by Mike Smylie
By the beginning of the seventeenth century fishing was once again flourishing off Iceland. Generally this fishery was prosecuted by large boats capable of sailing the 500 miles of ocean between northern Scotland and Iceland, and of remaining at sea for maybe six months at a time as spring and summer was the time for this fishery. Many were built in Harwich and have since been termed ‘cod smacks’. By the early eighteenth century these were fitted with fish wells to keep the catch fresh. The number of crew depended on size and the largest boats, up to 100 tons, had some forty men aboard. The whole journey from East Anglia could take a week if the wind was right, and a month if conditions were against them.
Fishing was using lines and Jones quotes John Collins in Salt and Fishery, published in 1625, in which hand-lines of 90 fathoms are described. The line is divided with a ‘cross-stick’ to two lines with two baited hooks, an early form of paternoster I assume. Long-lines were also employed.
On the other hand, the Newfoundland fishery was followed by vessels from West Country ports such as Weymouth, Poole, Southampton, Exeter, Bideford, Barnstaple and Plymouth. A few were said to have come from the east coast, most notably London. Theirs was an earlier start than the Icelandic fishery and they set sail in the New Year to face just over 2,000 miles of the winter Atlantic. First they chose the best landing places as harbours were few and far between. Sheltered beaches were sought where huts could be erected, drying structures and landing stages built and where timber was available. Sometimes those from a previous year might be reused, or sometimes destroyed to prevent someone else using them.
Hand-lines were used extensively and long-lines sometimes set, using small boats away from the mother ship. It was said that you could almost lean over and touch the back of a fish, they were so numerous. Fish were landed, split, dried and salted, the oil being collected from the swollen livers. When the French boats came, they were seen away by the English and they sailed south to discover the Grand Banks where the cod were just as prolific. They tended to process the fish aboard, returning home when the boat was full, and returning so that they made two journeys each year.4
The fishery progressed throughout the eighteenth century with some of the fishers deciding to settle in the New World. Each year the boats sailed over, filled up with fish over the summer and sailed back to Europe to sell the dried fish. Portugal, Spain and the Mediterranean countries bought the catch which was sometimes traded for other commodities such as spices, wine, velvets and other items that could be taken by the England to be sold for hard money. However, in the 1790s, there was a decline in the migratory fishery and the fishermen of the West Country refrained from visiting again, the fishery being left to the Newfoundlanders who then controlled it for the next 150 years, before the Europeans came once again and contributed to the total collapse in this fishery in the late 1980s and the subsequent ban on fishing in 1992.
The Icelandic fishery, on the other hand, was already a distant memory. The seventeenth century started well but by 1660 it was obvious to the East Anglian fleet that the cod fishery was in decline. In 1668 there were thirty-nine ships working Icelandic waters, and a decade later twenty-nine. By 1680 it was said to be a quarter of what it had been and, at the turn of the eighteenth century, only 10 per cent of those previously employed in it were still fishing. No ships were sent by Yarmouth, one of the main cod fishery ports. Fishing became focused on the North Sea which was being opened up by sailing smacks from Barking and Brixham.
It was Charles I, desperate to raise revenue, who started the rot by increasing duties in 1630, the time of the heyday of the fishery. At the same time there was a refusal to allow the reclaiming of salt duty from salt imported from Biscay that was used in the fisheries. Increases in salt tax meant, in the end, that the English were forced out of the Icelandic fishery because they were unable to compete and much of the cod that was then imported into the country came from the Dutch who were, at the time, also commanding the herring fishery in the North Sea.5
We saw in the last chapter how the North Sea was opened up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The late part of the nineteenth century saw the peak of the era of the sailing smacks working the North Sea and Shetland waters, but it wasn’t until the development of steam vessels that opened up the Icelandic waters to trawling and steam lining. Liners from Hull and Grimsby also worked around the Faroe Islands and the discovery of the halibut lining grounds known as the Faroe Banks in about 1880 saw interest from steam liners.6 However, before we discuss the effect of steam on the Icelandic fishing, we’ll have a brief look at the growth of ports that eventually commanded the northern fisheries in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the main these were Aberdeen, Hull, Grimsby and Fleetwood. The latter grew from what was little more than an uninhabited area around the estuary of the River Wyre in the beginning of the nineteenth century into a major fishery station in half a century. Built by the Hesketh family of Rossall Hall who owned most of the land between Rossall and North Meols, the name ‘Fleetwood’ came from a marriage of Roger Hesketh to Margaret Fleetwood whose family had originally owned Rossall Hall before they wed in 1733. By 1860 there were thirty-two small vessels working from Fleetwood harbour and this number doubled over the next fifteen years. When the Wyre Dock was opened in 1877, the arrival of the first steam trawler heralded a phase in the town’s fortunes that were unsurpassed.7
A postcard view of a Fleetwood trawler leaving port. These boats sailed right up to Iceland and beyond in their constant quest for fish. (Courtesy of Sankeys)
In terms of the fishery, Aberdeen, at the mouth of the River Dee, was a late starter. In the 1880s there was hardly any fishing activity even if a thriving herring fishery was being prosecuted almost within sight of its harbour entrance and fish had been brought into the market from the surrounding area, something bemoaned by John Knox in 1784:
… there is not a single decked vessel fitted out from Aberdeen for the herring or the white fisheries: here is an excellent harbour, an active people conversant in trade, and possessed of capital; seated two days’ sailing of the Shetland Isles, whose sole fishery is confined to a few open boats; the captures are insufficient for the supply of the inhabitants. If the merchants should also export cargoes of fifty or sixty vessels constantly employed in the herring and white fisheries, the port of Aberdeen would, in a few years, become the most celebrated mart of fish now existing.8
In 1882 a syndicate of local businessmen acquired a steam tug for trawl fishing and, even though the initial feeling was one of opposition, it didn’t take long for the success of the trawl to be seen and within a few years ‘fishing families from scores of villages all round the East Coast of Scotland were moving to Aberdeen to seek their fortunes and, backed by southern money, the fleet of steam trawlers grew and grew’. By 1900 there were 205, providing a living for some 25,000 people, both ashore and afloat.9
Hull, on the other hand, had sent ships to Iceland centuries earlier. In 1800 it was a major whaling port with something like 40 per cent of the country’s whalers based there, though by the middle of that century this was in decline due to overfishing. About the same time interest in fishing surfaced with the discovery of the Silver Pits and the Humber saw an influx of Devon fishers. Grimsby mirrors the same growth in the fisheries in the mid-1800s, with the trawl fisheries seeing both expansion in the steam fleets and the development of fishing methods leading to both ports, like Fleetwood and Aberdeen, starting to look north for an ever-growing demand for white fish. Grimsby has the added notoriety of having the first purpose-made steam trawler launched based there in December 1881. The Zodiac was owned and operated by the Grimsby Steam Trawling Company. A second vessel followed immediately and was based in Hull.10
So, it was the steam trawler that started the return to fishing off Iceland by exploiting its surrounding waters which were rich in white fish. Large catches meant an increase in the number of boats working there. The first Hull steam trawler sailed for I
celand in 1891 and made fantastic catches. The following year boats from other ports repeated the exercise and it was almost as if a bonanza had been released. However, at the time Iceland was governed from Denmark (as were the Faroe Islands) and, not keen on the sudden influx of trawlers, in 1893 a 50-mile fishing limit was declared around its coast. However, this was not recognised by British trawler owners and generally ignored and the 1890s were regarded as an ‘El Dorado’.11 Danish gunboats patrolled the area and arrested several boats which were escorted into port and fined, with the catch confiscated. In 1896 an agreement was signed whereby British boats were able to shelter in Icelandic ports as long as they stowed their gear and nets and didn’t fish to the east of the country. Some arrests for so-called ‘illegal fishing’ still continued although the outbreak of war in 1914 curtailed the fishing and no further agreements on the issue of Icelandic fishing were made.
It is worth noting that steam trawlers made inroads into fishing in other parts: around the coast of Ireland, out into the Atlantic to lonely Rockall, down into the Bay of Biscay and even further south to the Moroccan coast. To the north, trawlers sailed to the rich fishing grounds off Murmansk in 1904 and thence to Jan Mayen Island, Bear Island, Spitsbergen and even Greenland and Labrador. Sometimes the boats fished illegally and were caught and arrested but the boats persevered. Just before the outbreak of the First World War there were 25,000 fish and chip shops in Britain and the demand was insatiable. Ironically, the quality of the fish coming down from the north, having been encased in ice for maybe two weeks, was not as it should have been even if half the cod being consumed came from that direction. It was said that the smacksmen of old would have condemned such fish as substandard and consigned it overboard. Quantity, at the expense of quality, was the nature of the day and steam trawling – or some trawling in any form – always resulted in poorer supplies of fish. However, fishmongers demanded a supply and it was this that was the driving force behind steam trawling.12
The impact of steam was colossal in that the boats could go further, stay at sea longer and shoot longer trawls. The development of netting, from hemp and cotton nets to manmade fibres resulted in larger and larger nets being used.
The typical steam trawler of the time was about 120ft in length and had a triple expansion reciprocating engine of about 60 horsepower. The engines were big and took up a lot of the space, with the weight well aft. Accommodation was in the forward end and in rough seas the bow could rise and fall a vertical distance of some 20ft which made being there unbearable at times. As the great bow pitched downwards, everything not fixed down tended to remain in the air. Then, as the bow lifted again, the objects which were left in midair and which had only just begun their own freefall descent met the rising boat with a loud, bone-crunching thump. To supplement life in this living hell, water poured in nearly continuously from every part of the riveted hull. Yet by 1909 there were 1,336 steam trawlers in England and Wales, 514 of which were based in Grimsby alone and 449 at Hull. Scotland had another 278, although in many parts of that country they tended to be more sceptical about trawling, and retained the belief that it destroyed more than it benefited.13 They were pretty ramshackle boats and it’s a wonder they survived for so long. John Dyson quoted one fisherman who remarked, ‘These paddle-jumpers are held together by cement, iron-rust and God’s mercy!’14 He also describes how they developed, with wheelhouses, winches, improved trawls and other small improvements to make life slightly easier. Often it took five days to reach the fishing grounds and the boats would be overloaded with coal for such a long trip, some being taken aboard as deck cargo until supplies decreased below so that this could be stowed in the bunkers before fishing started. When fishing did start in earnest, it wasn’t abnormal to work thirty hours at one go and then sleep for four hours before being summoned on deck again. Shooting and hauling, with gutting in between times, occurred almost constantly, and sleep was at a minimum. Dyson tells of crew falling asleep in their food and even one poor lad fell asleep while on the lavatory and the crew filled his trousers with cod livers. Urinating on someone’s hands was the only way for that fellow to tie a knot. Gloves were frowned upon. The one blessing for the trawlermen was that each boat had a full-time cook who would serve up ample amounts of food.
Navigational aids were non-existent and skippers relied upon dead reckoning. Skippers didn’t need to hold tickets until 1894, reinforced in 1904 when the Merchant Shipping Acts brought in requirements for skippers and mates on vessels larger than twenty-five tons to hold official competency certificates. The tests were mostly oral and were very basic. Nevertheless boats had collisions, strandings and total losses. In 1904 twenty-one British trawlers were lost at sea.15 In the seas off the Icelandic latitudes the perils were much worse – ice, storms, icebergs, long hours of darkness and a low-lying coast devoid of habitation. Storms took their toll as described by a skipper and published in the Toilers of the Deep in 1893:
The storm began with a blinding downpour and a gentle puff of wind at intervals, each one stronger than the last, until at last it rose and increased in fury to a hurricane; and then, in a moment, it dropped to a dead calm without any warning. The wind had been from the southwest in the squalls and our aneroid was rushing up at an alarming rate. This, coupled with the sudden dropping of the wind, was a very bad sign so we hove up our fishing nets and prepared for a ‘blow hard’ … . Nearer and yet nearer on they came [clouds], and in about two minutes the gale in all its fury was upon us, screeching, roaring and howling, bearing our vessel over almost at once on her broadside; whilst the wind was so strong the sea was comparatively smooth. What we had to fear now was the wind dropping. This happened towards tea-time then up rose the ‘sea lions’, roaring, frothing and leaping in savage fury at our devoted ship. The first huge mountains of water broke on board whilst we were at tea, washing the man at the wheel off the bridge, entangling his legs in the wheel chain and seriously injuring him … dark grew the night, higher rose the seas – rushing and leaping in mad fury, threatening at every moment to engulf our vessel as she lay, a mere toy, upon that wild waste of waters. Sleep was out of the question and we remained fully dressed, dreading the worst, yet trying to persuade each other that we were hoping for the best. About 11 p.m. the second great mountain of water broke on board. We heard the watch on deck shouting ‘Water!’ and springing up the companion hatchway I heard the words, ‘Lord Save Us!’ and ‘Oh my poor wife and children!’ We were all on deck by this and saw that awful sea rushing at us … We could hear the crashing grinding noise as it rushed at us and not one man aboard but thought his last moment had come.
We felt our poor vessel tremble with the vibration of that thundering sea, towering as it seemed to us some twenty feet above us. Our ship seemed to be drawn broadside-on right underneath it, heeling over towards it, and then it fell. In a moment we were buried fathoms deep. How can I describe the next few moments? Screams of mercy, cries for help, ejaculatory prayers, soul-stirring indescribable sounds, the artillery-like cracking of the torn sails, howling wind and roaring sea. It was God’s mercy that we ever came to the surface again. But what a change! Masts, funnel, ventilators, lifeboat, trawl beams, nets, bridge, compass, companion hatchway – all had gone; but worse than this, our cabin was full of water and there was four feet of water in the engine room. Our pumps were choked with small-coal and would not work. We were half drowned, bruised and bleeding, and totally unfit to cope with this danger, knowing, too, that with one more sea like the last all would be over. And this was likely to happen at any moment.
However, life is sweet and the fear of death, coupled with hope – truly the sailor’s sheet anchor – gave us courage to fight the raging elements above and below us, and taking off our seaboots and oilskin caps we began our battle for life. It was bale, bale for eight hours without one moment’s rest, but the strain mentally and physically was telling, and with two feet of water yet in the cabin we could do no more. Thoroughly exhausted we sat on the lockers
and more than half dead we watched our clothes and bedding floating around us. All that day our vessel lay in the trough of the sea, at the mercy of the wind and waves. Four times that night we were hove down on our beam ends and each time we did not expect she would right again. Higher and higher rose the water in the cabin, darker grew the night, louder roared the sea, without food or fire, bitterly cold, up to the armpits in water we sat, worn with toil, anxiety and fear, expecting every moment the dread summons to appear ‘across the river’ …
I think it would be about four or five o’clock next morning I was startled out of a stupor into which we had all fallen by the extra heavy rolling of our vessel and the water rushing about the cabin. I felt sure this was a good sign, and ventured to peep on deck. Oh how glorious! The sky was perfectly clear and fairly studded with beautiful stars … After our smoke we set to work to clear the wreck but it was not until fourteen more hours’ hard work that we were able to get steam up and steam slowly home.16
