A Perilous Catch

by Mike Smylie

  4 See D.J. Brewer and R.F. Friedman, Fish and Fishing in Ancient Egypt, Warminster, 1989.

  5 A. von Brandt, in Fish Catching Methods of the World, London, 1972, gives a thorough account of these more unusual forms of fishing.

  6 L. Pedersen, ‘7000 Years of Fishing: Stationary Fishing Structures in the Mesolithic and Afterwards’, in A. Fischer (ed.), Man and Sea in the Mesolithic, Oxford, 1995.

  7 See M. Bell, ‘The Goldcliff Late-Mesolithic Site 5400–4000 Cal BC’, CBA report 120, 2000.

  8 F.M. Davis, An Account of the Fishing Gear of England and Wales, London, HMSO, 1936.

  9 D. MacDonald, Lewis, A History of the Island, Edinburgh, 1978.

  10 Mike Smylie, Anglesey and its Coastal Tradition, Llanrwst, 2000.

  11 E.E. Evans, Mourne County, 1951. Perhaps the best classification of these weirs has been put forward by N.V.C. Bannerman in The Bronze Age Coast Project – Ancient Fish Trap Types, 2000.

  12 See R.J. Slack-Smith, Fishing with Traps and Pots, Rome, 2001. Also ‘Fishing Baskets of Asia Pacific’, a pamphlet of an exhibition of fish traps held in Canada in 1997–98.

  13 Various authors have written on the fishing techniques of the River Severn, including the present author. For a brief look, see John Neufville Taylor, Fishing on the Lower Severn, Gloucester, 1974.

  14 J. Bickerdyke, Sea Fishing, The Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes, London 1895.

  15 Oppian of Corycus, Halieutica, LOEB, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1928 (translated by A.W. Mair). This was his poem of fishing (Halieutica) of some 3,500 lines, which he wrote in the second half of the second century.

  2

  THE GROWTH OF THE

  HERRING FISHERY

  In terms of fishing, both in the species and the techniques employed, there is a distinct difference between pelagic and demersal fishing. Pelagic refers to fish that live near or on the surface, rarely swimming to a more than a moderate depth while, on the contrary, the latter is said of fish that live in or near the bottom of the sea or ocean. This not to say that pelagic fish do not swim close to the seabed: they can reach depths up to 400m. Generally, though, they live in the top levels of the sea and also feed at the surface.

  In Britain the four main pelagic species fished commercially are herring, mackerel, pilchard and sprat, though there are others such as whitebait, anchovy, tuna and blue whiting. Sardines are the same species as pilchard, the latter being a more mature sardine. In Cornwall, where all British pilchards are landed, the name ‘Cornish sardines’ has been coined in an effort to increase sales. (The word ‘pilchard’ seems to have unfavourable connotations that ‘sardine’ doesn’t!)

  It is the herring fishery that has attracted the attention of writers and historians throughout the last thousand years. Thus much more is known about it and its effect on society than, say, for the mackerel, even if the mackerel is today often regarded as everyone’s favourite summer fish.

  Herring swim in huge shoals at spawning time and they have done so off almost every part of the British coastline over the last 300 years, even if their numbers are depleted today through overfishing. However, it has always been the fact that the North Sea saw a greater concentration of fish than did the west coast, with the obvious result being a higher concentration in fishing activity. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, the herring fishery as such didn’t really exist and was a resource largely ignored except by the small inshore fishermen who fished mostly for themselves and the locality. Nevertheless, the fishermen realised for themselves that the best time to catch herring at their prime was when they were about to spawn, and that they return year after year to spawn in the same place until something changes their behaviour.

  Before we discuss the growth of the business in catching and landing herring into an actual industry, we must go back over a thousand years to the times when the Romans were getting up and departing south from these shores. Yes, of course, they ate herring, understanding the healthy and appetising aspect of the fish, and having learnt what almost sounds like the secrets of the fish from the locals near to their garrison at Garianonum which was a few miles west of what is now Great Yarmouth and thought to have been Burgh Castle. Then the area was a huge estuary with a mass of sandbanks stretching over what we call the Norfolk Broads today.1

  As the last of the Romans left over the Straits of Dover in the fifth century, a confederation of Germanic tribes migrated towards Britain under Cerdick the Saxon with five ships, although they had been sending incursions over to battle against the Romans for centuries, necessitating the Romans to build their coastal fortifications. Cerdick and his gang found an ideal base upon a sandbank and built a stronghold upon it and discovered an abundance of herring offshore. A century later we find that Felip, Bishop of the East Angles, built a church with ‘godly men placed in it to pray for the health and success of fishermen that came to Yarmouth in the herring season’.2

  The Vikings, who came to Britain in the late tenth century, have been accredited with bringing the techniques of their boatbuilding skills to Britain. This has resulted in influences still being obvious among fishing and other working craft along a huge swathe of coast from the Thames, around the Scottish coast and down the other side as far as the Bristol Channel, and from the southeast of Ireland around to Donegal on the northwest coast. Double-ended in shape, clinker-built in construction, it is now considered that it was the Saxons who first brought these techniques into Britain and which the Vikings only substantiated because they, too, were using similar ways, probably brought about through the same development over the intervening 400 years.3

  We do not know what life was like for the simple fisherman in these times though presumably they were seamen rather than dedicated fishers. It is probable that the boats were open, propelled by oars, much in the way that Viking boats are today represented. It is, too, unclear exactly how the fish were being caught although we do know that nets were involved. Presumably it was with some form of a drift-net though it is equally possibly that such nets were anchored in specific places and left overnight. Herring tend to rise to the surface after dark, to feed off the plankton that floats there, and this was the best time to catch them, and remained so right up to the development of the mid-water trawling system in the second half of the twentieth century. So, if you don’t want to hang about for several hours at night with a train of drift-nets attached to the bow of your boat, given your boat is open and vulnerable to adverse weather, you anchor them, in the same way as Welsh herring fishers did up to the late twentieth century.

  The first herring fishery that was under any sort of centralised control was that of the southern Sweden area of Skanor in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This fishery was commanded by the growing Hanseatic League of merchants from the German towns of Lübeck and Hamburg, which later spread its influence across Europe by trading far and wide over the continent. The herring were in these waters a century before when, in a Polish poem recording a victory in Kolberg, famous for its salt herring, in 1105, it was said that ‘They brought us herring and stinking fish, and now our sons are bringing them to us fresh and quivering.’4 The Hanse was greatly helped by the Catholic Church’s insistence that fish was eaten on Fridays and other days. Herring largely supplied that market.

  Then the herring deserted almost overnight. There they were, year after year after year, and then they were gone. That’s been the trouble with investment in herring over the centuries: these fickle fish are capable of changing their migratory patterns overnight, as was mentioned earlier. In this instance it has since been suggested that a combination of high tides and a massive amount of rainfall pouring off the surrounding rivers into the Baltic scared them off and they spawned out in the North Sea. More likely is that other factors were involved in the collapse of the Skanor fishery and the power of the Hanse, such as Danish grappling back the fishing rights in the late sixteenth century.

  So what happened next? According to Voltaire, the Dutch �
�turned their stinking tons [of fish] into tons of gold’ for it was them that harnessed the political power that came with a vibrant herring fishery. In simplistic terms they grasped control of the North Sea herring. But here historical facts can become a bit vague and plagiarised for it would appear that they were already quite well established. Furthermore, Voltaire was writing in the late seventeenth century so he might not be a reliable source. It has been said by many that the reasons for Dutch mastery throughout the North Sea were down to several facts. First, they were connoisseurs of the herring and knew how to look after it. Herring, being an oily fish, goes off quickly once caught. Although Yarmouth fish merchant Peter Chivalier had introduced an improved method of salting herring (the Egyptians and Chinese were salting fish 4,000 years earlier, so it was not an unknown process) in the twelfth century, it was a Dutchman, Willem Van Beukels, who perfected the method of gutting and cleaning the fish and packing them into barrels with copious amounts of salt. To us it might seem obvious today that the gutting and cleaning was vital to preservation, but back then it obviously was not. Second, it was another Dutchman from Hoorn who remains nameless but who, about this time, invented the drift-net as we know it today with lead weights, floats and trains of nets tied together, and header ropes and strops to regulate the distance from the surface to the top of the net. What these two factors show was that the Dutch were busy catching herring at a time when the Baltic herring was supposedly in total command and that it wasn’t a fact of the Dutch simply taking over from the Hanse at their downfall, but that they were already building up a substantial fishery.5 Once the Baltic fishery collapsed, they achieved total command and fished the North Sea alone, often within sight of the British coast to the chagrin of the English Crown. Their method of using ‘busses’ – so called large bulky vessels that sent smaller open boats to fish, to return with herring that were cured aboard so that they could stay at sea for several weeks – produced copious amounts to satisfy the home market as well as the export to Eastern Europe.

  The fact didn’t go unnoticed for long and James I, after the Union of 1603, took steps to counter the Dutch, creating territorial waters. Although the Dutch, through previous agreements, were supposedly not to fish ‘within sight of the shoar’, they did.6 By 1622 James had set up a Commission which later legislated to prevent the Dutch fishing anywhere near Shetland, Norway and Ireland. The Dutch responded by sending in naval escorts with success as the British seemed unable to act or control its own waters. On several occasions French and Dutch boats attacked each other in British ports while the locals simply looked on powerless. Britannia in no way ruled the waves in those days! On one particular instance a French privateer chased a herring buss right into Yarmouth harbour, killed several Dutch fishers, and robbed their boat before sailing off. The town bailiff fired off a couple of shots before politely asking the French to desist. This was met by various gestures that one can only imagine though the next day the privateer was trapped by two Dutch warships and their only escape was to beach the boat at Lowestoft. Wading ashore they were arrested and thrown into a Yarmouth prison though their ultimate fate is unknown.7 When Cromwell overthrew the monarchy, he began to take action which ultimately saw the demise of the Dutch mastery in the North Sea in the eighteenth century, though long after his death.

  Attempts were made to develop a fishing industry in the early eighteenth century. In 1704 Queen Anne allowed all harbours and shores to control the landing of fish, as well as introducing a bounty on Scottish exports of £10 4s per last (£24 for red herrings). Foreign fishermen were given the same rights and import duties were freed on imports for fishing boat building.8 Then, in 1727, The Commissioners and Trustees for Improving Fisheries and Manufactures in Scotland offered small prize totalling no more than £100 to the first fishermen to spot the herring shoals upon their shores.9 There are, in fact, many discourses written about ways of increasing the capability of the British fisheries, and especially the herring.

  Views of a herring curing station on Loch Torridon, drawn by Thomas Newte in the 1780s.

  The English and Scots decided the best course forward was to emulate the Dutch buss fishery, as put forward in some of these discourses, and a bounty was introduced on vessels. This bounty amounted to thirty shillings, paid annually for each decked vessel of twenty to eight tons built and based in home ports. In 1750, when the bounty was raised to fifty shillings, the Free British Fishery Society was founded and four years later they were operating forty busses, encouraged by the payment of bounties introduced by the government. By 1759 there were only four busses left in their fleet, such was the difficulty the Society was having financially.10 Then, in 1787, the bounty system was altered to take into account the thousands of small boats fishing within sight of the shore around the Scottish coast and the North Sea coast of England. Instead of concentrating on paying out just on fleet tonnage, this was reduced to twenty shillings per vessel and a new bounty of two shillings and eight pence was paid on each barrel of white herring exported, one shilling and nine pence on full red herrings and just a shilling on spent red herring. ‘Red’ herring in this instance refers to ungutted herring while ‘white’ is gutted prior to salting.

  It is probably true to say that the bounty system was the first time that fishermen had to deal with day-to-day paperwork for it created a massive amount of bureaucracy for both them and the fishery officers overseeing it. The same is said for the paperwork for exemptions to paying the Salt Tax and the procedure was said to be so complicated that few bothered because of this and the amount of money and time needed to apply.11

  It was about this time that George II approved ‘An Act for the Encouragement of the White Herring Fishery’ which allowed coastal people to fish any part of the British Isles unhindered, use all the natural ports and harbours free of charge, and use all the beaches and uncultivated land for 100 yards above the high water mark for the purpose of drying nets and land and cure fish. For the first time fishermen could work as they please though the Act was largely irrelevant in the more far-flung corners of the country where they were fishing as they pleased anyway. It did have effects on fishers residing on the edge of any growing towns as suddenly they had the rights they had been attempting to enact.

  Several writers travelled the Highlands and Islands looking at, among other things, the fishery. The list reads well: Thomas Pennant, James Anderson, Thomas Newte, Thomas Garnett and John Knox, all reporting back though it was Knox who was most influential and prolific. He, an Edinburgh bookseller, wrote and published A View of the British Empire, More Especially Scotland, and Some Proposals for the Improvement of that Country, the Extension of the Fisheries and the Relief of the People in 1784. Two years later he was off again and returned to produce Observations on the Northern Fisheries with a Discourse on the Expediency of Establishing Fishing Stations, or Small Towns, in the Highlands of Scotland, and the Hebride Islands and the following year A Tour through the Highlands of Scotland and the Hebride Isles though this was more of a précis of the former. Nevertheless, Knox had clout and folk listened. At the same time the government commissioned no fewer than seven reports from the ‘Committee appointed to enquire into the state of the British fisheries’ between 1785 and 1786, so that the British Fisheries Society was set up in 1786 with the Duke of Argyll as president. Learning from the past errors of previous royal fishing companies and fishing societies, they planned to build fishing communities much as Knox suggested. The theory was that those ‘cleared’ (evicted) off the land where they had lived for generations, all in the name of sheep rearing, at least those not dead or emigrated, would supply the workforce if coastal villages were built in places with suitable shelter for boats to operate from. On the west coast three villages were built at Tobermory on Mull, Ullapool on Loch Broom and Stein at Lochbay, Skye. Knox had advocated forty. Another five reports emerged from the Committee in 1798–99. To the south of Wick, in Caithness, a fisher village and large harbour was built and named Pulteneytown
(today it is regarded as part of Wick) and this was the only real success for the Society although Ullapool had limited fortunes. Tobermory and Stein never really took off as fishing villages. Around the coast, though, the herring fishery progressed without interference or investment and, with the repeal of the dreaded Salt Tax in 1825, a huge boost was given to the curing process and one really did begin to see the beginning of a thriving herring industry.

  Around England, Wales and Ireland the story was one of little government help. Ireland was exporting herring to England while markets began to open up overseas to the whole of the British fishery. In the West Indies the sugar plantation workers – slaves until the 1830s – consumed thousands of barrels while the Mediterranean countries were also importing both the smoked and cured variety. In Wales the herring only came in autumn and was fished by a small number of beach-based fishers and the same could be said for the west coast of England. On the west coast of Scotland there were huge shoals in the lochs as well as out into the seas off the islands. Busses operated out of Campbeltown though they were prohibited in fishing close to the shore which meant the lochs were no-go areas. Loch Fyne’s herring had been recognised for its excellence since Hector Boece noted in 1537 that there ‘is mair plente of herring than is in any seas of Albion’.12

  In the Isle of Man the herring fishery had been thriving since the days the Vikings colonised the island. Old Manx laws attempted to preserve the stocks of herring as they obviously understood the threat from overfishing. A law of 1610 declared a closed season for herring within 9 miles of the coast from the beginning of the year until July.13 But by the 1820s the visiting Cornish and Scottish boats generally ignored this and before long the Manx boats were doing the same. No fishing was allowed from Saturday night until Monday morning as was the case in many parts of the country – parts of Scotland, especially among the islands, and in Cornwall and parts of Ireland.