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THE THUNNY FISHERY

 
Ταν βαιταν αποδυς εις κυματα τηνα αλευμαι
Ωπερ τως Θυννως σκοπιαζεται Ολπις ο γριπευς—Theoc.
 

The thunny fishery, if not as exciting as that of the whale, is far from uninteresting to the uninitiated. We were rowing about in want of an object, when our boatmen proposed to take us to see this animating species of labour; and off we went to a spot about two miles from shore, where we came upon a little flotilla of boats, all occupied in the common pursuit. A large quantity of floating cork announced our arrival on the fishing ground; then came long lines of buoys, to which the drop-nets were attached, and at last we drew alongside a small boat, hailing which, we learn that the net is already half-drawn, and that la pipa (the sword-fish) is in it. Now, we had long wanted to see a live sword-fish, but there was no need to stimulate our rowers, who appeared equally eager that we should assist at the fun, and made great exertions to reach the spot in time. "Questa," says our guide, showing the boundary of the space circumscribed by walls of net; "questa è la camera della morte, (this is the chamber of death,) piano, piano, (or we shall shoot ahead.") The space thus designated lay between two long barges, one of which was fixed by anchor, and had few people on board, while the other was crowded with naked limbs, and fine heads in Phrygian bonnets, academy figures every man of them. What symmetry of form! what jet black beard and mustache! what dark flashing eyes! what noses without reproach! All were in the various combinations of action which their position demanded, hauling away at what seemed to our impatience an endless net; by the shortening of which, however, as their boat received it, layer upon layer, fold upon fold, coil upon coil, they were slowly bringing up the reticulated wall. As the place of captivity came nearer, every body was intensely anxious to get a first view of the fish; and many other boats were coming up alongside of ours, which fortunately lay right over the meshes of the prison, which was becoming every second more and more restricted in size. At length some of us obtained a first view of the spada and his long sword, and testified our delight with vociferation. The fish, meanwhile, who hates publicity, backs off, and would back out, to the opposite end of the net, where, still finding himself an object of unpleasant remark, he tries by violence to escape sideways; but that is no go even for a sword-fish, for a sword is his which cannot cut cords, and he soon finds he can make nothing of it. Smaller and smaller, meanwhile, is becoming the condemned hold, and greater and greater the perturbation within. The captive fish begins to swim round and round, and to watch a new opportunity, but it is too late!—too many are on the look-out for him! Every man gets ready his hooked pole, and there is more tightening of the tackle! The terrified fish now rises to the surface, as it were to reconnoitre, and then down he dives with a lash of his tail, which sends buckets of water into the boat of the assailants. This dive, of course, only carries him to the false bottom of the net, and come up presently he must! Every eye now looks fishy, and every man's hand is armed for the first blow. One tall athletic fellow takes aim, and misses; another is more successful, and hits. Stunned by the blow, the poor fish flounders on this side and on that, and the water is discoloured by his blood! One, two, three pointed poles at once, are again in his flank; and now he rushes about like a rounded lion, brandishing his tail, and dashing up whirlpools of water. More Blows! more blood! He rushes desperately at the net, and running his long snout into the meshes, is hopelessly entangled. It is all over with him! Countless wounds follow, till he turns over on his side, and is handed up lifeless into the boat.

"There," says one, "goes fifteen scudi's worth, and no harm done to the net." "Little enough, too; but he is worth two thunny, anyhow," says another. "Ay! and gives more sport," exclaims a third. Such piscatory eclogue fell upon our ear, when our guide announced to us that we had now seen every thing. The excitement over, we sat down in our boat to make a note of what we have written, while the boatmen clave the phosphorescent water homewards, and landed us neatly at sunset, with their oars dripping luminous drops at every stroke, in the beautiful harbour of Palermo.

Some days after we were still more fortunate; we had observed the scouts with a white hood over their boat, looking keenly down (vide our quotation from Theocritus) into the deep blue sea, and watching with all-eyed attention for the apparition of some giant shadow which should pass athwart the abyss, and give the signal for a new chase, while their comrades were hauling in an immense miscellaneous take of fish, the acquisition of the morning. We shot the outpost, (placed to prevent larger vessels from entering the fishing preserves and injuring the nets,) and remarked our boatmen uncovering to a small Madonna railed in alongside. We were just in time on this occasion to see the water enclosed in the camera della morte, already all alive with fish; for a shoal of palamide, and of immense pesce di moro, filled the reticulated chamber. They darted here and there as the net was raising, and splashed so furiously about, that the whole water became one lather; meanwhile, the men who had been singing gaily, now prepared their landing-nets, shouting in a way which certainly did seem to increase the terror of their prisoners, who redoubled their efforts to escape.

The rich hues of the palamide, in shape and colour not unlike our mackerel, but with longitudinal, in place of transverse, green bands, were beautiful objects as they were raised all iridescent in their freshness out of the water, and transferred to the side boat. We also noticed in the net one or two immense fish, in shape like rounded parallelograms, with tough shagreen hides, goggle eyes, and two immense leathery fins placed at the lower part of the abdomen. They kept flapping these valves up and down, but not offering to strike, though lugged out by a hook. The haul was a good one, each fish worth a ducat; and had they, in fact, been at this price converted into coin at once, the money would have made no mean show in the bottom of the net. The treacherous camera della morte was emptied quickly, and in one minute more, down it went again into the depths below.

We should have mentioned a singular practice of the fishermen of the present day in Sicily, to pat the thunny while he is in the net, as you pat a horse or dog: They say it makes him docile. This done, they put their legs across his back, and ride him round the net room, an experiment few would practise on the dolphin's back, at least in these days; yet Aulus Gellius relates that there was a dolphin who used to delight in carrying children on his back through the water, swimming out to sea with them, and then putting them safe on shore! Now, but for the coins, taking the above custom into consideration, one might have supposed the ancients' delphinus to have been the modern thunny.

THE FISH MARKET

"Dragged through the mire, and bleeding from the hock," lay a continuous mass of slaughtered thunny, mouths wide open, bloody sockets, from which the eyes had been torn to make lamp-oil, gills ripped off to be eaten fresh, and roes in baskets by their sides. There was also a quantity of a fish of dirty white belly and dusky back, the alalonga, and two huge dolphins, with skins full of lamp-oil. This really ugly creature looks far better in the delphin title-pages, with his lamp and his "alere flammam" on clean paper, than on the stall; but his very best appearance is on a fine Sicilian coin, with Arion on his back. The snouts of four large sword-fish were also conspicuous; and there was thunny enough for all the world: some of the supply, however, was to be hawked about the streets, in order to which cords are placed under the belly of a thunny of fifteen cwt., and off he goes slung on a pole, with a drummer before and a drummer behind, to disturb every street and alley in Palermo till he is got rid of; not that the stationary market is quiet; for the noise made in selling the mutest of all animals is in all countries really remarkable; but who shall do justice to a Sicilian Billingsgate at mezzogiorno! "Trenta sei, trenta sei," bawls out the Padrone, cleaving a fish in twain with one stroke of an immense chopper kept for the purpose. "Trenta sei, trenta sei," repeat the two journeymen accomplices, one counting it on his fingers to secure accuracy and telegraph the information to distant purchasers, or such as cannot hear in the noise; another holds up a slice as a specimen; three fellows at our elbow are roaring "tutti vivi, tutta vivi," "a sedici, a sedici." The man of whitings, and even he of sardines, have a voice and a figure of their own. As you approach each stall, the noisy salesmen suspend their voices, and enquire, in gentler accents, if you intend to buy; if you do not, like the cicada their stunning sound returns as soon as you are past. We have hinted that the thunny, "Integer et cadavere toto," does not look handsome: vastly less attractive is he when mutilated. Big as an elephant's thigh, and with flesh like some black-blooded bullock of ocean breed, his unsavoury meat attracts a most repulsive assemblage, not only of customers, but of flies and wasps, which no flapping will keep off from his grumous liver. The sword-fish cuts up into large bloodless slices, which look on the stall like so many fillets of very white veal, and might pass for such, but that the head and shoulders are fixed upon a long lance, high above the stall, to inform the uninitiated that the delicate looking meat in question was fed in the pastures of the deep. The price of thunny, a staple commodity and object of extensive Sicilian commerce, varies considerably with the supply; as to the demand, it never ceases. During our stay in Palermo, a whole fish would fetch about eight scudi, and his retail price was about twopence per English pound. Think of paying three or four francs for less than half a pound sott 'olio in Paris. The supply seems very constant during the season, which, on the Palermo side of the island, is from May to July, and continues a month later along the Messina coast; after which, as the fish cease to be seen, it is presumed here that they have sailed to the African coast. The flesh of the spada fish is generally double in market price to that of the thunny, selling during the greater part of June at about fourpence a-pound. Every thunny is weighed upon landing, and a high tax paid upon it to the king, who, in consideration thereof, charges his Sicilian subjects no duty for gunpowder or salt. The fixed fisheries for thunny, round the Sicilian coast, are upwards of a dozen, the most famous being that of Messina. At Palermo, however, they sometimes take an immense strike of several hundred in one expedition. The average weight of a full grown thunny, is from 1000 to 1200 pounds; of course the men with poles who land him, can carry him but a little way, and he reaches the market by relays. Every bit of him is eaten, except his bones and his eyes, and even these yield a quantity of oil.

The spada, too, is pickled down to his bones—he is in great request for the hotels, and his eyes, duly salted, are considered a sort of luxury; in some places these are the perquisite of the fishermen, yielded by their employers, who farm the fisheries, and having satisfied the king, make what terms they can with the subject.

COMMERCIAL POLICY—RUSSIA

From the brief review, in our last Number, of Spain, her commercial policy, her economical resources, her fiscal rigours, her financial embarrassments, these facts may be said to have been developed:—In the first place, that theoretically—that is, so far as legislation—Spain is the land of restrictions and prohibitions; and that the principle of protection in behalf, not of nascent, but of comparatively ancient and still unestablished interests, is recognized, and carried out in the most latitudinarian sense of absolute interdict or extravagant impost. Secondly, that under such a system, Spain has continued the exceptional case of a non or scarcely progressing European state; that the maintenance and enhancement of fiscal rigours and manufacturing monopoly, jealously fenced round with a legislative wall of prohibition and restriction, has neither advanced the prosperity of the quarter of a million of people in Catalonia, Valencia, and Biscay, in whose exclusive behalf the great and enduring interests of the remaining thirteen millions and upwards of the population have been postponed or sacrificed—nor contributed to strengthen the financial resources of the government, as proved by the prostrate position and prospects of a bankrupt and beggared exchequer; that, as the necessary and inevitable consequence, the progress of agriculture, the ascendant interest of all-powerful communities and vast territorially endowed states—of Spain, the almost one only interest and element of vitality, economical and political—has been impeded, and continues to be discouraged; that the march of internal improvements is checked or stunted, when not absolutely stayed; finally, that public morals—the social health of a great people, inheritors of glorious antecedents, of an historic renown for those qualities of a high order, the deep-seated sentiment of personal, as of national honour and dignity, the integrity, fidelity, and gallantry, which more loftily spurn contaminating approximation with action springing out of base, sordid, and degrading motives and associations—have been sapped and corrupted by the debasing influences of that gigantic system of organized illicit trade which covers Spain with hordes of contrabandistas, more numerous and daring than the bands of aduaneros and the armies of regulars whom they set at defiance, and infests the coast of Spain with fleets of smuggling craft, which all the guardas costas, with the ancient armada of Spain, were it in existence, would be powerless to annihilate. And all this fine nation, of warm and generous temperament, of naturally noble and virtuous aspirations, thus desperately to be dismantled of its once-proud attributes, and demoralized in its character; its exhaustless riches of soil and climate to be wantonly wasted—per force of false legislation to be left uncultured—and for why? Shades of the illustrious Gabarrus and Jovellanos, why? Why, to enable some half dozen fabricantes of Barcelona to keep less than half-a-dozen steam-engines at work, which shall turn some few thousands of spindles, spinning and twisting some few millions of pounds of yarn, by which, after nearly three quarters of a century that the cotton manufacture has been planted, "swathed, rocked, and dandled" with legislative fondness into a rickety nursling, some fifty millions of yards of cotton cloths are said to be painfully brought forth in the year; the value of which may probably be equal to the same or a larger quantity of French cottons introduced by contraband, and consumed in the provinces of Catalonia and Arragon themselves—the first being sole seat of the cotton manufacture for all Spain. And for this deplorable consummation, the superabundant harvests of the waving fields, the luscious floods of the vineyards, the full flowing yield of the olive groves of Spain—of the wine, the oil, and the corn, of which nature is more bountiful than in Egypt of old—the produce and the wealth of the millions, (which, permitted, would exchange advantageously for foreign products, and, bye all the value, add to the store of national wealth, and create the means of reproduction,) are left to run waste and absolutely perish on the ground, as not worth the cost of transport to markets without demand. "The production of this soil," observes the Ayuntamiento of Malaga, in their eloquent Exposicion to the Cortes cited in our last Number, after referring to their own port and province, in whose elaboration thousands and thousands of hands are employed, millions and millions of capital invested, "are consumed, if not in totality, at least with close approximation, in England;" and after enumerating the wines, oil, raisins, grapes, oranges, lemons, and almonds, as products so consumed in this country—"We have active and formidable rivals in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, the Greek Archipelago, and other countries. We shall say nothing of the wools, corn and other fruits of Spain, so important, and some so depressed in England by foreign competition with those of this province. If the treaties of commerce of England with Italy and Turkey are carried into effect, the exportation of our oils and dried fruits will receive its death warrant—queda herida demuerte. France, Germany, and Portugal, accepting favourably the idea of the British Government, will cause our wines to disappear from the market; their consumption is already very limited, inasmuch as the excessive duty, to one-third the amount of which the value of the wine does not reach, at the mouth of the Thames, prevents the sale of the inferior dry wines. The same excessive duty tends to diminish the consumption of our fruits from year to year. Our oil has alone been able to find vent by favour of the double duty imposed till now upon Sicilian, superior to ours in quality. But the English speculators are already shy of purchasing, in the expectation of an assimilation of duties on oils of whatever origin." The Ayuntamiento proceeds to urge the necessity of a "beneficial compensation" to British manufactures in the tariff of Spain, without which, "the flattering perspective" of prosperous progress for the industry and agriculture of the Andalusias will be destroyed, and that those vast, rich, and fertile provinces will become a desolate desert. "The admission or prohibition of foreign woven cottons," says the Exposicion, "is for Malaga and its province of vital importance under two aspects—of morality and commerce. Until now we have endured the terrible consequences of prohibition. The exorbitant gain which it supports is the germ of all the crimes perpetrated in our country. The man who carries a weapon, who uses it and sheds the blood of an agent of the law in the defence of his illegally acquired goods, will not hesitate in shedding the blood of a fellow citizen who may stand in the way of his desires. And hence the frequent assassinations. He who with gold seduces others for the increase of his own property and for antisocial purposes, does not scruple, when fortune is adverse, to possess himself by violence of the gold of the honest husbandman, or peaceful trader: from hence the constant robberies in the less frequented places; from hence the general abuse of carrying prohibited arms of all sorts, and using them criminally against any one on the least provocation, already accustomed to use them against the Government. Who shall venture to enumerate the assassinations, the robberies, the ruined families, the misfortunes of all kinds, which, directly and indirectly, spring from contraband trade?"

Such is the Exposicion, such the experience, and such the views of a patriotic and enlightened corporation, representing and ruling over one of the most populous, wealthy, and industrially disposed districts of Spain. Our object in prefacing at this length, and with seeming irrelevance, perhaps, our review of the commercial policy of Russia, with its bearings on the interests of Great Britain, is to show the differing action of the same commercial system, in the present case of the prohibitive and restrictive system in different countries, both in respect of the mode in which the internal progress and industry of countries acting upon the same principle are variously affected themselves and in respect of the nature and extent of the influences of such action upon those relations of interchange which they entertain, or might otherwise entertain, with other countries where an opposite or modified system prevails. In its broad features the system of Russia varies from that of Spain only in being more rigorous and intractable still. Both, however, are founded on the same exclusive principle, that of isolation—that of forcing manufactures at whatever cost—that of producing all that may be required for domestic consumption—of exporting the greatest possible maximum—of importing the lowest conceivable minimum. Starting from the same point, and for the same goal, it will not be without interest or instruction to accompany and observe the progress of the one, as we have already endeavoured to illustrate the fortunes of the other—to present Russia, industrial and commercial, side by side, or in contrast with Spain, as we have described her. Your absolute theory men, your free-traders with one idea, like Lord Howick, your performers in the economic extravaganza now rehearsing in the Parliament-house under the style of "leave imports free, and the exports will take care of themselves," may chance to meet with many strange facts to confound their arbitrary theorems on the banks of the Neva. Absolute of wisdom, however, as they arrogate to be, and casehardened as they are, against assaulting results which should destroy their self-willed principle—a principle, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, proclaimed to be unchanged and unchangeable—in face of which facts are powerless and adverse experience contumeliously scouted, or mendaciously perverted, it is sufficiently obvious that lessons in political economy will, less than from any quarter of the globe, perhaps, be accepted from St Petersburg—they will fall upon unwilling ears—upon understandings obtuse or perverted.

We are not of the number of those who would contend that, under all times or circumstances, should a principle, or rather the system built upon a principle, be rigorously upheld in its application intact, sacred equally from modification on the one hand, as against radical revolution on the other. It cannot be denied that, under the protective system, have grown into their present gigantic proportions all the great manufacturing interests of Great Britain. But, with customary hardihood of assertion, maintain the economists—in whose wake follow the harder-mouthed, coarser-minded Cobdens of the League—although manufactures have flourished under such a system to an extent which has constituted this country the workshop of the world, they have so flourished in spite of the system; and, in its absence, left exposed to free unrestricted competition from abroad, must inevitably have progressed at a more gigantic rate of speed still. This is asserted to be in the order of nature, but as nature is every where the same—as the same broad features and first elements characterize all countries more or less alike—we ask for examples, for one example only, of the successful establishment and progress of any one unprotected industry. The demand is surely limited, and reasonable enough. The mendacious League, with the Brights and Cobdens of rude and riotous oratory, are daily trumpeting it in the towns, and splitting the ears of rural groundlings with the reiterated assertion that, of all others, the cotton manufacture owes nothing to protection. What!—nothing? Were general restrictive imposts on foreign manufactures no protection? Was the virtually prohibited importation of the cotton fabrics of India no boon? of India, root and branch sacrificed for the advancement of Manchester? Why, there are people yet alive who can recollect the day when Manchester cottons could not have stood one hour's competition with the free, or even 100 per cent taxed fabrics of India.⁴⁰ How, indeed, could competition have been possible, with the wages of weaving and spinning in India at three-halfpence per day, whilst for equal quantities and qualities of workmanship, the British weaver was earning five shillings, and the spinner ten shillings per day on the average? In 1780, Mr Samuel Crompton, the ingenious inventor of the mule frame for spinning, such as it exists to this day, and is the vast moving machine of cotton manufacturing greatness, stated that he obtained fourteen shillings per lb. for the spinning and preparation of No. 40 yarn, twenty-five shillings for No. 60, and two guineas for No. 80. The same descriptions of yarns are now profitably making at prices ranging from about tenpence to twentypence per lb. At the same period common calicoes were saleable at about two shillings per yard, which now may be purchased for threepence. Will it be said that the Indian spinner and weaver by hand could not, at the same epoch, have produced their wares at one-half the price, had not importation, with unrelenting jealousy, been interdicted? Was the rigid prohibition of the export of machinery no concession, all exclusively and prodigiously in the interest of the cotton manufacture, to the zealous promotion and ascendancy of which the mining and agricultural interests are unhesitatingly, not to say wantonly, prejudiced, if not absolutely perilled? We say wantonly, because the free exportation of cotton yarn, tolerated at the same moment, was an absurd and mischievous violation of the very principle on which the prohibited exportation of machinery was alone and could be justified. In face of these incontrovertible facts, of which hereafter, and now that the record of them is consigned to that wide circulation through the world which the pages of Blackwood only can afford, misrepresentation remains without excuse on the question of that fostering protection to which, in a larger degree, if not exclusively, the cotton manufacture of Great Britain is indebted for its growth to its present colossal, mammoth-like, and almost unwieldy grandeur. We do not, however, whilst re-establishing facts in their purity, dream the practical impossibility of confounding and disarming the ignorance of men unfortunately so ill educated and unread, and with intellect so incapable, apparently, of appreciating instruction, if not wilfully perverse, as the Cobdens, or of restraining the less coarse but more fluent flippancy and equally unscrupulous assurance of friend Bright, from resort to that stock and stale weapon of vulgar minds which is so readily drawn from the armoury of falsehood. To the end of the chapter they will lie on, until doomsday arrive, and they sink, like the Henry Hunts, et id genus omne, their at least as well-bred predecessors of the popularity-hunting school, to their proper level in the cess-pool of public contempt. Time, which executes justice upon all in the long run, cannot fail to lay the ghost of cotton and anti-corn law imposture, even in the troubled waters of the muddy Irk and Irwell, where first conjured from. And now, having shown how the cotton manufacture of Great Britain was from its birth cradled, rocked, and dandled into successful progress; how it was fostered and fenced round with protection and prohibitive legislation as against competition from abroad; we shall proceed with our review of the rise and career of protected manufactures in Russia. And we would counsel "one who has whistled at the plough," whose "farming notes" in the Morning Chronicle, when confined to such matters of practical detail as may be supposed to lie within the scope of his own experience and comprehension, are not destitute of interest and information, though with distorted and exaggerated views, to ponder well before a next reiteration of the random and absurd assertion that the "corn-law has done to agriculture what every law of protection has done for every trade that was ever practised—it has induced negligence, and, by its uncertain operation, has obstructed enterprise." Instead of whistling at the plough, such a writer almost deserves to be whipped at the cart's tail for so preposterously dogmatic an assumption. It has yet to be demonstrated, and the proof is challenged, that ever a great interest, whether manufacturing or agricultural, was established in any part of the world, since the creation, without the aids and appliances of legislative and guernatorial patronage. The degree, the qualification the practical limitations, which in the progress of time, with social and industrial changes supervening at home and abroad, may be rendered expedient or necessary in the application of the principle, constitute quite a different question, which may be discussed and entertained without any disparagement of the soundness of the policy, as best adapted to existing circumstances, of the system when first applied. The theory of free trade may be, in its entirety, as plausibly it is presented to us, founded on just principle; the abstract truth and perfection of which are just as unimpeachable as that of the social theory propounded by Rousseau in the Savoyard's profession of faith, or that of the "liberty, equality, and community of property" (to say nothing of women) theory preached, and practically developed to some extent, in the paganish philosophies and New Harmony vagaries of the St Simonians, the Fourierians, and of Robert Owen, in these our days. And yet, from the beginning of time—whether from the world before the flood, or since the reconstruction of the world after—never, to this present epoch, has one single example come down to us of the sober realization of either the economical abstraction or the social abstraction. Primeval chaos, chaos existing before all time, could alone have represented the beau-ideal of each. So far indeed as their own demesnes and domains, Laban and Pharaoh were not without their practical proficiency in the elements of economical science—for the one knew how to sell his daughters, as the other his corn, in the "dearest market;" and each to buy his labour and his money at the "cheapest." And never will these free-trade and social day-dreams be accomplished to the end of all time; never until chaos come again; never, unless perchance the Fitzwilliams and the Phillipses, impregnated with the beatific reveries of socialist Robert Owen, should throw open, the one, Wentworth hall, with its splendid parks and spacious domains—the other, his Manchester mills, wonder-working machinery, and million of capital stock, to joint-stock occupancy, with common right of possession of the rural labourers who till the ground, and the urban operatives who ply the shuttle—the producers, in fact, of all their wealth—share and share alike; themselves, in future, undertaking the proportion of daily task-work; driving the "teams afield," or tenting the mule-frame. Should, perhaps, the Phalansterial system of Fourier preferably suit their taste, they will be entitled to enter into the "phalanx of harmony," and share à des degrés différents, dans la répartition des trots facultés—capital, travail, talent, … with the enjoyment of such an apartment in the Phalansterial "palace" for four hundred families, the minimum of the phalanx being eighty, which may compare with the quality of répartition corresponding to them, as expounded by Madame Gatti de Gamond, the principal legatee of Fourier and his system.