e ideal fishing boat. So solidly built that it
fears no weather, with a round bottom, tossed about unceasingly on the
waves like a cork, always on top, always thrashed by the harsh salt winds
of the English Channel, it ploughs the sea unweariedly with bellying
sail, dragging along at its side a huge trawling net, which scours the
depths of the ocean, and detaches and gathers in all the animals asleep
in the rocks, the flat fish glued to the sand, the heavy crabs with their
curved claws, and the lobsters with their pointed mustaches.

When the breeze is fresh and the sea choppy, the boat starts in to trawl.
The net is fastened all along a big log of wood clamped with iron and is
let down by two ropes on pulleys at either end of the boat. And the boat,
driven by the wind and the tide, draws along this apparatus which
ransacks and plunders the depths of the sea.

Javel had on board his younger brother, four sailors and a cabin boy. He
had set sail from Boulogne on a beautiful day to go trawling.

But presently a wind sprang up, and a hurricane obliged the smack to run
to shore. She gained the English coast, but the high sea broke against
the rocks and dashed on the beach, making it impossible to go into port,
filling all the harbor entrances with foam and noise and danger.

The smack started off again, riding on the waves, tossed, shaken,
dripping, buffeted by masses of water, but game in spite of everything;
accustomed to this boisterous weather, which sometimes kept it roving
between the two neighboring countries without its being able to make port
in either.

At length the hurricane calmed down just as they were in the open, and
although the sea was still high the captain gave orders to cast the net.

So it was lifted overboard, and two men in the bows and two in the stern
began to unwind the ropes that held it. It suddenly touched bottom, but a
big wave made the boat heel, and Javel, junior, who was in the bows
directing the lowering of the net, staggered, and his arm was caught in
the rope which the shock had slipped from the pulley for an instant. He
made a desperate effort to raise the rope with the other hand, but the
net was down and the taut rope did not give.

The man cried out in agony. They all ran to his aid. His brother left the
rudder. They all seized the rope, trying to free the arm it was bruising.
But in vain. "We must cut it," said a sailor, and he took from his pocket
a big knife, which, with two