Calcutta Review - Paperback

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CALCUTTA REVIEW. No CXXIY. Art. I.?THE FISHERIES OF SOUTHERN INDIA. BY THE LATE J. A. BOYLE, HABEAS ClVIL SERVICE. THE name that the first European settlers gave to the South- Eastern shore of India?' La Pcherie '?the Fishery, marks very clearly what they found to be the distinctive occupation of the coast-dwellers. The shallow, tepid sea of Manaar teems with fish of every form; while as soon as the coral reefs are passed, the deep waters outside are the home of the finest of tropical fishes, the seer, which, at its full size of forty pound's weight, rivals in quality and daintiness of flesh the most highly-prized fish of colder seas. There are indeed very few species of fish that are of any real value, for the seer and the pomphret and the mullet make up the list of edible fishes in the Englishman's sense; though a local villager will eat anything from a skate to a hammer-headed shark. There is an air of desolation and barrenness about these tropical seas that can hardly fail to strike those who sail them. Scarcely a gull or kittiwake breaks the silence of the sea or the burning expanse of sky. Now and again a porpoise?wongei or Roller, as the Tamilians call him?heaves his great barrel-form above a wave, and rolls on again into deep water: or a shark's fin shows his dreaded presence, as he makes the lesser fishes flee before him. Miniature sword-fish dart hither and thither through the blue waters as it-seems with no more resistance than an arrow through the air. But above, the signs of life are rare; and one misses sorely the merry swallows and the chattering gulls to flit above the ship and dash into the water, and to remind us of life above the dead and barren sea. Rich treasures, however, lie buried five fathoms deep; for there the sea has ...