The things we do!

Then, when he had finished, he went and leant on the cage
of the watch-light, and gazed abstractedly on the ocean.
In the meantime, a number of the sailors of the Nautilus,
all strong and healthy men, had come up onto the platform.
They came to draw up the nets that had been laid all night.
These sailors were evidently of different nations,
although the European type was visible in all of them.
I recognised some unmistakable Irishmen, Frenchmen, some Sclaves,
and a Greek, or a Candiote. They were civil, and only used that odd
language among themselves, the origin of which I could not guess,
neither could I question them.
The nets were hauled in. They were a large kind of "chaluts," like those
on the Normandy coasts, great pockets that the waves and a chain fixed
in the smaller meshes kept open. These pockets, drawn by iron poles,
swept through the water, and gathered in everything in their way.
That day they brought up curious specimens from those productive coasts.
I reckoned that the haul had brought in more than nine hundredweight of fish.


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