82 NORTH SEA FISHERS AND FIGHTERS 



the kettle and the victuals. The time came when the 

 " busters "were produced; but I let them pass. With 

 all possible respect and goodwill towards the cook, who, 

 poor little fellow, hovered near, with folded bare arms 

 and exposed chest, to see the crowning glory of his toil, 

 I could not grapple with them for I had seen them 

 made. 



In these days, if my young friend of the Grimsby 

 smack is still alive and following the calling of the 

 Dogger, he must be a brawny man, probably master of 

 a steam -trawler. If so, he has witnessed one of the most 

 amazing of modern revolutions the change from sail to 

 steam in fishing and as he dines in his comfortable cabin 

 he must call to mind the crude days of wood and canvas, 

 and recall, as he might conjure up a dream, the placid 

 days off Heligoland, when, both of us younger by many 

 years than we are to-day, we looked at the hull-like lump 

 of land rising from the North Sea, and in our different 

 ways pictured the paths before us. At that time Heligo- 

 land was a British possession, soon to be given to a 

 foreign power and fortified, and to cease to be a place 

 where British North Sea men, who were by way of being 

 roystering blades, could land and spend the hours when 

 calms made trawling impossible and brought much devil- 

 ment into being. 



And the great, bluff, burly skipper the man who 

 could not either read or write, but who knew his Dogger 

 as well as the Biblical student knows the Scriptures. 

 What of him ? I wonder if his gloomy forecast that the 

 Dogger, which had held him so long, would keep him, 

 has been realised ; or if that other foreboding has come 

 to pass that when he was incapable of going to sea he 



