286 LABRADOR 
have to a humble corner on a fishmonger’s slab.’ During 
his life he seems singularly free from diseases, but blindness 
and rickets (unaccompanied by fever) have been found not 
infrequently. The blindness may be due to mechanical 
injuries or to exposure to too much light during the long 
days of the north. Rickety fish often have humped backs. - 
The largest codfish of which I have record on this coast 
scaled one hundred and two pounds, and was five feet six 
inches long. The record on the English coast is seventy- 
eight pounds, with length of five feet eight inches; this fish 
was caught in 1755,and was sold for the sum of one shilling. 
The largest recorded cod on the Newfoundland Banks was 
caught by Captain Stephen May in 1838; the weight, after 
the fish was gutted, was one hundred and thirty-six pounds ! 
Another cod holds the record on the American coast; 
he was caught by Captain Atwood, who found him to scale 
one hundred and sixty pounds. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence 
and on the east coast of Labrador, the fish are of smaller 
average size than on the banks off Newfoundland and the 
United States. The fish from the far north, near Cape 
Chidley, are both shorter and thinner than those taken at 
the Strait of Belle Isle. The average Labrador cod taken 
in the trap-net is about twenty inches long, and weighs 
between three and four pounds. Those caught on hook 
and line in the autumn are much larger and heavier. 
The monster cod once caught off Rockall and the Hebrides 
in the early days of those fisheries have disappeared. Pre- 
sumably they held a kind of monopoly of all food that came 
along, and thus assumed the first chances in swallowing 
baited hooks. It may be noted that the cod is never large 
enough to be completely free from the danger of being eaten 
