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was carried on until the beginning of this century, and 

 it was not uncommon to see a vessel with four or five 

 poles sticking out from it, to which the bait was attached. 

 That was given up, however, fifty years ago. At the 

 beginning of this century another form of apparatus came 

 into use, which was exceedingly effective for a time, and 

 it was during the prevalence of this method that the 

 great fisheries in the United States and the Canadian 

 waters sprung up which had led to so many treaties 

 from 1865 to 1870. There were from 500 to 700, or even 

 in some years 1000 American vessels in the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence fishing for mackerel, and this was called the 

 mackerel hook fishery. It was conducted in this way : the 

 fishermen took on board a hundred or more barrels of 

 a very oily, fat fish called the menhaden, something like 

 the pilchard. They ground it up fine and threw it out 

 in great quantities. The mackerel would follow this for 

 a long distance, and come up round the vessel like a 

 flock of chickens coming to be fed. Then the fishermen 

 had short lines with hooks on the ends, with which they 

 caught the mackerel and threw them over on to the deck, 

 and with a crew of 10 to 14 men the catch would some- 

 times amount to 20,000 in a day. That mode of fishing 

 was carried on for a long time, but the purse seine gra- 

 dually came into use and displaced it. It was first used 

 in 1814, but did not come into general use until 1860, 

 and there were now probably 500 of them at work. The 

 mackerel fishery had now been transferred from the Gulf 

 of St. Lawrence to off the shore waters along the coast, 

 and at the present time they followed them down to 

 Cape Hatteras. The mackerel on the other side of the 

 Atlantic had definite migrations, coming north in the 

 spring of the year, when the fishermen followed them 

 until August, when they were in the Gulf of Maine, then 



