fish--always
a hard task and sometimes a very difficult one on account of the heavy
sea--has been repeated three or four times; for the number of fish is
so great that the stage becomes overloaded by night, and the boat
crews then have to turn to and help take care of the catch and clear
the stage for the next day's operations. Till long after midnight the
work goes merrily on in the huts or shelters over the stages, for the
hard work then means no starvation next winter in the Newfoundland
homes, and the fish are split, cleaned, headed, salted and packed with
incredible rapidity.

The tired crews get an hour or two of sleep just as they are; then,
after a pot of black tea and a handful of bread, start out to begin
the next day's work, resting and eating during the hour between the
trips, and then going out again, and repeating the some monotonous
round over and over till we wondered how they lived through it, and
what was to be done with all the fish. When there is a good breeze the
boats are rigged and a large part of the weary labor of rowing is
escaped. How tired the crews would look as the big twenty-four feet
boats went dashing by our vessel in the fog and rain, on the outward
trip, and how happy, though if possible more tired, as they came back
three or four hours later, loaded to the gunwale with cod, and
thinking, perhaps, of the bags full that they had left buoyed near the
trap because the boat would not carry the whole catch. It is a hard
life, and no wonder the men are not much more than animals; but they
work with dogged persistence, for in a little more than two months
enough must be earned to support their families for the year. When the
"spurt" ends the crews get a much needed rest, and attend to getting a
supply of salt ashore from the salt vessel from Cadiz, Spain, one of
which we found lying in nearly every fishing harbor, serving as a
storehouse for that article so necessary to the fishermen.

As to the magnitude of the industry, it is estimated that there are
about 3,000 vessels and 20,000 men employed in it during the season.
Some of the vessels are employed in merely bringing salt and taking
away the fish, notably the great iron tramp steamers of from 1,500 to
2,000 tons, which seem so much out of place moored to the sides of
some of the little rocky harbors. The average catch in a good year is,
we were informed, from four to six hundred quintals in a vessel of
perhaps forty tons, by a crew of