n o 
in great quantities. The mackerel would follow this for 
a long distance, and come up round the vessel like a 
flock of chickens coming to be fed. Then the fishermen 
had short lines with hooks on the ends, with which they 
caught the mackerel and threw them over on to the deck, 
and with a crew of io to 14 men the catch would some¬ 
times amount to 20,000 in a day. That mode of fishing 
was carried on for a long time, but the purse seine gra¬ 
dually came into use and displaced it. It was first used 
in 1814, but did not come into general use until i860, 
and there were now probably 500 of them at work. The 
mackerel fishery had now been transferred from the Gulf 
of St. Lawrence to off the shore waters along the coast, 
and at the present time they followed them down to 
Cape Hatteras. The mackerel on the other side of the 
Atlantic had definite migrations, coming north in the 
spring of the year, when the fishermen followed them 
until August, when they were in the Gulf of Maine, then 
they followed them back in the fall. The mackerel 
increased in size as they got on better feeding-ground. 
They disappeared for a month or so in June, when 
they went to the bottom and spawned. He could assure 
Mr. Cornish that there was not the slightest practical 
difficulty in working the purse seine. They were from 
70 to 150 feet in depth, and 1,000 to 1,300 in length, 
and were worked by a special boat something like a 
whale boat, and it was quite easy for a vessel to catch 
as many fish as could be cured in three or four days. 
At first they used to give the surplus away or let them 
go, but now they had invented a kind of storage net, 
which they hung out over the side of the vessel, and 
kept the fish alive in it, taking out at intervals as many 
as they could cure before they spoiled. 
