But FitzGerald’s fears concerning Posh were not realised. He seems to have had an
especial dread of the disease (as who has not?), for in a letter to Frederic Tennyson of January 29th previously (II, 89, Eversley Edition) he wrote (of Montaigne): “One of his Consolations for The Stone is that it makes one less unwilling to part with Life.”
Levi was a Lowestoft fishmonger, referred to in the footnote of Two Suffolk Friends, p. 108.
The Gazelle was the “punt” or longshore boat which Posh bought at Southwold, and called (by reason of her splendid qualities) The Little Wonder.
The difference between “sunk” and “swum” herring nets would be unintelligible to a modern herring fisher. Now the nets are thirty feet in depth, are buoyed on the surface of the sea, and are kept perpendicular (like a wall two miles long) by the weight of heavy cables or “warps” which stretch along the bottom of the nets. I am, of course, referring to North Sea fishing only, and not to the longshore punts,
whose nets are not half the depth of the North Sea fleets.
In FitzGerald’s time if the herring were expected to swim deep the nets were sunk below the cables or warps which strung them together, and if they were thought to be swimming high they were buoyed above the warps, the system of fishing being called “sunk” in the former case and “swum” in the latter. Now all nets are “swum,” that is to say, all are above the warps and are buoyed on the surface. But the depth has increased so much (to what is technically known as “twenty-score mesh,” which comes to about thirty feet) that there is no need to alter their setting.
Posh’s wife, whose state of health is referred to in this letter, survived till 1892, but for many years suffered from tuberculosis in the lungs.
The Monitor was a Kessingland craft, and belonged to one Hutton.
But whether Posh fished with “sunk” or