OF ALL COUNTRIES. 509 



CHAPTER V. 



DEEP SEA FISHING AT THE PRESENT DAY. 



Ho ! come, and bring away the nets. 



Pericles. 



DEEP SEA FISHING, at least in its general form, is a 

 creation almost of the last half-century. In Grimsby, for 

 example, the capital, if we may so call it, of the deep sea 

 trade, thirty years ago the imports of this kind hardly 

 equalled those of Southport or Grossmont at the present 

 day, and nowhere nearly approached Hartlepool or Filey. 

 In 1854 the number of tons conveyed inland was 453. 

 Ten years later it had decupled, in 1869 it had become 

 sixtyfold, and by 1881 had attained a growth of nearly 

 one hundredfold in little more than five-and-twenty years. 

 Trawling is the method to which this great increase is 

 principally due, and it may be well here to describe the 

 peculiarities of the different kinds of nets used in deep 

 sea fishing. On the open sea there are two kinds of nets 

 chiefly in use : the trawl for those fish, such as turbot, 

 which love to hide themselves at the bottom of the ocean, 

 and the drag for such as like the herring prefer the 

 surface. The trawl is in fact a kind of sea plough, one 

 essential object of it being to stir up the inmates of those 

 deep recesses, and it is fashioned with a view to effect this 

 purpose, no less than to capture them when once driven 



