(3.) The _market_ also is of prime necessity. Fish are not caught and cured except for a market. Besides the extended coast, where an immediate demand must always prevail in proportion to increasing population, there is an existing market in California, amply attested by long voyages to Kamtchatka for fish, and by recent attempts to find fishing-grounds. San Francisco at one time took from Okhotsk nine hundred tons of fish, being about one eighth of the yearly fishing product of Gloucester. Her fishing-vessels last year brought home from all quarters fifteen hundred tons of dried fish and ten thousand gallons of cod-liver oil. There is also a growing market in Washington and Oregon. But beyond the domestic market, spreading from the coast into the interior, there will be a foreign market of no limited amount. Mexico, Central America, and the States of South America, all Catholic in religion, will require this subsistence, and, being southern in climate, they must look northward for a supply. The two best customers of our Atlantic fisheries are Hayti and Cuba, Catholic countries under a southern sun. The fishermen of Massachusetts began at an early day to send cod to Portugal, Spain, and Italy, all Catholic countries under a southern sun. Our “salt fish” became popular. The Portuguese minister at London in 1785, in a conference with Mr. Adams on a commercial treaty with the United States, mentioned “salt fish” among the objects most needed in his country, and added, that “the consumption of this article in Portugal was immense, and he would avow that the American salt fish was preferred to any other, on account of its quality.”[216] Such facts are more than curious. But more important than the Pacific States of the American continent are the great empires of Japan and China, with uncounted populations depending much on fish. In China one tenth subsist on fish. Notwithstanding the considerable supplies at home, it does not seem impossible for an energetic and commercial people to find a market here of inconceivable magnitude, dwarfing the original fur-trade with China, once so tempting.