after steamer pulls into the line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river."

Until 1865 the steamboats controlled the transportation business of all the territory drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. But two causes for their undoing had already begun to work. The long and fiercely-fought war had put a serious check to the navigation of the rivers. For long months the Mississippi was barricaded by the Confederate works at Island Number 10, at New Madrid and at Vicksburg. Even after Grant and Farragut had burst these shackles navigation was attended with danger from guerrillas on the banks and trade was dead. When peace brought the promise of better things, the railroads were there to take advantage of it. From every side they were pushing their way into New Orleans, building roadways across the "trembling prairies," and crossing the water-logged country about the Rigolets on long trestles. They penetrated the cotton country and the mineral country. They paralleled the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Cumberland, as well as the Father of Waters, and the steamboat lines began to feel the heavy hand of competition. Captains and clerks found it prudent to abate something of their dignity. Instead of shippers pleading for deck-room on the boats, the boats' agents had to do the pleading. Instead of levees crowded with freight awaiting carriage there were broad, empty spaces by the river's bank, while the railroad freighthouses up town held the bales of cotton, the bundles of staves, the hogsheads of sugar, the shingles and lumber. On long hauls the railroads quickly secured all the North and South business, though indeed, the hauling of freight down the river for shipment to Europe was ended for both railroads and steamboats, so far as the products raised north of the Tennessee line was concerned. For

a new water route to the sea had been opened and wondrously developed. The Great Lakes were the shortest waterway to the Atlantic, and New York dug its Erie Canal which afforded an outlet-pinched and straitened, it is true, but still an outlet-for the cargoes of the lake schooners and the early steamers of the unsalted seas.

With the entrance of the Twentieth Century began a decline in river traffic so that it is to-day at its lowest ebb. Its decline is largely due to the unrelenting hostility of the railroads, which not only refuse traffic arrangements with river boats, but buy up and hold out of use the most advantageous locations for docks and wharves. In 1917 the volume of traffic on the Mississippi and tributary waters had sunk to 1,621,000 tons. There were not lacking efforts to revive it, though not in the form of its ancient grandeur. Passenger traffic was virtually abandoned. Freight, it was believed might be carried in barges towed by a powerful tug, and several of these barge lines were in contemplation at the time of the completion of this book. The great economic advantage to France of its canals and canalized waterways was demonstrated during the war, as never before. Indeed, it has been held by good authorities that except for her canals France could never have kept her armies at the front supplied with rations and the material of war. Stimulated by this record the United States is sending a commission abroad to study French methods of interior water transportation, and it is not improbable that as freight carriers our rivers may regain the importance they have now lost. But the glory of the "old times on the Mississippi," when it was the great highway of luxurious travel between the north and south has departed forever.

CHAPTER IX

THE NEW ENGLAND FISHERIES — THEIR PART IN EFFECTING THE SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA THEIR RAPID DEVELOPMENT WIDE EXTENT OF THE TRADE-EFFORT OF LORD NORTH TO DESTROY IT-THE FISHERMen in the REVOLUTION - EFFORTS TO ENCOURAGE THE INDUSTRY ITS PART IN POLITICS AND DIPLOMACY-THE FISHING BANKS TYPES OF BOATS GROWTH OF THE FISHING COMMUNITIES - FARMERS AND SAILORS BY TURNS - THE EDUCATION OF THE FISHERMEN METHODS OF TAKING MACKEREL - THE Seine and the TRAWL SCANT PROFITS OF THE INDUSTRY PERILS OF THE BANKS SOME PERSONAL EXPERIENCES THE FOG AND THE FAST LINERS THE TRIBUTE OF HUMAN LIFE.

THE

HE summer yachtsman whiling away an idle month in cruises up and down that New England coast which, once stern and rock-bound, has come to be the smiling home of midsummer pleasures, encounters at each little port into which he may run, moldering and decrepit wharves, crowned with weatherbeaten and leaky structures, waterside streets lined with shingled fish-houses in an advanced stage of decay, and acres of those low platforms known as flakes, on which at an earlier day the product of the New England fisheries was spread out to dry in the sun, but which now are rapidly disintegrating and mingling again with the soil from which the wood of their structures sprung. Every harbor on the New England coast, from New Bedford around to the Canadian line, bears these dumb memorials to the gradual decadence of what was once our foremost national industry. For the fisheries which once nursed for us a school of

the hardiest seamen, which aroused the jealousy of England and France, which built up our seaport towns, and carried our flag to the furthest corners of the globe, and which in the records both of diplomacy and war fill a prominent place have been for the last twenty years appreciably tending to disappear. Many causes are assigned for this. The growing scarcity of certain kinds of fish, the repeal of encouraging legislation, a change in the taste of certain peoples to whom we shipped large quantities of the finny game, the competition of Canadians and Frenchmen, the great development of the salmon fisheries and salmon canning on the Pacific coast, all have contributed to this decay. It is proper, however, to note that the decadence of the fisheries is to some extent more apparent than real. True, there are fewer towns supported by this industry, fewer boats and men engaged in it; but in part this is due to the fact that the steam fishing boat carrying a large fleet of dories accomplishes in one season with fewer hands eight or ten times the work that the old-fashioned pink or schooner did. And, moreover, as the population of the seaport towns has grown, the apparent prominence of the fishing industry has decreased, as that industry has not grown in proportion to the population. Forty years ago Marblehead and Nantucket were simply fishing villages, and nothing else. Today the remnants of the fishing industry attract but little attention, in the face of the vastly more profitable and important calling of entertaining the summer visitor. New Bedford has become a great factory town, Lynn and Hull are great centers for the shoemaking industries.

When the Pilgrim Fathers first concluded to make their journey to the New England coast and sought of the English king a charter, they were asked by the thrifty James, what profit might arise. "Fishing," was the