THE SEINE NET

Evening Star, Issue 22047, 5 June 1935, Page 7

THE SEINE NET

FISHING IN CORNWALL MAINSTAY OF PEOPLE /As much as any other part of England West Cornwall is a victim of the guide books. One of these works arrived recently whose author had evidently got as far as Newlyn. He was fairly correct in his patter about the fishing there. Then, as is inevitable, ho went on to talk about Land’s End and the strange village of Sennen that lies in its own bay round a corner‘of the coast. He added that it was said that until quite recently the ancient business of fishing with a seine net was practised there. He could hardly believe it; in these days pf progress it could not possibly be true; but there the statement was. It might surprise that writer to learn that so far from being an ancient and legendary object the great seine net, much the same as that used by St. Peter on the Lake of Galilee, is the chief support of every living soul in Sennen Cove (writes Mary Butts, in the ‘Manchester Guardian’). There are other supports—individual fishing from boats, crabbing and crab-pon making, and, of course, in summer the visitors. But the mainstay of the place is the net, nearly two hundred feet long, costing several hundred pounds to buy and 40 men to move, and round whose nature and use through the centuries a whole .technique, a whole ritual, and a state of mind have been evoked and upon whoso existence something more than the mere physical life of these men and their families depends. : All spring, autumn, and winter the great fislr shoals nose, their way round this coasts. Bass and pollock are there, and the precious grey mullet—. and sometimes in spring a fresh-run salmon glorious from the sea, making its way round to the Severn or the Wye or the Usfc. It is a mystery to any “foreigner ” how they know, hut down in the CoVe in. each generation men are born with an eye for the ways of the fish in the sea, for the subtle changes in sea colour which mark the arrival of a shoal. They can tell what kind of fish they are; and out of 12,000 odd in an estimate of number be no more than 100 out; can tell as well by night as by day. • THE “ HUEUR.” To these men is given the ancient name of “Hueur,” and it is; their business, whenever the fish are expected, to . walk the cliffs night and day until within the great sweep of the bay (and the use of the seine necessitates a wide stretch of sand) a change invisible to any eyes but. theirs means that the mackerel or the bass are in. When the fish come they come by the thousand, timid as hares, as apt to scatter as a flock of starlings, desperately quick of hearing, and fast to take cover among the rocks where no net can reach. •

Then it is possible to xee what is becoming, alas! a rare thing, a primitive community in action. The men are silent, infinitely quick, infinitely skilled. The women and children Vanish indoors. (Until lately not one would dare to show her face, least of all comb her hair, until the fish had “ broken sand.”) In the boathouse 40 men are unwinding the vast net, which is carried to the shore and piled in the special broad-beamed row boat/ called the mullet boat, and worked hy a few men with oars, while the rest gather in line along the shore. Softly' and quickly the rowers put out, and as they row their eyes are not on the sea but inland to the top of the high cliff. For there, on the highest convenient point, a rock worn smooth hy centuries of feet, the Hueur stands, with a great bunch of furze, directing them. Down at the tide edge the men are quiet, but a quarter of a mile back, high in air, the Hueur is howling likp a man possessed. “Heeva! Heeva! Heeva! he cries, leaping up, throwing his body about, whirling his staff, signalling in a fury of gesticulation, his head back, his eyes rclHng, his feet dancing, his body swinging from the waist, the sweat pouring off him. ' One has seen him, too, at night with his staff in flames, the . sparks scattering, as in a frenzy' of passion he _ directs, strains, “magics” the boat into position. Meanwhile the 1 men, passing along the outer edge ,of the shoal, with, exquisite judgment pay out the net, laying it on the water so as to enfold the fish, until the whole is “ shot ’’ and; the shoal enclosed within it. PILING THE CATCH. As soon, as the net is shot and drawn up, “ breaking sand,” it is as though another Sennen has been born. - - The intimate operation carried put by three or four meii in a boat and a, line of men who are hot spectators but, in a final sense, participators in their act—• an act winch is a life act, a play of man seeking , his bread out of deep waters, of “ men against the sea is changed for a road of general activity, when wives, children, the very old, stray' passers-by, and stray visitors rush out of doors and race one another across the sand. The Hueur, exhausted, is lying on the ground'; practice varies, but for the quietest of his craft the strain is intense. But everyone else in Sennen is down on the shore getting that catch up the beach. Then it is piled up : to each who has a share in the boats a pile. Until lately a pile was. assigned to each widow, or .orphan also, but now ■ the women, who usually have charge in Sennen of all finance, have traded this privilege for a free band witb_ the visitors m summer and the takings from their particular industry. It is piled on the smooth rocks above high water, where for centuries tho catch has been laid, each pile marked with a token, a brass snuffbox, a bright pebble, so that each man may know his own. The catch, if taken in the morning, is lefts till the afternoon: if later, all nightj until, as soon as may be, the buyers, usually from Newlyn, arrive, and « chosen fisherman, with extreme relish, imagery, and shrewdness, auctions each heap. .