TRAWLING. 43 



watching and waiting by wives and mothers on shore, 

 some of the smacks return and report that one or more 

 of the fleet have not been seen or heard of since the 

 gale that perhaps a boat has been picked up, or float- 

 ing wreckage identified as belonging to a fishing craft, 

 then the truth comes home in all its bitterness, that the 

 missing trawl smacks and their hardy crews will never 

 again be seen.* 



The depth of water in which the trawlers work is 

 generally from twenty to thirty fathoms ; very rarely 

 in as much as fifty fathoms, and then only in one or 

 two particular localities. The most important and 

 extensive trawling grounds are in the North Sea ; and 

 among the numerous grounds in the neighbourhood of 

 the Doggerbank, to which names have been given, and 

 which are resorted to year after year by hundreds of 

 trawlers, according to the season, are the Inner and 

 Outer Well Banks, the Great Silver Pit, and Botany 

 Gut. The Great Silver Pit was discovered in a very 

 severe winter, about 1843. Trawlers were then only 

 feeling their way in the North Sea, and the vessels 

 which worked there were very few. But in the course 

 of their explorations they came on this particular 

 locality, and for many miles in an easterly and westerly 

 direction, the soles, then driven into deep water by the 

 extreme cold, had congregated in such myriads, that 

 the oldest trawler had never seen such a sight as was 

 presented by the trawl nets, after being worked over 



* Since the above was written, thirty-nine trawl smacks, with 

 crews of 228 men and boys, have been totally lost in the North 

 Sea. It is believed that this unprecedented loss of fishing craft 

 took place during one terrible gale, in January 1877, when 

 upwards of 100 other trawlers were more or less disabled. 



