sea. This curious phenomenon I have often witnessed, both at night and in the day time. A large shoal (“school” the fishermen say, but this of course is merely a corruption of the word) contains countless thousands, and extends many miles. I have seen myself, on a fine June morning at sunrise, a line of the prisms reflected from the backs of the mackerel some miles long, broken at intervals by a cross-tide, where the sea was of a beautiful emerald green. The beauty of this spectacle I need scarcely say was great, and the sight of this broad purple belt barred with green, almost golden in the sunlight, was worth anybody’s while to walk miles to behold. Sometimes a few fish straggle from the main body of the shoal, and then it very often happens, that of two boats not a mile apart, the one will take some thousands of fish, whilst the other will not take a score. Mackerel are not sold like herrings by the “last” of 10,000 fish, but by the thousand or the hundred, and in a bad season I have known them sold by the score, and even by the dozen. I am now speaking, of course, of the wholesale trade, as between the boats themselves and the great market-dealers. The wholesale price is from 8l. to 12l. per thousand, or from 2d. to 3d. per fish: 4d., 6d., 8d., and sometimes 1s. per fish are the prices of prime dinner mackerel to private consumers; still I may venture to assert that “three for a shilling” may be considered a fair average market price. The average price obtained by the fishermen is 6l. per thousand, but I have known it as high as 16l. per thousand. I have, on the other hand, known thirty sold for a shilling; but such an occurrence is witnessed only once in a lifetime. As each boat carries six men and a boy, the average earnings of the fishermen from the mackerel are from 10l. to 30l. per head, and the average “take” per boat, 500 to 1500 or 2000 fish per night. Sometimes a boat will take 10,000 to 20,000 a-night, but on the other hand, she may be a month at sea and not exceed a few hundred each night. Again, should fish be plentiful, down comes the market price; consequently it is not always the heaviest “takes” that are the most remunerative, and it is better for a boat to maintain a moderate success each night than to meet occasionally with a great turn of luck. The ages of the crew average from 50 to 20, exclusive of a boy of from 12 to 18 in each boat. Few of the crew exceed 50 years of age, as a rule. The average of married men in the crew is not much over one-half, and many boats contain two or three of a family, perhaps a father and two single sons. The “boy” has usually an elder brother or his father in the same boat with himself. Making allowance for bad weather, and the time lost in mending and tanning nets, the average number of nights on which a boat can fish is only thirty; for though mackerel are caught from January until July, many boats do not commence till two or three months later, and the mackerel season proper is from about the 25th of March until the beginning of June. Few boats go to sea more than three nights per week, and some not so often. A boat often loses much time in getting to shore with her fish if the wind be unfavourable, or there be a calm; she also loses time in landing her cargo, for a mackerel-boat must discharge her fish, and cannot salt them and put to sea again directly without landing them, as the herring-boats do on emergency. Salting would spoil mackerel for the market, whereas it simply prepares herrings for curing. Should a dead calm come on, the boats may have to row in some fifteen miles, and I have seen a whole fleet thus becalmed. On such occasions the first boat or two “skim all the cream” of the market, and the last cargoes which arrive go for almost what they will fetch. I have known mackerel sold at eight in the morning for 16l. per thousand, and much finer fish sold at six p.m. the same day for 2l. the thousand. The first, no doubt, were retailed in London at 8d. or 10d. a-piece for dinner-tables, whilst the fate of the latter was, I suppose, the costermonger’s barrow. The usual price of “Michaelmas Mackerel” is 6d. a-piece. They have, as I have stated, no roes, but they are far firmer than the spring fish.
Here let me record my opinion that it is a popular but mistaken idea to suppose that full-roed fish are the best. Common sense ought to tell us that any creature on the very verge of parturition cannot possibly be in a state of health. Perhaps with fish this is not of so much consequence, but I am confident that anyone who has once eaten a properly-cooked autumn mackerel will never again give the preference to the poor mother-fish, almost bursting with roe. We consider salmon out of season in spawning time; we even make “fence-months” for all fresh-water fish; and why so many persons should esteem a mackerel or a herring fit for nothing unless it is on the point of spawning, I confess myself quite unable to decide.
Mr. Henry Mayhew, in his work on “London Labour and the London Poor,” has furnished us with some valuable statistics respecting the number of fish annually sold in the metropolis, and from these I find that, though, numerically speaking, soles, plaice, and herrings are at the head of the list, mackerel find great favour with all classes. Plaice and herrings, being the cheapest fish that come to market, of course find a legion of purchasers amongst the very poor; indeed, but for these two most valuable additions to their meagre fare, our poor would rarely go beyond a vegetable diet. The low class of Irish, for instance, in the season, eat fish at least three times a-week.
Mackerel sometimes grow to a very large size, and I have seen them exceeding two feet in length and weighing many pounds. There is a bastard kind of fish called the “horse-mackerel,” which somewhat resembles the herring, and is often caught with a hook. I have taken it thus whilst fishing for whiting. When the mackerel is caught with a hook and line, as is the case on some parts of our coast, the bait used is a worm or a piece of red cloth, and sometimes a piece of a mackerel itself. With regard to the red cloth, I do not conceive that the fish has any intention of eating it, but that it is irritated by that colour, as are other living creatures (the bull and the turkey, for instance), and, flying at it, gets hooked!
The mackerel men, at the close of the season in July, go home and prepare their boats for the
