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The purse seiner works in daylight, off a powerfully engined sixty-foot, thirty-ton craft. He pays the seine out over a roller on a revolving platform aft. His vessel moves slowly in a sweeping circle as the net goes out, a circle perhaps a thousand feet in diameter. When the circle is complete the two ends of the net meet at the seiner's stern. A power winch hauls on ropes and the net closes.
The gill-netters hung on the seiner's heels, because where the purse seine could get a haul so could they. And the carriers and buyers sought the fishermen wherever they went, to buy and carry away their catch. Folly Bay suffered bad luck from the beginning. Gower had four purse-seine boats in commission. Within a week one broke a crankshaft in half a gale off Sangster Island.
He clipped the tug, scraped the barge, and set the seiner's boat a-dancing, and two lengths more he put down the wheel and threw her gracefully into the wind. Down came jib, down came jumbo, over splashed the anchor. She ran forward a little, rattled back a link or two, steadied herself, and there she was.
A single riding light glowed at the No. 5's masthead. Her cabin lights blinked out. Her crew sprawled in their bunks, sound asleep. Under cover of the night the fishermen took pattern from the seiner's example. A gill net is nine hundred feet long, approximately twenty feet deep. They stripped the cork floats off one and hung it to the lead-line of another.
"Oh, no," she says, "I don't know him, but I know of him everybody does." Well, everybody did, that's a fact, and the way Marm Bounderby and Maizie was togged out at the supper-table was a sin and a shame. And the way they poured gush over that bald-headed broker was enough to make him slip out of his chair. Talk about "fishers of men"! them Bounderbys was a whole seiner's crew in themselves.
"Give me," he said to the cook as the proper man for an audience, "a seiner's crew when they're not on fish for real gentlemen of leisure. Look at 'em now you'd think they were all near-sighted, with their cards up to their chins. And above them look Kipling to starb'd and the Duchess to port.
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