172 BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 
possibly the closing down of the canneries in winter has had as much 
influence upon its discontinuance as the laws upon the Canadian stat- 
ute-books. 
There seems to be a general impression that herring caught with 
torches are not so firm and will not keep half so long as the weir her- 
ring, but no satisfactory explanation is given. 
Seining. — With the increased demand for herring which the sardine 
canneries have developed fishermen have exercised their ingenuity to 
discover new methods of catching them, and, as a result, both the drag- 
seine and the purse-seine have been introduced. While drag-seines have 
been extensively employed in the herring fisheries about the Magdalen 
Islands, on portions of the coast of Newfoundland, and in other locali- 
ties, they were, as far as we can learn, never used for small herring in 
this locality prior to 1880, when Mr. McVickers, of Deer Island, pur- 
chased a large seine to be used for this purpose. This was tried for sev- 
eral weeks with poor success, and it was finally considered too large 
and was cut into four pieces, each constituting an independent seine; 
but for some reason seining never became extensive until the summer 
of 1884, when, owing to the abundance of the squid, which interfered 
with the fishing of the weirs, seines were generally resorted to, and, 
during the months of September, October, and a part of November, 
nearly the entire supply of the factories was derived from this source. 
As the few haul-seines used in the locality were very successful, the 
weir fishermen could not resist the temptation to tie two or three weir 
seines together and use them for the same purpose; and catches of 50, 
75, and even 100 hogsheads of herring were frequently made by them 
with this apparatus. 
During the past two autumns there have been at least 50 or 60 sein- 
ing crews, averaging 5 or 6 men each. The seining was done chiefly in 
the early evening. The seines were loaded on large boats and kept in . 
readiness for use at some convenient point. The men would then row 
into the little coves along the shore and light a torch to see if the her- 
ring were there, and if a school was found the seine would at once be 
brought and the fish surrounded and hauled into the shoal water near 
the beach, when they would be quickly transferred to the boats by 
means of dip-nets. 
The principal seining grounds were in St. Andrew’s Bay, Back Bay, 
and farther east along the main shore to Point Lepreau. 
The average seine used in this fishery is from 30 to 50 fathoms long, 
30 to 40 feet deep, and 1 to inch mesh ; but the length of any seine 
can easily be extended by adding one or more weir seines to it when nec- 
essary. 
With so large a crew of seiners and a large fleet of collecting boats 
following close behind them, the excitement was considerable, and fre- 
quently several hundred men with a large fleet of boats would be col- 
lected in one locality. The noise and confusion resulting was used as 
