of their
bodies, looking in the pale moonlight like the faces of lost souls,
showing on the surface of the bottomless pit, casting despairing arms
around their heads in impotent agony. The water which has sluiced over
their slimy bodies is charged with irritating properties, such as drive
a man to tear the very flesh from his bones in a fruitless attempt to
allay the horrible itching. When the water dries, the irritation ceases,
but at sea, and at night, when the dew falls like rain, and one is
drenched to the skin by water from the nets, it is not easy for anything
to become dry. Therefore one must suffer patiently till the boat puts
back again at dawn.

These are some of the creatures which share with the Fisher Folk the
seas of the East Coast, and hundreds of devices are used to capture
them. Nets of all shapes and sizes, seine nets with their bobbing
floats, bag nets of a hundred kinds, drop nets, and casting nets. Some
are set all night, and are liberally sprinkled with bait. Some are
worked round schools of fish by a single boat, which flies in its giant
circle, propelled by a score of paddles dripping flame from the
phosphorescence with which each drop of the Eastern sea is charged. Some
are cautiously spread by the men in one boat, according to directions
signalled to them by a second, from the side of which a diver hangs by
one arm, listening intently to the motion of the fish, and judging with
marvellous accuracy the direction which they are taking. Lines of all
sorts, hooks of every imaginable shape, all the tricks and devices,
which have been learned by hundreds of years of experience on the
fishing grounds, are employed by the people of the East Coast to swell
their daily and nightly takes of fish.

In the sheltered water of the Straits of Malacca, huge traps are
constructed of stakes driven into the sea-bottom, and in these the vast
majority of the fish are caught. But on the East Coast such a means of
taking fish is forbidden by nature. A single day of monsoon wind would
be sufficient to destroy and scatter far and wide the work of months,
and so the Fisher Folk whose lot is cast by the waters of the China Sea,
display more skill in their netting and lining than any other Peninsula
Malays, for on these alone can they depend for the fish by which they
live.

Their boats are of every size, but the shape is nearly the same in each
case, from the tiny _kolek_ which can only hold three men, to the great
_p