And this subject reminds me of another fishery which I witnessed a
few months ago--last March--at Sestri di Ponente, near Genoa. We
frequently saw nearly the whole of the fisher population of the place
engaged in dragging from the water on to the sands enormously long
nets, which had been previously carried out by boats to a distance not
more I think than three or four hundred yards from the shore. From
these nets, when at last they were landed after an hour or so of
continual dragging by a dozen or twenty men and women, were taken huge
baskets-full of silvery little fish sparkling in the sun, _exactly_
like whitebait. I had always supposed that whitebait was a specialty
of the Thames. Whether an icthyologist would have pronounced the
little Sestri fishes to be the same creatures as those which British
statesmen consume at Greenwich I cannot say; but we ate them
frequently at the hotel under the name of _gianchetti_, and could find
_no_ difference between them and the Greenwich delicacy. The season
for them did not seem to last above two or three weeks. The fishermen
continued to drag their net, but caught other fishes instead of
_giancketti_. But while it lasted the plenty of them was prodigious.
All Sestri was eating them, as all Douarnenez ate sardines in the old
days. When the net with its sparkling cargo was dragged up on the sand
and the contents were being shovelled into huge baskets to be carried
up into the town, the men would take up handfuls of them, fresh, and I
suppose still living, from the sea, and plunging their bearded mouths
in them, eat them up by hundreds. The children too, irrepressibly
thronging round the net, would pick from its meshes the fishes which
adhered to them and eat them, as more inland rising generations eat
blackberries. I did not try the experiment of eating them thus, as one
eats oysters, but I can testify that, crisply fried, and eaten with
brown bread and butter and lemon juice, they were remarkably good.