St. Ives has grown, since the time of Mr. Carew, into a place of considerable importance, participating in the general prosperity of the whole country; and deriving great local advantages from the extension of its fisheries, from the construction of a pier, and from the extraordinary increase of trade at the adjacent port of Hayle.
Fish of almost every kind, frequenting the coast of Cornwall, are taken at St. Ives; but the fishery absorbing all the others in its magnitude is the taking of pilchards.
Pilchards are taken in two different ways quite distinct from each other.
The first, most ancient, most certain, and therefore of greatest importance to the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, is called drifting.
Boats sail in the open sea, drawing after them a great number of nets appended to each other, provided with small leads and corks at the opposite sides, and extending in all to a very great length. The meshes of these nets are made of such a size as to admit the head of a pilchard
to pass through them, but not the body; in consequence such fish as strike against the net are retained suspended by their gills, acting in the nature of a barb.
The second method is on a much more extensive scale, uncertain as to success; but occasionally giving fortunes to those concerned in carrying it on, by the gain of one prosperous year.
This method is founded entirely on the habit common to all the clupea genus of congregating in large shoals, and coming occasionally near the shore into shallow water, and into places where the ground is free from rocks; this latter circumstance is peculiarly favourable in the St. Ives Bay, and the ground is moreover covered to the depth of several feet by a fine sand, composed entirely of shells, reduced almost to a state of powder.
All the most favourable stations are occupied during the proper season of the year by large boats, having nets on board measuring four hundred and forty yards in length by twenty-seven yards in breadth, capable therefore of covering nearly two and an half statute acres. These nets are provided with very heavy weights at one of their sides, so as to sink them firmly on the ground, and with large corks to make them buoyant on the other. Two large boats and one smaller, as an attendant, are appropriated to each net; and when a shoal is discovered approaching, by a well-known change of colour and a ripple on the water, these boats, sometimes directed also by signals from the shore, move in opposite directions, extending the immense net to intercept the fish, and then to close it behind them. In this way a quantity sufficient to fill a thousand casks, after being pressed, have been frequently secured at one time, and on some occasions much more. The casks are hogsheads of fifty-four gallons, and contain about two thousand five hundred pilchards, so that the thousand hogsheads make two millions and a half secured by one net.
The fish are taken out of the sea by raising them to the surface of the water in smaller nets, used within the great