Excerpt from A Review of the Fishery Industries of the United States and the Work of the U. S. Fish Commission

The first American colony, planted at Jamestown in 1609, owed its permanence chiefly to the abundance of fish and oysters in the adjacent rivers. Its founder, Captain John Smith, was the pioneer of the American fisheries, and in his writings devotes many pages to the discussion of the methods by which they should be carried on. He was a practical fisherman, for his vessel in 1614 took 47, 000 fish off the coast of Maine. He realised thoroughly the value of his spoils. "And is it not pretty sport, " wrote he, "to haul up two pence, six pence, and twelve pence as fast as you can hale and veare a line? He is a very bad fisher cannot kill in one day with his hooke and line, one, two or three hundred cods." The colonists whom he planted on the shores of the Chesapeake have handed his precepts faithfully down to their descendants, who are to-day hauling pence up out of the water faster than their forefathers ever learned to do. The fisheries of the Chesapeake region yielded in 1880 a product valued at nearly eight and one-half million dollars.

The Massachusetts colonies were founded with still more special reference to the fisheries. We are told in Winslow's "Briefe Narrative of the True Grounds and Causes of the First Planting of New England, " that when the Puritans sent agents from Leyden to King James to gain his consent to their going to America, the King at once asked "what profit might arise." They answered in a single word, "Fishing."

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