178 SEINE VERSUS DRIFT. 



The uncertainty of seineing is very great ; the quan- 

 tity of pilchards shipped from St. Ives alone, for instance, 

 has varied within the last quarter of a century from seven 

 thousand to nearly thirty thousand hogsheads. In 1847, 

 so large was the catch, that some of the seines had to be 

 kept in the water a fortnight, from want of sufficient 

 hands to take up the fish. As a matter of course, the 

 price is also very variable : fresh fish, from two shillings 

 a long hundred down as low as sixpence ; fumadoes, or 

 cured fish, from eighty-five shillings to thirty-five shillings 

 a hogshead of fifty-two gallons, holding about three thou- 

 sand fish. 



The drifters do not confine themselves to the Cornish 

 waters. Their well-formed boats may be found on the 

 Irish coast and in St. George's Channel ; nay, they even 

 push through the Caledonian Canal into the North Sea. 

 It is the herring that takes them into these strange 

 waters ; but they are careful to return in time for the 

 pilchards. 



The scene when the drift-boats come ashore, has all the 

 liveliness and something of the grotesquenfcss of a panto- 

 mime, though it is much more serious. We find it so 

 graphically described by a contemporary writer (in the 

 immortal Maga), that we cannot do better than transfer 

 his description to our pages, unaltered : 



Not only is everybody busy, but every one is shouting 

 or screaming (your Cornish are un peuple criard) ; the 

 jowslers (hawkers), who have driven down from inland, 

 cracking their whips and yelling out the highest they will 

 give per hundred ; the wives eager to learn what sort of 

 take it has been ; everybody pitching his voice at that 

 sing-song which so baffles the comprehension of the mono- 



