flat stern, which looks like a narrow wedge with the
point cut off, is a good deal more waterborne than the bow and rises
more readily to the seas without presenting too much resisting surface
to either wind or wave. Each schooner has several dories, which fish
all round it, thus suggesting what is often called the hen-and-chickens
style. At dark, or when the catch has filled the dory, the men come
back on board, 'nesting' half a dozen dories, one inside the other.
But sometimes a sudden storm, especially if it follows fog, will set
the chickens straying; and then the men must ride it out moored to some
sort of drogue or floating anchor. The usual drogue is a trawl tub,
quite perfect if filled with oil-soaked cotton waste to make a 'slick'
which keeps the crests from breaking. The tub is hove into the water,
over the stern, to which it is made fast by a bit of line long {161}
enough to give the proper scope. And there, with the live ballast of
two expert men, whose home has always been the water, the dory will
thread its perilous way unharmed through spume and spindrift, across
the engulfing valleys and over the riven hill-tops of the sea.

These schooners and their attendant dories have a long and stirring
history of their own. But they are not the only craft, nor yet the
oldest; and though their history would easily fill a volume twice the
size of this, it would only tell us a very little about Canadian
fisheries as a whole, from first to last. Even if we went back by
hasty steps, of quite a century each, we should never get into the wild
days of the early 'fishing admirals' before our space gave out. All we
can do here is simply to mention the steps themselves, and then pass
on. First, the red men, few in number, and fishing from canoes. Then
the early whites, dispossessing the red men and steadily increasing.
They came from all seafaring peoples, and had no other form of justice
than what could be enforced by 'fishing admirals,' who won their rank
by the order of their arrival on the Banks--admiral first, vice-admiral
second, rear-admiral third. Then government by men-of-war began, and
Newfoundland itself became, {162} officially, a man-of-war, under its
own captain from the Royal Navy. Finally, civil self-government
followed in the usual way.

All through there was a constantly growing and apparently inextricable
entanglement of international complications, which were only settled by
The Hague agreemen