MISCELLANEOUS. 1185 



is easy. The mackerel fishery is the least laborious and the most profit- 

 able. 



I know something of the energy and skill of our fishermen, and 

 appreciate them highly; but I feel quite certain that under a system of 

 ad valorem duties their competitors in Nova Scotia and elsewhere in 

 British America will, ere long, supplant them in our own markets. As 

 has been already remarked, the colonists may take every kind of fish, 

 in any desirable quantities, at their very homes, and without the 

 expense of large vessels or extensive outfits; while the pursuit in the 

 more distant haunts of cod and mackerel is attended with less cost 

 than from the ports of Massachusetts and Maine for the reason that 

 the labor, timber, iron, cordage, and canvass, necessary for the con- 

 struction and equipment of vessels, and the salt, hooks and lines, for 

 their outfits, are much cheaper. These advantages will be acknowl- 

 edged at once, and unless the observation of many years has led me 

 astray, they are too great to allow of the present reduced scale of 

 impost. 



Severely as the late change of policy with regard to the admission 

 of foreign fish has been felt by all branches of our fisheries, the mack- 

 erel catchers have suffered the most. They still pursue the employ- 

 ment in the hope of the restoration of specific duties, and because then* 

 local position and other circumstances have not, as yet, allowed them 

 to adopt any other. As was said by Fisher Ames, soon after the organ- 

 ization of the present national government, when appealing for protec- 

 tion to our fishermen, " they are too poor to stay too poor to remove." 



It is even so. During certain months of the year our vessels seek 

 the mackerel in the waters of Nova Scotia and other British posses- 

 sions ; but as our treaty with Great Britain requires them to keep three 

 miles from the land, the fishery in the narrow straits, by the means of 

 nets and seines, is in colonial hands exclusively. The quantities of 

 fish which the colonists sometimes take in nets and seines are immense. 

 It is not long since forty thousand barrels were caught in three harbors 

 of Nova Scotia in a single season. This quantity is more than one-tenth 

 of the whole obtained by all the vessels of Massachusetts in the most pros- 

 perous year. Yet these three harbors can be entered in sailing a dis- 

 tance of twelve miles. The owners of American vessels often lose the 

 use of their property, and the expenses of outfits besides. The pro- 

 prietors of estates in the colonies where mackerel seines are used, 

 receive, on the other hand, hundreds of barrels of the fish caught in the 

 waters appurtenant thereto for the rent of these waters, and the privi- 

 lege of dressing, salting, and packing on the shores. To secure two, 

 four, six, and even eight hundred barrels at a time, it is only necessary 

 to set a seine, to tend it, and, at the proper moment, to draw it to the 

 shore. Competition without protection, when such rewards as these 

 await the colonial fishermen and land owners, who expend nothing 

 whatever for vessels, and whose whole outlay involves little beyond 

 the cost and wear of seines and the loss of time for short periods in a 

 season, is, I think, impossible. The lot of those of our countrymen 

 who live by the use of the hook and line is hard enough at best. The 

 battles which they have fought, and which, in the course of eA^ents, 

 they may be required to fight, ought to prevent their utter ruin. The 

 topic will be resumed elsewhere. 



92909 S. Doc. 870, 61-3, vol 3 36 



