FISHERIES OF THE PACIFIC COAST. 
151 
Italians, too, are more or less guilty of fishing with prohibited apparatus, but they 
do not so persistently violate the law as the Chinese. 
There seems to be no way of ascertaining the number of sturgeon trawls and 
fyke nets employed on the rivers and bays adjacent to San Francisco Bay ; but, 
judging from the frequent reports coming from different sources, it is to be presumed 
that illegal fishing is followed considerably. The quantity and kinds of fish which 
the Chinese of San Francisco expose for sale and export would indicate that a large 
percentage of their food-fish are caught by illicit methods. 
Preparation of products . — The curing- of fishery products for exporta- 
tion is carried on during the entire fishing season. The fish are dried 
in the same manner as has been noticed in discussing Chinese methods 
of curing elsewhere, and scarcely anything is too minute to be excluded. 
Quantities of fish from 1 to 2 inches in length are dried for exportation.* 
®rying shrimp for China. 
The special feature of curing is the preparation of shrimp, which ap- 
pear to be the most important object of fishery to the Chinese on San 
Francisco Bay and adjacent waters. Wilcox states that the vats in 
which shrimp are boiled, as observed by him at several of the camps, 
are very primitive and quite different from those heretofore described.! 
He noticed that a hole was first scooped out of the side of a hill or steep 
bank for the fireplace, and in this is placed the boiling vat or tank sup- 
ported on a rudely built base-work of stones. The vat was 6 feet long 
on top, 5 feet on the bottom, 3 feet 4 inches wide, and about 2 feet 
deep. It had wooden sides and ends and a sheet-iron bottom bent up 
- * Alexander says: “This work is sometimes performed iu a very discreet manner, 
especially when an unusual amount of illicit fishing has been going on.” 
tThe kettle for boiling the shrimp is a rectangular iron tank fi feet long by 4 feet 
wide and 2 feet deep, with a fireplace underneath. (The Fisheries and Fishery Indus- 
tries of the United States, p. 808: “The Shrimp and Prawn Fisheries of the Pacific 
Coast,” by Richard Rathbun.) 
