and
playing games until it was time to haul the trawl and light enough to
find their own vessel and signal for the boat.

The relation of my new friends to religion was a very characteristic
one. Whatever they did, they did hard. Thus one of the admirals, being
a thirsty soul, and the grog vessels having been adrift for a longer
while than he fancied, conceived the fine idea of holding up the
Heligoland saloons. So one bright morning he "hove his fleet to" under
the lee of the island and a number of boats went ashore, presumably to
sell fish. Altogether they landed some five hundred men, who held up
the few saloons for two or three days. As a result subsequently only
one crew selling fish to the island was allowed ashore at one time.
The very gamble of their occupation made them do things hard. Thus it
was a dangerous task to throw out a small boat in half a gale of wind,
fill her up with heavy boxes of fish, and send her to put these over
the rail of a steamer wallowing in the trough of a mountainous sea.

But it was on these very days when less fish was sent to market that
the best prices were realized, and so there were always a number of
dare-devils, who did not care if lives were lost so long as good
prices were obtained and their record stood high on the weekly list of
sales which was forwarded to both owners and men. I have known as many
as fourteen men upset in one morning out of these boats; and the
annual loss of some three hundred and fifty men was mostly from this
cause. Conditions were subsequently improved by the Board of Trade,
who made it manslaughter against the skipper if any man was drowned
boarding fish, unless the admiral had shown his flags to give the
fleet permission to do so. In those days, however, I often saw twenty
to thirty boats all tied up alongside the cutter at one time, the
heavy seas every now and again rolling the cutter's sail right under
water, and when she righted again it might come up under the keels of
some of the boats and tip them upside down. Thus any one in them was
caught like a mouse under a trap or knocked to pieces trying to swim
among the rushing, tossing boats.

As a rule we hauled at midnight, and it was always a fresh source of
wonder, for the trawl was catholic in its embrace and brought up
anything that came in its way. To emphasize how comparatively recently
the Channel had been dry land, many teeth and tusks of mammoths who
used to roam its now buried forests