SEA AT £600 A SQUARE MILE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXII, Issue 148, 24 June 1901, Page 2

SEA AT £600 A SQUARE MILE.

VALUABLE FISHERIES

It is probable that few people, except fishermen, realise the immense value of certain patches of sea. It is almost impossible to imagine that wide expanses of tossing foam far out in the centre of the North Sea should be worth more, acre for acre, than the green pastures and rich plough-lands of pood English soil. Yet it is quite easy to prove that the whole of that vast shallow known as the Dogger Bank brings in a bigger income than any equal area ashore which is devoted to crops or cattle. The Dogger is 170 miles long by 65 broad, that is, it has an area of 1.1,050 square miles. All the winter long the fishing fleets of the United Kingdom, of France, Holland, Germany and other countries are at work on it, catching between them over 450,000 tons of fish; that is, over 40 tons to the square mile. Put these at £15 a ton, it is easy to see that the Dogger Bank returns an income, of ,C6OO a square mile a year. Considering that only seven-tenths of the land ashore can be profitably used for farming, the extra profit on the sea is plainly enough seen. Off. the Ekscx coast lie patches of mud just below low-tide mark which cannot be bought, so valuable are they. To oysters they owe their worth, A single acre of oyster bank on which the shell-fish have been allowed to grow to four years old will yield £80 to £200 worth of natives in a year. Anyone who is exploring the Essex coast can tell the oyster bods by the long, thin stakes which rise above the water. There is a very heavy penalty for yachtsmen who carelessly allow their craft to ground on imid banks marked in this way. All the oyster beds on the coast are in the hands of different corporations, that of Whitstable being the most exclusive. Each is extremely jealous of the others, and three or four years ago there was a regular naval battle between the oyster men of the Blackwater and those of Burnham. The question in dispute was the right to dredge up shingle and shells from their rival's territory, and use it for covering their own oyster beds. Young oysters —spat as they are called —are first laid down on beds of this kind of stuff. Quite apart from the many wrecks which strew its floor, there are portions of the. Mediterranean which are fabulously rich; £1200 worth of sponges were taken, in IRB7, from one patch of sea-bottom near the Island of Rhodes. The space was not more than 150 by 120 yards. Near "Rhodes, too, is coral wf great value, but much of it at a depth which is absolutely prohibitive for divers without dresses. Off Bengasi is a mass of branch coral said to have cost nine lives. These nine men went down one after another, and simply disappeared. The tenth was named John Cataris. Taking a large slab of stone in his hands, he dived into seventy feet of water. About fifty feet of rope were out when the men in the boat found it floating loosely. They began to haul back. The rope stuck, and then came loose again, and tip was pulled John Cataris with his back scored by rows of wounds like those of saw teeth. His story was that .he dived, stone foremost, into a hot, dark place, and then was suddenly hurled back. His mates declare that he descended head-foremost into the jaws of the huge shark which had swallowed the other nine, and but for the great stone he held that he would have shared their fate. The discovery that a certain sort of seamoss can be used to clarify beer has added very much to the value of several small bays on the Massachusetts coast of America. At a place called Scifruate there were gathered last year nearly a thousand tons of this sea moss, worth, in all, over £12,000. Mossers make from one to two pounds a day during the season Tvlien this moss is fi"fc "to gpather, and many a family has £80 to £90 to put by against the long, cold, stormy winter of the North Atlantic coast. —"Cassell's Saturday Journal."