to get special
privileges on the fishing grounds. Whenever man tries thus to monopolize,
by sharp practise or exclusive laws, the bounty which God has provided in
abundance for all, the end is confusion, distress, disaster, and too often
war.

But the story of what the politicians, and those postgraduates of
politics, the statesmen, have done for and against the fishermen of New
England, is not that which I have to tell. Rather, it is my purpose to
tell something of the lives of the fishermen, the style of their vessels,
the portions of the rolling Atlantic which they visit in search of their
prey, their dire perils, their rough pleasures, and their puny profits.
First, then, as to their prey, and its haunts.

The New England fishermen, in the main, seek three sorts of fish--the
mackerel, the cod, and the halibut. These they find on the shallow banks
which border the coast from the southern end of Delaware to the very
entrance of Baffin's Bay. The mackerel is a summer fish, coming and going
with the regularity of the equinoxes themselves. Early in March, they
appear off the coast, and all summer work their way northward, until, in
early November, they disappear off the coast of Labrador, as suddenly as
though some titanic seine had swept the ocean clear of them. What becomes
of the mackerel in winter, neither the inquisitive fisherman nor the
investigating scientist has ever been able to determine. They do not, like
migratory birds, reappear in more temperate southern climes, but vanish
utterly from sight. Eight months, therefore, is the term of the mackerel
fishing, and the men engaged in it escape the bitterest rigors of the
winter fisheries on the Newfoundland Banks, where the cod is taken from
January to January. Yet it has dangers of its own--dangers of a sort that,
to the sailor, are more menacing than the icebergs or even the
swift-rushing ocean liners of the Great Banks. For mackerel fishing is
pursued close in shore, in shallow water, where the sand lies a scant two
fathoms below the surface, and a north-east wind will, in a few minutes,
raise, a roaring sea that will pound the stoutest vessel to bits against
the bottom. With plenty of sea-room, and water enough under the keel, the
sailor cares little for wind or waves; but in the shallows, with the beach
only a few miles to the leeward, and the breakers showing white through
the darkness, like the fangs of a beast of prey, the captain of a fishing
schooner on