmed clearness in my memory. 



The fleeting system of fishing, as carried out by 

 sailing smacks, had reached its zenith, and there 

 wt-re many signs of the revolution which the intro- 

 duction of steam trawlers and drifters was to bring 

 about in the fishing industry. When from my 

 rough experiences of fishing off Heligoland I landed 

 at Billingsgate from the carrier I made the old, old 

 declaration that 1 had had enough of North Sea 

 smacks and North Sea fishing-grounds to last -my 

 life-time ; yet, as the warrior returns to the battle- 

 field, so I went back to those hard fighting zones 

 which produced the incomparable men who have 

 done so much for the salvation of civilisation ; and 

 so that I might the more fully understand and 

 sympathise with fishermen, I settled on the York- 

 shire coast for five years. 



From that time onward it was my good fortune 

 to see trawlers and drifters at work in many regions 

 — from the Shetlands southabout to the Bristol 

 Channel ; to watch them in the Atlantic, the Bay of 



