250 
BULLETIN OF THE UNITED STATES FISH COMMISSION. 
vessels from 75 to 150 tons each, armed with two great purse seines that can gather in half an acre of 
mackerel seen on the top of the water, go down in the middle of March off Cape Hatteras; they put a 
man at the masthead, aTid day and night, without ariy cessation, they pursue these schools of mackerel 
from the time they come to the shore until they go down into the deep water and drop their spawn. 
The mackerel is the most timid lish that swims in the sea — more timid than the trout, even, or 
the salmon — and this process of taking these fish with the great purse seines hy a hundred or two 
hundred fishermen has not depleted them. Nobody on earth knows whether they are depleted. 
Professor Baird does not undertake to say whether they are depleted or not; he does not undertake 
to say whether man can deplete them or not; hut they are driven away from the shores and from the 
fishermen accustomed to fish in boats on the shores. So the evidence before oiir committee was that 
the large majority of the mackerel taken were taken from 15 to 20 miles from the shore, where the 
small boats could not venture and do not venture. 
The men interested in the mackerel business believe that if you will put a close time on 
mackerel, run it up to the 1st of June, when they begin to spawn and go to the bottom and out 
of the way of the purse seines, your catch of mackerel will come hack to its usual haunts and that 
the people from North Carolina up to the State of Maine can go hack to the old way of fishing, where 
they can go out in their little boats and catch from 100 to .500 mackerel in a day and take them ashore 
and get their pay and have them in the market all up and down. 
What is the operation now? These great fleets of vessels go down into the southern waters. 
They have an immense draft of fish, and they hie away as quickly as they can to the port of New 
York in order to land them before they spoil. Then they are lauded in the great city of New York hy 
millions, and, as the Senator from New York said, they are sold to the fish dealers for 1 cent apiece or 
10 cents for twenty-five, and in one single year 35,000 barrels were thrown overboard into the sea as 
spoiled. 
Mr. Mii.LER. The Senator puts words into my mouth that I did not use; and therefore I do not 
ask his courtesy to correct it at this time. 
Mr. Frye. I will put it into somebody’s mouth. Somebody said it. It is the fact, notwith- 
standing, that the fishermen were compelled to sell their fish for a, cent apiece to the fishmongers of 
New York City or twenty-five for 10 cents. Who was it said that they were sold at 10 cents for 
twenty-five? The Senator from New York, 1 think, said it. 
Mr. Palmer. No; I said it. 
Mr. Miller. If the Senator will permit me, what I read was the testimony of what the Senator 
sees lit to call ,a fishmonger, Hon. Eugene Blackford, of New York, a distinguished citizen of the State 
of New York, one of our fish commissioners, as he has been for years. 
Mr. Frye., He sells fish, does he not? 
Mr. "Hale. I understand him to be the principal fish dealer in Fulton Market. 
Mr. Mii.ler. In his own testimony before your committee, which I read here, he said the price 
at wliich they were sold was the price at which they were sold by the dealers, not by the fishermen 
themselves. They were handled by the dealers, the whole of them. 
Mr. Frye. And that same year 30,000 barrels of them were thrown away as absolutely useless. 
Every year, when sudden luck comes to these fishermen, and they are obliged to hasten to port to get 
rid of their drafts of mackerel, half of them sometimes are thrown away and wasted. 
The trouble is that our fishermen are frightening the mackerel away from their haunts and that 
the fishermen on the shores can not get the chance to take one a day with hook and line. 
Mr. CtRay. Their rights are saved in the bill by an amendment which has been adopted. 
Mr. Frye. The Senator from Delaware calls my attention to the fact that all the old-fashioned 
fishing is saved by an amendment to the bill. 
There is another thing to which I wish to call attention. The Senator from New York says this 
is a very strange lull ; that if the scientists and learned men in fish want to protect the mackerel, why 
do they allow nets and seines on the shore? It ought to bo obvious to a man who knows anything 
about fishing what it is allowed for. The bill absolutely permits the landing of mackerel during the 
specified length of time all up and down this coast from seines and nets attached to the shore. What 
for? To take mackerel ? Not at all. They .are not placed there to take mackerel. They are placed 
there to take the other spring fish which come upon the shore, but there will be mackerel that will 
get into the nets and into the weirs, .and we do not wish to compel those fishermen with nets and 
weirs to throw away m.ackerol .and waste them and make them useless. Wo were protecting the rights 
of those poor men on shore, so that if a few mackerel did got into their nets and weirs they could sell 
