Sea Fisheries: their Treasures and Toilers

Abstract

“THE English have long understood that the X men of the seaboard are not foreigners, but of the same nation as the men of the cities, the mines, and the fields.” So writes Prof. Hérubel in the very complimentary preface to this English edition of his “Pêches Maritimes d'aujourd'hui et d'autrefois” He flatters us somewhat. The heroism, the picturesqueness, and the more striking hardships of fishing, these are pretty well known; but there is little enough knowledge of the working, as opposed to the spectacular, conditions of fishing, and of the fisheries as a trade and an employment. Fishing, to most people, is the special affair of someone else. Nor has the large amount of scientific research into fishery problems been adequately popularised. It has presented, as it were, no report to and for the general public. There is no good bridge between the highly technical Journal of the Marine Biological Association and learned monographs and trade periodicals on the one side, and unsystematic picture-books about fish and fishing on the other. Sharp controversies affecting the livelihood of more than a hundred thousand sea-going fishermen, who land yearly over ten millions' worth of fish, rouse next to no widespread interest, mainly for the reason that so few people know enough about fishing to hold an opinion.