The pilchard fishers have not forgotten the crisis of 1903, to combat the recurrence of which it was proposed to establish special schools for fishermen apprentices, and to forbid the use of the drag-net, and they are seeking a rearrangement of conditions whereby the returns may be more equally distributed among the workers than now. At the present time the owner—who fits out the boat—claims a third, and the skipper a third, the hands dividing the other third. According to this arrangement, the novice or apprentice receives an infinitesimal share.
As a Frenchman, a Breton of Quimper who was not in the sardine business, said to us: “Ces pauvres diables! Ils mériteraient mieux.” All of which is true, so let all well-wishers, who are fond of the “little fishes boiled in oil” at their picnic dinners, give a thought now and again to the Breton fisherman.
Besides the sardine fisheries, there is a considerable traffic from such ports as Tréguier, St. Malo, and Morlaix in the deep-sea fishery, and elsewhere in the mackerel and herring fishery in Icelandic waters and the North Sea, and these give a prosperity that would otherwise be wanting.
Statistics are dry reading, and so they are not given here, but there are some curious things with regard to the laws regulating the offshore and deep-sea fisheries of France, just as there are with respect to the line fishing, by which method one can legally take fish only if he actually hold his rod or line in his hand: he may not lay it on the ground beside him and doze until an unusually frisky gudgeon wakes him up.
On all of the French fishing-craft, which sail to the Banks or to Iceland for cod, French salt must be used, and all masters of fishing-craft must keep a supplementary log or diary relating to the takings of fish alone.
In deep-sea fishing the law prescribes that a vessel which is fitted out for the fishing-banks must remain on the ground a certain length of time. This is to preclude the possibility of a decreasing catch, it is to be presumed, as many a fisherman has been known, before now, to give up the labour with holds half-filled simply because he had come upon a meagre feeding-ground. It seems a wise precaution, and is another of those parental acts which the French government is always undertaking on behalf of its children. There is still the whalebone catch to reckon with, for the French government specializes this industry, and offers a bonus of seventy francs a ton displacement on leaving port for all French equipments, and fifty francs per ton displacement upon returning after the term prescribed.