ean years that the
fishermen encountered; but with all the encouragement in the way of
bounties and protected markets that Congress could give them, they never
were able to earn in a life, as much as a successful promoter of trusts
nowadays will make in half an hour. The census figures of 1890--the latest
complete figures on occupations and earnings--give the total value of
American fisheries as $44,500,000; the number of men employed in them,
132,000, and the average earnings $337 a man. The New England fisheries
alone were then valued at $14,270,000. In the gross total of the value of
American fisheries are included many methods foreign to the subject of
this book, as for example, the system of fishing from shore with pound
nets, the salmon fisheries of the Columbia River, and the fisheries of the
Great Lakes.

Mackerel are taken both with the hook and in nets--taken in such
prodigious numbers that the dories which go out to draw the seine are
loaded until their gunwales are almost flush with the sea, and each haul
seems indeed a miraculous draught of fishes. It is the safest and
pleasantest form of fishing known to the New Englander, for its season is
in summer only; the most frequented banks are out of the foggy latitude,
and the habit of the fish of going about in monster schools keeps the
fishing fleet together, conducing thus to safety and sociability both. In
one respect, too, it is the most picturesque form of fishing. The mackerel
is not unlike his enemy, man, in his curiosity concerning the significance
of a bright light in the dark. Shrewd shopkeepers, who are after gudgeons
of the human sort, have worked on this failing of the human family so that
by night some of our city streets blaze with every variety of electric
fire. The mackerel fisherman gets after his prey in much the same
fashion. When at night the lookout catches sight of the phosphorescent
gleams in the water that tells of the restless activity beneath of a great
school of fish the schooner is headed straightway for the spot. Perhaps
forty or fifty other schooners will be turning their prows the same way,
their red and green lights glimmering through the black night on either
side, the white waves under the bows showing faintly, and the creaking of
the cordage sounding over the waters. It is a race for first chance at the
school, and a race conducted with all the dash and desperation of a
steeple-chase. The skipper of each craft is at his own hel