A Cronje vanquished, Botha held at bay, A storm-swept way to Peace, ere Peace shall be ! But when shall come the end to bloody strife, And treasure shall reward thy glory's quest? What added lustre will thy banner wear? What new accord of praise the nations give? Can glory hallow grasping hands of greed? Make right the fixed and stubborn might of will? Will not the ghosts of Boer and Briton slain The glaring sin lies chiefly at thy door. Thy breach of faith the hounds of war let loose, Made hells of earthly heavens, dyed fields with gore, Until thine end was gained allowed no truce! Bethink thee, England, of thy Christian creed, And stay thy crimsoned, crushing hand of wrong. Make Peace and fill with blessed word and deed To speed the day of Time's millennial song! ALEWIVES AND THE DIP-NET PROCESS. By H. W. Brown, M. Sc. F the many interesting phenomena which to the 'longshoreman are always common enough, none, it seems to me, can be more worthily marvelous than those grand movements of gregarious and migratory fishes which occur annually all along our coasts. Vast schools of porgies, for example, appear off New England in midsummer; and I have seen a single greasy, old, black fishing steamer hoisting aboard three hundred and fifty barrels of this oily treasure as the result of but two average hauls of her huge, purse-like, seine net. Shad, cod, mackerel, menhaden, and the like, also go in schools, and each suggests to the observer its own particular features of interest, as it does to the ever-dependent fisherman of our banks and bays its own peculiar methods of capture. But there is one annually returning visitant to our shores and streams of exceptional interest. of exceptional interest. Concerning it, however, very little seems thus far to have been written, and I suppose many intelligent people, especially such as live far inland, may possess hardly more information about it than is implied by one of its several suggestive names. Some, perhaps, have never even heard of it. I refer to the plain, the old-fashioned, albeit the somewhat oversavory, alewife. This common and very interesting "All alewives taking the right-hand course are permitted to pass into the happy spawning ground above." food fish is often confused in thought with the sea-herring, a species which it does somewhat resemble; but the former is of larger and, as fish go, more corpulent proportions, hence, probably, the origin of the name; besides the alewife is anadromous in its habits. The sea-herring (clupea harengus) never enters fresh water, even for spawning. cercal tail. It weighs from two-fifths. to one-third of a pound, rarely one half, and is exceptionally muscular. That it needs must be an unusually athletic fish we may presently have good occasion to show. There are but two species of alewife along our coast, the so-called "branch herring" (Pomolobus pseudoharengus) and the "glut herring" (Pomolobus æstivalis), species that are much alike both externally and internally, differing mainly only in the color of the peritoneal lining pale in the one case, black in the other. When first taken from the water an alewife is of bright, silvery gray color, darker upon the back, without special markings, ten to twelve inches long, flattish, having a fair complement and spread of fins and a homo Various Every state along our seaboard, from Maine to Florida, with the possible exception of Georgia, engages more or less in the alewife industry; but of the New England states Massachusetts surpasses her sisters, both in the number of men employed and in the value of her catch. appliances for this sort of fishing are in common use-pound-nets, trapnets, gill-nets, seines, weirs, fykes, and, in New England, dip-nets. In New Hampshire, the Newmarket and Exeter rivers sustain a few nets, while the Merrimack, Taunton, and some other rivers of Massachusetts, use the seine chiefly. In both Massachusetts and Maine the dip-net process of catching is used very largely. In Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire the the branch-herring in inland ponds seine also is used, while in each of or lakes connected with the sea. the New England states where ale- The warm shallows of these places wife fishing is carried on pound- are the Mecca of their summer pilnets, trap-nets, and weirs are em- grimage. Hither they swarm in vast ployed. numbers, remain a few weeks, deposit the spawn and the milt, and then go straggling back to the sea. Of all the rivers of New England, the one from which most alewives are annually taken is the Damariscotta in Maine. From this small river nearly two and one half mil It is observed that such fish always return to leave their eggs upon the identical spawning ground where lions of fish have been secured in a single season, weighing more than a million pounds (1,390,612 pounds in 1896), an amount larger than that from any other stream of our entire Atlantic border, I believe, with the exception of the Potomac. The total weight of alewives taken from New Hampshire rivers (say) in 1896 was 269,734 pounds. Unlike the cod, herring, and so forth, the alewife, although its habitat is the ocean, prefers to deposit her eggs in fresh water; the glutherring not far from tidal water; but they were themselves brought forth. Doubtless it is chiefly due to some functional disturbance of ovaries and spermaries that migratory fishes are led to seek a spawning place somewhere every year, but by what unerring sense they are enabled to return, season after season, to the same stream for that purpose one is scarcely able to conjecture. The dip-net method of catching alewives is peculiar to New England. My own observations in connection with this process have been made chiefly at the principal fishway of the little river already mentioned-the near by, holding brackish water), is Damariscotta, in Maine. Damaris- well supplied with smelts and eels, cotta Mills is the seat of the business and formerly had its oysters. The for the section. Here the fishing name of the region, then, may have season affords for the people one had a somewhat more than local good-almost the only-opportunity significance to the mind of the early for really lively work which those savage. ease-loving citizens seem able to enjoy for a full twelve-month, and they make the most of it. The name Damariscotta is one of "The Mills," at the thoroughly picturesque fishway of which the greatest catch is annually made, is a small village about fifteen miles "With long-handled nets, several brawny dippers draw forth the fish incessantly." the many Indian words which we find written upon our New England landscape, and it is said to signify "The place of little fishes." Doubtless this fact should suggest a very remote beginning for the alewives of Damariscotta. Some enthusiastic genealogist might here discover a source of perpetual pleasure in being able to trace an unbroken, if only a piscatorial, line to a point so far back in human-who knows if not in geologic-time! Damariscotta Bay, however (a small inland tidal sea, from the sea. It is reached by alewives and sea tourists alike by means of the beautiful winding river which is the only outlet for the tidal waters of the bay. The bay itself receives fresh water mainly from a short, rocky, tumbling stream which all the year round drains a twelve-mile pond, fully sixty feet above. This elevated lake is the spawning place of the millions of fish that come up the river, and it is at the time of their ascent that they are taken in enormous quantities and |
