42 MR. A. H. PATTERSON ON A DECAYED TRAWL-FISHERY. 
and rail charges, and trust to the honesty of the London 
salesman. 
" Mr. Patterson, the smacks used to find a job for lots of 
poor boys — apprentices, what was drawed from workhouses 
and other like quarters, and a rough time they had of it, 
though some preferred it to what they’d been used to. Bark- 
ing smacks sometimes carried as many as seven or eight 
apprentices ; and I once know’d a smack, the Hebe, as had 
a whole crew of juveniles, the skipper being only a boy of 
twenty. 
“ Smacksmen worn’t to be despised ; they might be ignorant 
of book lamin’, and perhaps the only one able to keep accounts 
and write out the bills of ladin’ was the cabin-boy, but they was 
no duffers at sea. If they didn’t make much out of the chart 
they got to know to an inch where they wor — and a lot better 
than the chart could figure it out for them ; they’d grope 
their way about by the lead by day or night, and when a 
scientific skipper would be fumblin’ about in a fog, they’d 
know their bearins to a hand’s breadth. And then for pluck, 
they didn’t know what danger was ; there was heroes in 
the fleets what oughter had medals and pensions, but never 
a word of it got wind except some newspaper bloke got figgering 
up some terrible gale, and reglar pumped information out of 
’em. You know as well as I do how many a vessel in direst 
peril would have gone altogether, crews an’ all, but for 
assistance rendered ’em by smacksmen at the risk of their own 
lives. People ought to think well of the smacksman, for his 
hardihood, let alone for the price paid for the fish they eat, 
what have often been caught for them at the sacrifice of 
a fisherman’s life.” 
