594 
NATURE 
[AucustT 8, 1912 
Cornishmen, the Dutchmen, and the Norsemen, were 
long pre-eminent, and the Dutch the greatest of all. 
In the days of Queen Elizabeth, before ever a herring 
was caught by our own people, the Dutch sent to our 
coasts a yearly herring-fleet of 3000 sail. It was 
Dutch colonists, under William of Orange, who first 
taught Englishmen to trawl at Brixham; and to that 
Brixham fishery, and the direct influence and_ par- 
ticipation of the men who conducted it, all our modern 
trawling industry harks back. And again, in Scot- 
land, our prosperous east coast fishery, far different 
from the struggling efforts of the western Celt, owes 
its origin to those Dutch and Frisian settlers who (as 
history and tradition tell us) came over under Mary 
Queen of Scots and her son, and who still retain no 
small trace of their origin in speech and custom and 
costume. These good people present a problem to the 
administrator, when (as oftentimes) they cling not 
only to their old ways, but, resisting all economic 
tendencies to concentration, cleave to the ancient 
homes of their forefathers, and make heroic efforts, 
and demand the like heroism on the part of his 
Majesty’s Treasury, to fit their multitudinous petty 
havens to the needs of an enlarged and altered 
industry. 
It is different with the great centres of the modern 
trawl-fishery, the site of which is determined by deep- 
water harbours, by proximity to a great capital, or by 
convenient railway facilities. These conditions greatly 
limit the number of trawling centres, of which 
Grimsby and Hull, Aberdeen and Granton, Ostende 
and Ymuiden, Geestemunde and Cuxhaven, are the 
chief. Proximity to the fishing-grounds matters less 
to these distant voyagers than to the herring-fisher. 
With him, ports contiguous to the successive seasonal 
fishing-grounds are a prime necessity, and railway 
facilities are of minor importance; for the fish must 
be cured in haste—and may be exported at leisure, 
generally (because most cheaply) by sea. And so it is 
that all down our east coast the herring ports are 
numerous, and are often remote from the greater 
centres of population. 
The North Sea is a very shallow sea. We can sail 
from here to Hamburg, save for one little bit, in water 
under 20 fathoms deep, and from here to the north 
of Denmark in water that never exceeds 30 fathoms. 
Suppose the bottom of the North Sea to be raised 
up by successive stages—raise it by 10 fathoms, or 12 
paces (just the breadth of this street from wall to 
wall), and immediately the islands of the Frisian shore 
are linked together in an even coast line, while a 
belt ten miles broad or more is added to the 
Danish coast; a multitude of low islands spring up off 
the Belgian and East Anglian coasts, and a greater 
island rises up in the Dogger Bank, where even now 
in heavy storms the waves break upon the sunken 
land. Let the North Sea rise but 20 fathoms, and 
from Flamborough Head eastward dry land fills the 
southern North Sea, save for a shallow inlet, parallel 
with our coast, that has been scoured out a little 
deeper than the rest by the tidal inflow from the 
Channel; the Dogger Bank is now a great low island 
some 150 miles long. Let our upheaval proceed some 
10 fathoms more, or 30 fathoms in all, and now from 
the Yorkshire coast straight across to the most 
northerly point. of Denmark the new shore line 
appears; and all to the south of it, an area of some 
70,000 sauare miles, is now dry land, save for a few 
small lakes, chief among which are the celebrated 
Silver Pits, where nowadays the soles congregate. 
Once more let the bottom of the North Sea rise up 
so fathoms, or 300 ft. (not yet near the height of St. 
Paul’s), and the new coast line now runs round the 
Orkney Islands, and then from somewhere about 
Peterhead through the Skagerack to Sweden, with ! 
NO. 2232, VOL. 89] 
one conspicuous dip or bend, that under the condi- 
tions we have imagined would form a sort of new 
Zuyder Zee. Northward, far beyond the 50-fathom 
line, and away to the north of Shetland, the com- 
paratively shallow bottom of the North Sea slopes 
downwards to the north, until we reach the 100- 
fathom line a little to the north of Shetland. But 
some sixty miles from the Norwegian coast this 100- 
fathom line bends southward, until it, like our other 
contour lines, enters the Skagerack. The deep groove 
that surrounds the Norwegian coast, and cuts off from 
it the comparatively shallow plateau of the North Sea, 
isa geographical feature of great importance, the mean- 
ing and history of which have not yet been fully told. 
The 100-fathom line is succeeded to the northward at no 
great distance by the 200-fathom line, and beyond this 
the depths increase rapidly, for we are now at the edge 
of the continental shelf, and the old abyss of ocean is 
but a stone’s throw away. Elevate, then, in imagina- 
tion, the bottom of the North Sea by, say 150 or 200 
fathoms (rather less or rather more than the length 
of Albemarle Street), and all the North Sea to beyond 
the Shetlands and all the British Islands and the 
British seas become part of the Continent; all that 
remains of the North Sea is a large lake, immensely 
deep, that occupies the greater part of the present 
Skagerack, and continues the chain of great deep 
cold lakes, with their ancient faunas, still showing 
traces of their origin from the sea, that are so con- 
spicuous a feature of the geography of Sweden. 
Of all these physical features the greatest is that 
which is represented, or approximately represented, 
by the roo-fathom line. The geographer traces it 
along all the western coasts of the Old World, from 
the north of Norway to southern Africa. It encircles 
our own islands, it broadens here and there, it is the 
edge of our continental area, and beyond it the Con- 
tinent plunges into the abyss of ocean. The geologist 
sees in it, in all probability, the actual coast line of 
early Tertiary times after the great changes that had 
raised part of the bed of the cretaceous ocean 
into dry land: the coast line of an age 
when broad plains or chalky downs stretched 
over the North Sea. And now that subse- 
quent and successive changes, in which again 
subsidence and upheaval have alternated, and the great 
ice sheet has scraped and scooped the North Sea and 
filled its bed to unknown depths with its drift and 
clay, now over the shallow slopes and levels that the 
1oo-fathom line bounds, the fisherman finds his place 
and calling. Here and there in the world, as, for 
instance, off the coast of Portugal, are isolated deep- 
sea fisheries; here and there the adventurous trawler, 
or halibut-fisher, plies his craft on the deeper slopes 
of the continental shelf to 200 fathoms, or a little 
more; but, broadly speaking, the 1oo-fathom line 
bounds and limits the ordinary operations of the 
fisherman. Where that continental shelf narrows, the 
fisherman’s field is narrowed; where it widens out, 
he finds an ampler range; and in the region of the 
White Sea and the Murman coast, the whole of our 
North Sea area, in a belt round our western coasts, 
a broad girdle round France, a narrow one_ off 
Portugal and Spain, here and there in Africa, as off 
Morocco and down in Greyhound Bay—in all of these 
regions the continental shelf or plateau extends its 
rich and productive bed a long way from the land, 
and vet but a little way into the territorv of Ocean. 
What I have called the gateways of the North Sea 
are not merely highways of commerce, they are the 
doors by which Ocean itself enters into the narrow 
seas, bringing with it its quickening influence on life, 
and its regulating and ameliorating effects on climate; 
and there have been times when. one or another, or 
all, of these gates were closed. It is to the opening 
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