pence, or twelvepence, as fast
as you can hale and veare a line? If a man worke but three days in
seaven hee may get more than hee can spend unless hee will be
excessive.

"Young boyes and girles, salvages, or any other, be they never such
idlers may turne, carry, and returne fish without shame or either
great pain: hee is very idle that is past twelve years of age and
cannot doe so much: and shee is very old that cannot spin a thread
to catch them."

His accounts and similar ones were so much read in England that when the
Puritans asked King James of England for permission to come to America,
and the king asked what profit would be found by their emigration, he
was at once answered, "Fishing." Whereupon he said in turn, "In truth
'tis an honest trade; 'twas the apostles' own calling." Yet in spite of
their intent to fish, the first English ships came but poorly provided
for fishing, and the settlers had little success at first even in
getting fish for their own food. Elder Brewster of Plymouth, who had
been a courtier in Queen Elizabeth's time, and had seen and eaten many
rich feasts, had nothing to eat at one time but clams. Yet he could give
thanks to God that he was "permitted to suck of the abundance of the
seas and the treasures hid in the sand." The Indian Squanto showed the
Pilgrims many practical methods of fishing, among them one of treading
out eels from the brook with his feet and catching them with his hands.
And every ship brought in either cod-hooks and lines, mackerel-hooks and
lines, herring-nets, seines, shark-hooks, bass-nets, squid-lines,
eel-pots, coils of rope and cable, "drails, barbels, pens, gaffs," or
mussel-hooks.

Josselyn, in his _New England's Rarities_, written in 1672, enumerated
over two hundred kinds of fish that were caught in New England waters.

Lobsters certainly were plentiful enough to prevent starvation. The
minister Higginson, writing of lobsters at Salem, said that many of them
weighed twenty-five pounds apiece, and that "the least boy in the
plantation may catch and eat what he will of them." In 1623, when the
ship _Anne_ arrived from England, bringing many of the wives and
children of the Pilgrims who had come in the first ships, the only
feast of welcome that the poor husbands had to offer the newcomers was
"a lobster or a piece of fish without bread or anything else but a cup
of spring water."

Patriarchal lobsters five and six