Chapter VI (3)

The quantity of netting now employed in the herring-fishery is enormous, and is increasing from year to year. It has been strongly represented by Mr. Cleghorn, and others who hold his views, that the herring-fishery is on the decline; that if the fish were as plentiful as in former years, the increased amount of netting would capture an increased number of herrings. It is certain that, with a growing population and an increasing facility of transport, we are able to use a far larger quantity of sea produce now than we could do fifty years ago, when we were in the pre-Stephenson age. If, with our present facilities for the transport of fish to inland towns, Great Britain had been a Catholic instead of a Protestant country, having the example of the French fisheries before us, I have no hesitation in saying that by this time our fisheries would have been completely exhausted—that is, supposing no remedial steps had been taken to guard against such a contingency. Were we compelled to observe Lent with Catholic rigidity, and had there been numerous fasts or fish-days, as there used to be in England before the Reformation, the demand, judging from our present ratio, would have been greater than the sea could have borne. Interested parties may sneer at these opinions; but, notwithstanding, I maintain that the pitcher is going too often to the well, and that some day soon it will come back empty.

I have always been slow to believe in the inexhaustibility of the shoals, and can easily imagine the overfishing, which some people pooh-pooh so glibly, to be quite possible, especially when supplemented by the cod and other cannibals so constantly at work, and so well described by the Lochfyne Commission; not that I believe it possible to pick up or kill every fish of a shoal; but, as I have already hinted, so many are taken, and the economy of the shoal so disturbed, that in all probability it may change its ground or amalgamate with some other herring colony. I shall be met here by the old argument, that “the fecundity of fish is so enormous as to prevent their extinction,” etc. etc. But the certainty of a fish yielding twenty thousand eggs is no surety for these being hatched, or if hatched, of their escaping the dangers of infancy, and reaching the market as table food. I watch the great shoals at Wick with much interest, and could wish to have been longer acquainted with them. How long time have the Wick shoals taken to grow to their present size?—what size were the shoals when the fish had leave to grow without molestation?—how large were the shoals when first discovered?—and how long have they been fished? are questions which I should like to have answered. As it is, I fear the great Wick fishery must come some day to an end. In the course of twenty-seven seasons as many as 1,275,027 barrels of herring have been caught off Wick (each barrel containing 700 fish); and in all probability as many more fish were killed by the nets, and never taken ashore. When the Wick fishery first began the fisherman could carry in a creel on his back the nets he required; now he requires a cart and a good strong horse! Leaving out one of the twenty-seven seasons (the first), and dividing the remaining twenty-six into two periods of thirteen each, we find the aggregate of the boats, the average crans to each, and the aggregate total for the

Boats. Average Crans. Total Crans.

1st thirteen years, 10,202 941 735,318
2d ” 13,522 519 539,719

During the first of these periods each boat carried about twenty-five nets, spun and worked in the county in a homely way; during the second period each had from thirty to thirty-five nets, machine-made, the twine being very even and fine, and far larger and deeper, a great many of them being of cotton, and far superior in their catching power to those of the first period; and yet, with 3320 additional boats carrying perhaps 200,000 more nets, larger, finer, and deeper than in the first period, we took 195,609 barrels fewer fish in the second than in the first thirteen years. During a late Wick fishing, a remarkable feature was the great disparity in the catch by individual boats. Although the average per boat over the whole fleet is set down as about eighty-three crans, yet half the boats do not average forty crans. As a rule, the boats that take the most fish are those with the longest, finest, and deepest drifts. In fact, the whole argument just amounts to this—that if the fish are as plentiful as ever, then double the quantity of netting _ought_ to take double the quantity of herrings. During a late Wick season (1863), the entire fleet was only at sea twelve nights, and the average per night to each boat was only three crans. The _Northern Ensign_, a local journal, has over and over again asserted that the fish are as numerous as ever; but that, in consequence of the crowd of boats, there is not room to capture them. In answer to this I may note, that on six different evenings of the season, when the boats out ranged from two to six hundred, the take did not average half a cran per boat. It may be likewise stated that 604 boats, in the year 1820, with a greatly less amount of netting, took as many fish as have been taken this season (1863) although the boats fishing were 480 above the season of 1820. The average capture per boat in 1820, with the limited netting, was 148 crans, whilst the average for 1863 was only 85 crans! How is it possible to reconcile such great differences?

I conclude this part of the herring question by one other illustration. In 1862 the aggregate sailings—_i.e._ number of voyages—of the Wick boats for the season was 28,755, and the total catch 92,004 barrels; while this season (1863) the Wick boats have only taken 89,972 barrels in 32,630 voyages; and all over the country, so far as I know—and I have made extensive inquiries—the tale is the same, a failure in the herring-fishery. Perhaps the best plan is at once to exhaust the figures of the subject while we are discussing it. As to the Wick July fishing, the following figures are illustrative of two different periods of five years each:—

┌───────┬──────────┬┬───────┬──────────┐
│ Year. │ Barrels. ││ Year. │ Barrels. │
├───────┼──────────┼┼───────┼──────────┤
│ 1843 │ 14,000 ││ 1859 │ 2,500 │
│ 1844 │ 15,615 ││ 1860 │ 12,850 │
│ 1845 │ 22,578 ││ 1861 │ 5,821 │
│ 1846 │ 30,350 ││ 1862 │ 7,173 │
│ 1847 │ 15,442 ││ 1863 │ 8,517 │
├───────┼──────────┼┼───────┼──────────┤
│ │ 97,985 ││ │ 36,861 │
└───────┴──────────┴┴───────┴──────────┘

The figures of the greatest month of the fishery—viz. August—are as follow:—

┌───────┬──────────┬┬───────┬──────────┐
│ Year. │ Barrels. ││ Year. │ Barrels. │
├───────┼──────────┼┼───────┼──────────┤
│ 1843 │ 69,640 ││ 1859 │ 80,853 │
│ 1844 │ 72,585 ││ 1860 │ 86,120 │
│ 1845 │ 66,702 ││ 1861 │ 73,580 │
│ 1846 │ 61,450 ││ 1862 │ 65,321 │
│ 1847 │ 59,528 ││ 1863 │ 46,000 │
├───────┼──────────┼┼───────┼──────────┤
│ │ 329,905 ││ │ 351,874 │
└───────┴──────────┴┴───────┴──────────┘

It will be seen from these figures that, even in the great herring month of August, notwithstanding the large increase of boats and nets, a decreased quantity has been taken during the last two years. To understand this better, the boats in the first period were 4345, and in the second period 5489, and in this last period the boats had vastly increased their netting, as many as 55,775 more nets having been added. Now, it stands to reason that if the herrings were as numerous as ever in the second period, the take should have been, through the mere increase of boats, not counting the addition to the amount of netting, 417,916 barrels.

The September fishing has only been prosecuted of late years, for the very good reason that in former times all the herring required were caught in July and August; during the last two years great efforts have been made to institute a September fishery, and a great force was brought to bear on the races of herring then coming to maturity, with what result the following figures will show:—

┌───────┬──────────┬┬───────┬──────────┐
│ Year. │ Barrels. ││ Year. │ Barrels. │
├───────┼──────────┼┼───────┼──────────┤
│ 1843 │ 4,100 ││ 1859 │ 9,846 │
│ 1844 │ 2,000 ││ 1860 │ 504 │
│ 1845 │ 2,880 ││ 1861 │ 6,194 │
│ 1846 │ 900 ││ 1862 │ 20,000 │
│ 1847 │ 9,100 ││ 1863 │ 30,000 │
├───────┼──────────┼┼───────┼──────────┤
│ │ 18,980 ││ │ 66,544 │
└───────┴──────────┴┴───────┴──────────┘

The September fishery at Wick will have its day like the July and August fisheries.

One more table will finish these statistics; it represents the averages of the Wick fishery for two periods—one for seven years, ending in 1824; the other for the seven years ending with the season of 1863:—

┌────────┬────────┬────────────┬┬────────┬────────┬────────────┐
│ Years. │ Boats. │ Crans ││ Years. │ Boats. │ Crans │
│ │ │ per Boat. ││ │ │ per Boat. │
├────────┼────────┼────────────┼┼────────┼────────┼────────────┤
│ 1818 │ 482 │ 136 ││ 1857 │ 1100 │ 73 │
│ 1819 │ 609 │ 133 ││ 1858 │ 1061 │ 80 │
│ 1820 │ 604 │ 148 ││ 1859 │ 1094 │ 79 │
│ 1821 │ 595 │ 123 ││ 1860 │ 1080 │ 92 │
│ 1822 │ 595 │ 91 ││ 1861 │ 1180 │ 87 │
│ 1823 │ 555 │ 123 ││ 1862 │ 1122 │ 82 │
│ 1824 │ 625 │ 123½ ││ 1863 │ 1084 │ 79 │
├────────┼────────┼────────────┼┼────────┼────────┼────────────┤
│ │ 4065 │ 877½ ││ │ 7721 │ 572 │
└────────┴────────┴────────────┴┴────────┴────────┴────────────┘

I shall not expend further argument on these figures, they speak too plainly to require illustration.

The state of the case as between the supply of fish and the extent of netting has been focused into the annexed diagram, which shows at a glance how the question stands.

1818-1824. The During the 10 years 1857-1863. The average
average per boat 1841-50 the average per boat 82 crans.
125¼ crans. catch per boat was
112 crans.
]

Before concluding this chapter I wish to say a few words about a point of herring economy, which has been already alluded to in connection with the special commission appointed to inquire into the trawling system—viz. as to the natural enemies of the herring, the most ruthless of which are undoubtedly of the fish kind, and whose destructive power, some people assert, dwarfs into insignificance all that man can do against the fish:—“Consider,” say the commissioners, “the destruction of large herring by cod and ling alone. It is a very common thing to find a codfish with six or seven large herrings, of which not one has remained long enough to be digested, in his stomach. If, in order to be safe, we allow a codfish only two herrings _per diem_, and let him feed on herrings for only seven months in the year, then we have 420 herring as his allowance during that time; and fifty codfish will equal one fisherman in destructive power. But the quantity of cod and ling taken in 1861, and registered by the Fishery Board, was over 80,000 cwts. On an average thirty codfish go to one cwt. of dried fish. Hence, at least 2,400,000 will equal 48,000 fishermen. In other words, the cod and ling caught on the Scotch coasts in 1861, if they had been left in the water, would have caught as many herring as a number of fishermen _equal to all those in Scotland, and six thousand more_, in the same year; and as the cod and ling caught were certainly not one tithe part of those left behind, we may fairly estimate the destruction of herring by these voracious fish alone as at least ten times as great as that effected by all the fishermen put together.” As to only one of the numerous land enemies of the herring, the late Mr. Wilson, in his _Tour round Scotland_, calculated that the gannets or solan geese frequenting one island alone—St. Kilda—picked out of the water for their food 214 millions of herrings every summer! The shoals that can withstand these destructive agencies must indeed be vast, especially when taken in connection with the millions of herrings that are accidentally killed by the nets, and never brought ashore for food purposes. The work accomplished by these natural enemies of the herring, which has been going on during all time, does not however affect my argument, that by the concentration on one shoal of a thousand boats per annum, with an annually-increasing net-power, we both so weaken and frighten the shoal that it becomes in time unproductive. As the late Mr. Methuen said in one of his addresses: “We have been told that we are to have dominion over the fish of the sea, but dominion does not mean extermination.”

Although Scotland is the main seat of the herring-fishery, I should like to see statistics, similar to those collected in Scotland, taken at a few English ports for a period of years, in order that we might obtain additional data from which to arrive at a right conclusion as to the increase or decrease of the fishery for herring. It is possible to collect statistics of the cereal and root crops of the country; it was done for all Scotland during three seasons, and it was well and quickly accomplished. What can be done for the land may also, I think, be done for the sea. I believe the present Board for Scotland to be most useful in aiding the regulation of the fishery, and in collecting statistics of the catch; their functions, however, might be considerably extended, and elevated to a higher order of usefulness, especially as regards the various questions in connection with the natural history of the fish. The operations of the Board might likewise be extended for a few seasons to a dozen of the largest English fishing-ports, in order that we might obtain confirmation of what is so often rumoured, the falling off of our supplies of sea-food. There are various obvious abuses also in connection with the economy of our fisheries that ought to be remedied, and which an active Board could remedy and keep right; and a body of naturalists and economists might easily be kept up at a slight toll of say a guinea per boat.