MR. A. H. PATTERSON ON A DECAYED TRAWL-FISHERY. 27 
in it, making about four voyages during the year. It was 
a hazardous calling, owing to the depredations of foreign 
war vessels ; for their better protection the trawlers were 
convoyed to and fro by our ships of war. The fish were 
salted, and a proportion of the catches had to be surrendered 
for the use of the king’s household, and for the victualling of 
the Royal Navy — a species of income tax that was undoubtedly 
evaded whenever possible. 
From Frank Buckland’s report on “ The Fisheries of 
Norfolk ” (1875), we gather that some forty odd years previous 
to the publication of that entertainingly-written blue-book, 
two vessels only, belonging to Yarmouth, were engaged in 
trawling, and that, some ten years after, a few of the local 
merchants at the termination of the herring voyage fitted out 
luggers with trawling gear, and despatched them to the 
nearer deep-sea grounds — to Smith’s Knowle, the Silver Pits, 
the Sole Pit, the Haddock Bank and Botany Gut. This 
venture met with such good fortune (for the fish had not then 
been much disturbed) that others followed, while vessels of 
greater size, with wider beam than the somewhat slightly- 
built luggers, were built for this more arduous pursuit. 
A Mr. King, who had had much experience as a managing 
hand in a large firm of trawling vessels, recently told me that 
in 1848-50, we had about a dozen trawlers ; in 1853 we 
had well on for sixty. Samuel Hewett, giving evidence 
before the Sea-fishery Commissioners, in 1866, stated that, in 
1848, there were but five, but that their numbers increased 
in eighteen years to 150 vessels. The trawler of that period 
was known as the “ long-boomer,” from the huge and un- 
wieldy boom attached to the one mast carried ; this boom 
was some 38 feet in length, the vessel herself being but 50 
feet long, of from 30 to 40 tons, drawing nine feet of water. 
A great impetus was given to the fishery in 1855-6, when the 
first sixteen smacks came to Gorleston from Barking (in Essex), 
followed by Hewett’ s fleet of some 70 or 80 sail. These 
Barking smacks were exceedingly well-built, well-equipped 
craft, put together as strongly as a man-o’-war, many of the 
timbers, at the demolition of one of them, being used in the 
