Sundown is the time for shooting nets. Eight to fourteen are carried for mackerel, six to ten for herrings—the scantier the fish, the greater the number of nets. At Seacombe they are commonly forty fathoms in length along the headrope which connects them all, and five fathoms deep. Stretching far away from the boat, as it drifts up and down Channel with the tides, is a line, perhaps a thousand yards long, of cork buoys. From these hang the lanyards[16] which support the headrope, from the headrope hang perpendicularly the nets themselves. Judgment is needed in shooting a fleet of nets. They may get foul of the bottom or of another boat's fleet. When, on account of careless shooting or tricks of the tide, the nets of several boats become entangled, there is great confusion, and the cursing is loud.
Nets shot, the fishermen make fast the road for'ard; sup, smoke, sing, creep under the cutty, and sleep with one eye open.
Sometimes they are too wet to sleep; often in the winter it is too cold.
Afterwards, the laborious hauling in—one man at the headrope and the other at the foot. Contrary to a very general impression, the fish are not enclosed within the net, as in seining or in pictures of the miraculous draught of fishes. They prod their snouts into the meshes, and are caught by the gills. There may not be a score in a whole fleet of nets, or they may come up like a glittering mat, beyond the strength of two men to lift over the gunwale. Twenty-five thousand herring is about the burthen of an open beach drifter. Are there more, nets must be given away at sea, or buoyed up and left—or cut, broken, lost. Small catches are picked out of the nets as they are hauled in, large catches ashore.
FISHERMEN FLEECED
It is ashore that the fisherman comes off worst of all. Neither educated nor commercialized, he is fleeced by the buyers. And if he himself dispatches his haul to London.... Dick Yeo once went up to Billingsgate and saw his own fish sold for about ten pounds. On his return to Seacombe, he received three pounds odd, and a letter from the salesman to say that there had been a sudden glut in the market. Fishermen boat-owners have an independence of character which makes it difficult for them to combine together effectively, as wage-servers do. They act too faithfully on the adage that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and ten shillings on the beach a sovereign at Billingsgate. So 'tis, when
There's little to earn and many to keep,
and no floating capital at a man's disposal.
In recent years, owing to bad prices and seasons and general lack of encouragement, or even of fair opportunity, the number of sea-going drifters at Seacombe has decreased by two-thirds. Much the same has happened at other small fishing places along the coast. This decline—so complacently acquiesced in by the powers that be—is of national importance; for the little fisheries are the breeding ground of the Navy. Nowadays fishermen put their sons to work on land. "'Tain't wuth it," they say, "haulin' yer guts out night an' day, an' gettin' no forrarder at the end o'it." Luckily for England the sea's grip is a firm one, and many of the sons return to it.
When one hears Luscombe talk about the maddening trouble he has had in teaching plough-tail or urban recruits to knot and splice a rope, or watches, as I have, a couple of blue-jackets drive ashore in a small boat because they couldn't hoist sail, then one comprehends better the importance of the fisher-families whose work is made up of endurance, exposure, nerve and skill; who play touch and go with the sea; and who in the slack seasons have—unlike the ordinary workman—only too much time to think for themselves. They are the backbone of the Navy.