40 MR. A. H. PATTERSON ON A DECAYED TRAWL-FISHERY. 
and I wasn’t generally nervous. I don’t wonder, with all 
the men lost around the Dogger, we sometimes got human 
skulls, and that, in the trawl, and more ’an once I’ve seen 
a man in oily jumpers, and boots on, shot out on deck with 
the fish, when we’ve opened the cod end. It made your flesh 
crawl, shovin’ of ’em over again with a capstan bar or your 
shovels, or what come handiest. Lor, the Dogger’s a regular 
ocean cemetery. 
“ It wasn’t very safe, I can tell you, when a fleet of a hundred 
or two hundred smacks got caught in a gale — they fairly 
banged into one another. It was risky, too, that hurrying 
to the cutter, every skipper fearin’ his boat load should be 
last or lost. It’s a wild, restless life, bor, and no one knows 
it like them as has gone through it, and smacksmen ain’t 
much given to talking of it. You’re in a nice sound sleep, 
though you’re bein’ rocked as if you was in a milk churn, 
when on a sudden you hear the skipper shouting,' Busky ! ’ 
and up you rush to do a trot round with the capstan bars 
(the crank capstan didn’t come in till the dandy rigs came 
into favour, nor the steam capstan till the nineties) — and 
then there was the sorting, and gutting, and packing. Then 
the ferrying, perhaps, on top of that. Perhaps you’d only just 
turned in, after haulin’ the small boat aboard, when you got 
roused out again, to go over the side after a load of trunks, 
and then on top of that, perhaps, up springs a gale o’ wind. 
Wet clothes, blistered skin, what developed into sea boils, 
and general out-of-sortness — that all came in with a day’s 
work, and had to be made small beer of. I don’t wonder the 
poor little apprentices — we had hundreds in those days — out 
of the workhouses, used to sob their little hearts out in their 
bunks, and wish themselves back home again. 
“ What’s broke up the Yarmouth trawling ? Now you’ve 
axed something. Several things, to my way of thinkin.’ 
The lessening of fish within decent limits, was one thing, 
that stept in to upset things, and look ’ere, Mr. Patterson, 
you don’t need to wonder at it when you consider the hundreds 
of big nets sweepin’ about in all directions — thousands of 
tons of small fry was killed, and no use to nobody, not even 
