Morning journal and courier., 1891-03-14
No. 63

per has been cooked, and a tiny table at which four of us can sit at one time and eat. And how We do eat Never before have ham and eggs, potatoes fried in fish grease, pretty tough bread and black cof- fee, tasted so toothsome and sweet. Then an hour or so on deck spinning yarns, watching the countless night-hghts gleam- ing from neighboring smacks, or tracing the train of smoke and phosphorescence behind the great steamers, passing and re- passing as if to run us down, and all but two or three of the crew turn in" below
 About midnight We who remain on watch ''try" the nets. 4 half dozen or more are hauled in. Perhaps not & single herring is found The nets are cast out again. Then it is drift, drift, drift, until three o'clock in the morning, more than one thousand silent smscks in company, trailing one thousand miles of nets. Al this hour all is commotion throughout the entire fleet. The daily drawing of the sea lottery is al hand. On each smack stern is machine called the ''lron Man, worked by one man, which halls in the back rope over three pulleys, and is equal to about two and one-half mems strength. The re- mainder of the crew are hauling in the middle and foot of the nets. shaking the wriggling, silvery, squsaking fish from the Heshes into the hold as the nets come over the gunwale; the '.scummsr- boy" with his "scummer," like 8 sAlmon-landing net, ea- gerly scooping up every herring which by mischance drops back into the sea, from which service his entire wages are secured. If few fish have been taken, ii is a weRri- some task hauling in more than A half miles length of dripping nets. If three, or four or half dozen "lasts" are se- cured, as is often done, the men work un- der the greatest excitement and good feel ing. Finally, as perhaps the dawn is just breaking, the entire fleet is heading to- wards Yarmouth before a spanking breeze, the light-laden, unlucky craft out-speed ing those deep-sunk with their precious freights, rendering easy and cheery the nervousness of tagging behind
 Half a thousand crafts may already be berthsd at the quays and discharging their fish when your own smack arrives If so you will find half 8 hundred thousand Yarmouth folk and sight-seers swelling the motley throngs to greet you. The her rings are disposed of in jiffy by auction; carted to the fsh-houses: covered with salt for twenty-four hours; and are then washed in vsts by the curers, called tow era" Then they are spitted through the head with spits about four feet long by women, glib of tongue and dextrous of fingers, locally known as rivers" From thelr hanus they are conveyed 10 the nuge ''smoke- houses, where they are hung in tiers in narrow passages from forty to if ty feet high; and in these the process of smoking goes on in gentle smudgings, with frequent intermissions, several weeks. They have then become the rich, juicy, toothsome "Yarmouth blosters' of com merce. It is among the many legends of old Yarmouth town, and is set down ss authentic history by its ancient chronicles, that the Yarmouth mode of curing herring by salting and smoking, which has result ed in the greatest industry in the prepara- ton for use of single fish at a single port in the world, was the result of accident; fisherman having hung some herrings up in his cabin where, ''what with his fiering and smoking, or smokie-f fering, in that his narrow lobby, his herrings, which were as white as a whalebone, when he hung them up, now lookt as red as lobster"
 EDGAR L. WAKEMAN.