Few braver or hardier men are to be found in England than the Cornish fishermen. Their business, at all times hazardous, is doubly so on a coast so dangerous as theirs, where the charm of scenery is bought at the expense of security. Isolated rocks which are set up like teeth close round the jagged cliffs and far out from shore, cropping up at intervals anywhere between Penzance and Scilly; sunken rocks which are more perilous because more treacherous; strong currents which on the calmest day keep the sea where they flow in perpetual turmoil; a singularly tumultuous and changeable sea, where the ground-swell of the Atlantic sweeps on in long waves which break into a surf that would swamp any boat put out, even when there is not a breath of surface-wind stirring; for the most part a very narrow channel to the coves, a mere water-path as one may call it, beset by rocks which would break the boats to splinters if they were thrown against them—all these circumstances make the trade of the Cornish fishermen exceptionally dangerous; but they also make the men themselves exceptionally resolute and daring. They are true fighters with nature for food; and, like the miners, they feel when they set out to their work that they may never come back from it alive.
No man can predict what the sea will be an hour or two hence. Its character changes with each fluctuation of the tide; and a calm and halcyon lake may have become fierce and angry and tempest-tossed when the ebb turns and the flow sets in. There are times too, when a boat caught by the wind and drifted into a current would be as helpless as a cork in a mill-race; and when a whole fleet of fishing-boats might be blown out to sea, with perhaps half their number capsized. But, as a rule, having learnt caution with their hardihood from the very magnitude of the dangers which surround them, these Cornish men suffer as little by shipwreck as do the fishermen of safer bays; and though each cove has its own sad story, and every rock its victim, the worst cases of wreck have been those of larger vessels which have mistaken lights, or steered too close in shore, or been lost in the fogs that are so frequent about the Land's End. Or they may have been caught by the wind and the tide and driven dead on to a lee shore; as so often happens in the bay between Hartland and Padstow Points.
But the more cautious the men are the less money they make; and though life is certainly more than meat, life without meat at all, or with only an insufficient quantity, is rather a miserable affair. The material well-being of the poor fellows who live in those picturesque little coves which are the delight and the despair of artists is not in a very satisfactory condition. By the law of aggregation, unification, whatever we like to call it—the law of the present day by which individuals are absorbed into bodies that work for wages for one master, instead of each man working for himself for his own hand—the independent fishermen are daily becoming fewer. Save at Whitesand Bay, where there is a 'poor man's seine' and 'a rich man's seine,' almost all the seine nets belong now to companies or partnerships of rich men; and in very few have the men themselves any share.
Fishermen's seines are not well regarded by the wealthy leaseholders of the cove and foreshore; and the leaseholder has very large legal rights and powers which it would be idle to blame him for exercising. The cots are his, and the capstan is his, and the right of landing is his; thus he can put on the screw when he wants to have things his own way, and can threaten evictions, and the withdrawal of the right to the capstan and to the landing-place, if the men will not go on his seine, but choose either a united one of their own or independent drift or trawl nets. Some, it is said, even object to the men fishing at all, at any rate during the seine season; some have raised the annual rent per boat for cove rights to three or four times its old rate; and some go through a round of surly suspicion and irritating supervision during the 'bulking' days, and higgle jealously over the small share allowed to the hands in the catch. So that, on the whole, the Cornish fisherman of the smaller coves has not much to boast of beside his courage and good heart, and a sturdy independence and honesty specially noticeable.
We know of no more animated scene than seine-fishing. From the first act to the last there is a quaint old-world flavour about it inexpressibly charming to people used to the prosaic life of modern cities. The 'huers' who stand on the hills watching for the first appearance of the 'school,' and who make known what they see either by signals or calling through a huge metal trumpet, the sound of which no one who has once heard it can ever forget; the smartness of the men dressing the seine-boats which carry the huge net with all its appurtenances; their quiet but eager watching for the school to come within practicable distance—that is, into sufficiently shoal water, and where the bottom is fairly level (else the fish all escape from under the net); the casting or shooting of the seine enclosing the school, and then the 'tucking' or lifting the fish from the sea to the boats—every stage is full of interest; but this last is the prettiest of all.
Imagine a moonlight night—low water at midnight—when the tucking begins. The boat cannot come up to the ordinary landing, which is only a roughly-paved causeway dipping by a gradual descent into the sea; so those who would share in the sport are fain to take the fisherman's path along the cliff and drop into the boat off the rocks. These rocks are never very safe. Even the men themselves, trained to them as they are from boyhood, sometimes slip on their slanting, broken, seaweed-covered surfaces, when, if they cannot swim and are not helped, all is over for them in this life; and for strangers they are difficult at the best of times. But on an obscurely lighted night, and after heavy rain, they are doubly risky. The incoming wave lifts the boat a few inches higher and nearer; and you must catch the exact moment and make a spring before she drifts off again with the ebb. The row across the little bay is beautiful. The grey cliffs look solemn and majestic in the pale light of the moon; the shadows are deep and unfathomable; everywhere you see black rocks standing out from the steely sea, and little lines of breakers mark the place of the sunken rocks. In the distance shine the magnificent Lizard Lights, and the red and white revolving light of the terrible Wolf Rock flashes on the horizon; the moon touches the sea with silver, and the waves as they rise and fall seem like molten metal in the heavy sluggish rhythm of their flow. Only round the foot of the cliffs and about the rocks they break into spray that serves as high lights against the sombre grey and black of the landscape. You pull across to the opposite point, and then round into another smaller bay where the cliffs rise sheer, and the seine net is cast. You come into a little fleet of fishing-boats set round on the outside of a circle of corks, within which is the master-boat, where all hands are assembled pulling at the net, to draw it closer. It is a stirring sight. Some dozen or more stalwart fellows are hauling on the lines with the sailors' cheery cry and the sailors' exuberant goodwill. Every now and then the master's voice cries out 'Break! break my sons!' when they shorten hold and go over to the other side of the boat, pulling themselves gradually aslant again, till the same order of 'Break! break!' shows that their purchase is too slack. At last the net is hauled up close enough, and then the fun begins.
All the boats engaged form a close circle round the inner line of corks, which is now a little sea of silver where the imprisoned pilchards beat and flutter, producing a sound for which we have no satisfactory onomatopoetic word. In moonlight this little sea is silver; in torchlight it is of fire with varied colours flashing through the redder gleams; and in the dark it is a sea of phosphorescent light, each mesh of the net, each fish, each seaweed illuminated as if traced in flame. Every one is now busy. The men dip in baskets, or maunds, expressly made for this purpose, and ladle out the quivering fish by hundreds into the boats. In a few moments they are standing leg-deep in pilchards. Every one on the spot is pressed into the service, and even a boat manned by nothing more stalwart than one or two half-sick and half-frightened women receives its orders; and 'Hold on ladies! all hands hold on to the boat,' serves to keep one of the busiest of the tucking-boats in equilibrium.
The men, for all their hearty work, are like a party of schoolboys at play. Their humour may be rough, but it is never meant to be rude; their goodwill is sincere, for they have a share, however small, in the success of the catch; and the more they tuck, the more they will have for their wives and families to live on through the winter. It is their harvest-time; and they are as jocund as harvesters proverbially are. There is no stint of volunteer labour either. Men who have been working hard all day on their own account go out at midnight to lend a hand to their mates at the seine. Even though the take is for a hard-fisted master who would count fins if he could, and who would refuse his men a head apiece if he thought his orders would be carried out, they are all honestly glad. They remember the time when a rich school was the wealth of the whole cove, and when a string of fresh pilchards would be given freely to any one coming to the cove at the time of bulking, or, as we should call it, storing.
Still, whatever of economic value there may be in this exploitation of labour, it has its mournful side in the loss of individual value which it includes. And no one can help feeling this who listens to the talk of the elder fishermen, sorrowfully comparing the old days of personal independence and generous lordship with the present ones of wages and a wide-awake lesseeship, conscious of its legal rights and determined to act on them.
When all the fish have been tucked there is nothing for it but to row home again in the freshening morning air. The tide is rising now, and the moon is waning. The rocks look blacker, the grey moss-grown cliffs more solemn, more mysterious, the white surf breaking about them is higher and sharper than when you set out; and the boom of the sea thundering through cave and channel has a sound in it that makes you feel as if land and your own bed would be preferable to an open boat at the mercy of the Atlantic surges. The tide has so far risen that you can land nearer to the paved causeway than before; but even now you have to wait for the flow of the wave, then make a spring on to the black and slimy rocks, which would be creditable to trained gymnastic powers. So you go home, under the first streaks of dawn, wet through and scaly, and smelling abominably of fish dashed with a streak of tar for a richer kind of compound.