Amos Seaman School Museum
River Hebert, Nova Scotia

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King Seaman - His Legacy Continues

 

 

TRANSCRIPT

Yes, they'd take their horses and they had their camps on the marsh, and they had stables to put the horses in and they had these sheds where they put the fish. They'd go down in the spring and they put these nets out with stakes and whatever. The long ones were 14 feet or maybe longer and they were hardwood and very sharp. Then they had a lot of stakes, just ordinary fence stakes they had already.
I'd say 14 feet, maybe more but so much went down, but that quicksand. The way they put those stakes in. They tied ropes on the top end. Two ropes one on each side and there would be two or three men on a rope. And they put this up where they wanted it and they started working that back and forth pulling on the ropes,and that would go down. They had to keep it going, because if they stopped that was just the same as cement, it couldn't get started. So they'd keep it going till it got down to the right height and then that was alright.
Then they had these stakes, these fence stakes, they drove maybe 20 feet away so they could tie the ropes down on both sides.
And those nets, I don't know just how long they were, but I think they were around 40 feet. And they had around 60 nets in one spot and forty in another spot.
And going down there at night, they claimed it was about 10 miles to where the nets were, from the village or camps. And they'd have a lantern and they used to drive stakes to mark the road so they'd... One fellow would sit there with the lantern looking for a stake hole right there and then on to the next one, and if it wasn't there they'd have to stop and find out where they were at to get their bearings.......then move on to the next one.
There was one place, about half way down there, where the tide came in lower than where the nets was. And the tide would come in and there would be no water around the nets, but there would be deep water raising in here about half way to shore. But some of the older fellows, knew about how much time you could spend down there.
One night we were down there. The nets sometimes would get spoiled with sticks or something. Sandy Burke.... and we was down there and I was with them. George Symes..... George and I were getting the fish out of the nets. There were the four of us. George and I and Sandy were tending the nets and Sandy kept telling everyone it was time to get out of here. So after that we just put everything into the wagon and go. Sure enough, there was quite a lot of water. They'd tell stories about horses having to swim.
They were just ordinary wagons like you use on a farm. They had quite a good sized body to them and sometimes they would load them right up with shad and haul them away. And there were times, depending on the tides. If the tide was low or if the tide was high, we'd get a better run of fish. They'd load that and they'd bring it up and it would be may be one or two o'clock in the morning. So they had a place outside of the dyke, a platform, kind of like a platform. They were these big molasses puncheons. You used to get molasses one time, and they were big puncheons. So they had them sawed in two for barrels. We had a hole there that when the tide came in it filled up with water, and that's what we used to do to clean the fish off. The next tide would come in and clean that hole out with water.
There were a lot of shad sold. I've seen puncheons, I don't know how many, I forget now. Big puncheons that were full of shad. In the later part of the summer, he had in later years.. In earlier years he had horses and couldn't do it with them. In later years, he had a truck and he always hired someone to drive it for him. I drove one summer for him. So we'd load the fish and we started away and we get up here around River Hebert, and we'd sell some. And we'd go across the Boars Back, also Halfway River and down there, right into Parrsboro. And there was certain people that would buy and we made a trip a week there and they would but one or two.
What would a fish be worth at that time?
The good fish were worth a quarter.
What year would this be?
That would be around, maybe 34.
The 30's.
And a small one 15 cents.

 

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