f seafaring people and their
families. The men form the crews of the numerous vessels employed in
the herring fisheries which belong to the various fishing-places on the
coast. Nowhere along the shores of England are finer sea-boats or more
hardy crews to be found.

Most of the herring vessels are luggers, from thirty to forty tons
burden, and entirely decked over. Each carries from eight to ten men.
They are divided below into compartments, or tanks: in one compartment,
salt is stowed; into another, the herrings, as soon as caught, are
thrown; in a third they are salted, and are then packed away in lockers,
on either side of the vessel, till she is full. She is then steered for
the shore to the point nearest to a railway, or where there is a market.
Each vessel has several long nets: the upper part of the net floats
close to the surface of the water, buoyed up by bladders; the lower part
is kept down by small bits of lead, and one end is moored to the bottom
by a heavy weight. The fish, as they swim in large shoals, strike
against the net as against a wall, and are caught in the meshes.
Herring fishing is carried on at night, when the fish cannot see the
nets. When a vessel or boat has cast out her nets, she hangs on to the
lee [See note 2] end of them till the morning.

Besides these large herring luggers, many open boats are used; and great
numbers of other boats from the coasts of Scotland and the North of
England resort to these seas in the herring season. There is yet
another class of vessels which frequent this coast. They are the
deep-sea fishing smacks--cutters measuring from thirty to fifty tons,
each carrying about ten men. Their nets differ much from those used by
the luggers and boats. They fish with trawls, and so are called
_trawlers_. A trawl is a net with a deep bag fastened to a long beam,
which long beam has a three-cornered iron at each end. This beam is
dragged along at the bottom of the sea, and stirs up the turbot, bream,
plaice, soles, and other flat-fish which lie there; when they swim into
the bag and are caught. These trawlers fish in the North Sea, sometimes
a hundred and a hundred and fifty miles away from England, off the
Texel. Other fishing grounds are from twelve to twenty miles off the
British coast. At times, more than a hundred vessels are together,
forming a large fleet. One of the oldest and wisest of the captains is
chosen as their head man, and is called the admir