22 INTRODUCTORY 



our fisher-folk, as their work in lifeboats and 

 in mine-sweeping bears witness. Many of 

 these excellent, industrious and fearless men 

 are total abstainers, and deeply religious. The 

 bulwark of the nation, they have never been 

 more valuable than they are now, and it is 

 the herring fishery, " the fruitful nursery of able 

 seamen for the navy and mercantile marine," 

 which has trained them to be the safeguard 

 of Britain to-day. 



The seas around our shores teem with fish. 

 Sir John Lawes once stated that an acre of 

 sea off the East Coast yields as much good food 

 for human consumption as a hundred acres of 

 Northamptonshire grass-land ; and the most 

 valuable food to be found in our seas is the 

 herring (Clupea harengus). 



The market value of the herrings brought 

 in to the Aberdeenshire coast in a single season 

 was stated some years ago to exceed the annual 

 rental of the land of the whole county of Aber- 

 deen, and the North Sea alone produces more fish 

 than all the other fishing grounds exploited by 

 Europeans put together. In 1908 it yielded 

 about 1,000,000 tons of fish, of which more than 

 half (57 per cent.) or 38 per cent, of the whole 

 value, were herrings caught in drift nets. Great 

 Britain catches and brings to its ports two- 

 thirds of all the herrings caught, and nearly 

 all the fish caught with the trawl ; yet, 

 although we are the greatest capturers of 

 herrings in the world, we import about 40 per 



