3-071-138 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Our Fishing Industries: Crab-Catching at St. Goran, Mcvagissev Bay, Cornwall, 1883. '1. Crabber making bis pots or traps. 2. Crabber's boat, with flat-fish for bait. 3. Archangel and ray, to be cut up for bait. 4. Crab-pots, with strap and buoys. 5. Casting the crab-pots overboard. 6. Gigantic lobster and crab. 7. Boats going to sell the crabs to the Southampton collecting smack. 8. Tillage of Cornish crabbers. 9. Spider-crab or gabbery...The crab-pots are made of young and pliant shoots of the willow...Lobster pots are made in the same way...The pots are baited with pieces of cut-up fish...The crabber, having rowed out with his pots to his fishing-ground, looks out for what he considers a suitable place to commence the operations of the season...Should stress of weather...prevent the crabber front attending to his pots for three or four days the crabs mostly make their escape. Some eat a way out of the pots by tearing up the ribs; and gabberies or spider-crabs are especially destructive...A male crab which is...of full size, eighteen inches across the shell, fetches fourteen pence...the female crabs, or "humps," fetch only twopence each...The gigantic lobster shown in one of our Artist's Sketches measured thirty-one inches from claw to claw'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.