Chapter VII: Fishermen and Merchantmen

Up to the end of the sixteenth century we have seen the progress of the Mercantile Marine influenced by the pilgrim and cargo trade in the south of Europe, and in the Iberian peninsula by the long ocean voyages east and west for the purpose of spreading Christianity, trading, and obtaining greater territory. In the north of Europe we have seen that the crusades, as in the south, had their effect, and that pilgrims and merchandise were regularly carried across the Bay of Biscay.

But we have seen, too, that the Hanseatic League and the fishing industry had from early times done much; nor were these influences yet dead. It is interesting, as showing the far-sightedness of the Hanseatics, to note that they were careful to get into their hands the entire corner of hemp, from which ropes were made. Everywhere the League had extended its tentacles as a powerful European trading combine. The market of Bruges was a place where you met all the great travellers and merchants of Europe. Every one who was any one in commerce sooner or later came here. In London they had entrenched themselves with characteristic German astuteness, and their privileges had been marvellously protected by the English sovereigns from the twelfth century. Indeed the Hanseatics became, so to speak, the Rothschilds of Europe for financing regal schemes. The Wars of the Roses and the hostilities with France were the means of making the Hanseatics very useful financially, and they got their reward in the shape of special privileges, which their depôt just above London Bridge in Thames Street enjoyed for many a year. Down to the time of Edward VI they indeed prospered exceedingly.

In Portugal the League had established a factory at Lisbon, and thence they traded with the Italian commercial republics and also got a hold on the big Levantine trade. But during the reign of Elizabeth Englishmen began to realise their own strength and capabilities at sea. The defeat of the Armada, and the many fights with the Spanish and Portuguese, had given them a confidence which they had never before enjoyed. The English sailors were to justify their maritime ability not merely against the southerners, but against these very powerful and historic members of the northern league. Consequently they did not hesitate to seize sixty Hanseatic ships about to enter the Tagus with grain for the Spaniards. In 1598 the Hanseatics were turned out of England, and though they were allowed eventually to come back, and their property in the city of London was not sold until 1853, when the Cannon Street railway station was erected, yet the rise of English sea-power, expressed not merely in actual fighting, but in the maritime spirit generally, had given the ancient league its death-blow. Thereafter it merely lingered.

But simultaneously with the decline of the Spanish and Hanseatic Mercantile Marines was growing up the Dutch. And it cannot be emphasised too strongly that this was owing to the herring having in the fifteenth century begun to spawn in the North Sea instead of the Baltic, as already mentioned. It seems curious that an innocent fish should thus be the deciding force of international history. If you examine modern Dutch charts you will still see marked channels and shoals which show the intimate connection which that country had with fishing. The “haringvliet,” or mouth of the Maas, and the “Schotsman” shoal, off the island of Walcheren, at once suggest the time when the Low Countries were acquiring wealth by their fisheries and doing a good deal of trade with Scotland. Then they became more ambitious, and built those fine great ships, which you see in the paintings of Vroom and other artists, that were the means of bringing home from their East Indies wealth in another form once enjoyed by the Venetians and Spaniards.

So invaluable had the fisheries been to the Dutch, both in regard to shipbuilding and in creating a fine school of seamanship, that by the time of Cromwell these Netherlanders were the “waggoners of the sea,” had the world’s carrying trade and owned four-fifths of all the merchant ships that sailed the seas. Now, having regard to the young, keen sea spirit which had made the sixteenth century so illustrious, it was hardly surprising that before long there should be trouble between the English and the Dutch. It was analogous to the years which immediately preceded the Great War of 1914. Collision was certain: it was a question only of time. Thus, as early as 1608, Grotius, the famous Dutch jurist, wrote his _Mare Liberum_, wherein he contended that the high seas were open to all. Contemporary with him was living the English jurist Selden, who in 1618 had begun his treatise _Mare Clausum_. At the request of James I it was not published for fear of complications with the Danes, but in 1635 Selden again took up this work at the desire of Charles I. In the previous year Charles began to levy ship-money, which really was intended in order to strengthen the fleet against the Dutch in the probability of war.

Legislation is merely the expression of the nation’s contemporary fears, and in the long series of maritime Acts from the fourteenth century onwards we can see the national nervousness of the time lest the foreigner should dominate the success of our Mercantile Marine. We have already seen Edward I styling himself “Sovereign of the Seas.” Then in the last years of the fourteenth century we have what was the first of the Navigation Acts. The basic aim was to exclude the ships, seamen and trade of the foreigner and to encourage those of our country. We will not bore the reader with a legal dissertation, but it will help us to understand the difficulties of the time if, very briefly, we show how the State was helping the subject of our study. During the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth there was legislation dealing with the privileges of English shipping. At a later date the claim to the sovereignty of the seas was expressed by compelling the Flemish subjects of Philip, who married our Queen Mary, to pay a fine and an annual rent of £1000 for twenty-one years’ lease of the fishing near the north Irish coast, whilst a similar lease with similar conditions was granted by Mary to the Hanseatics. Without a licence foreign subjects were forbidden to fish in English waters, though with the decline of English sea-power in the seventeenth century foreigners ceased to be bound by these claims.

The doctrine of the “Dominion of the Seas” is inseparably bound up in the growth of our Mercantile Marine and our fishing industry. Matters reach a crisis in the dispute, and then the discussion is settled by an appeal to force in the shape of war. The Anglo-Dutch wars were fundamentally caused by the herring fisheries and the Mercantile Marines of the two nations. Every other reason was entirely artificial and subservient. Whether the seas could be free to all everywhere to trade, whether the fisherman could shoot his nets where he liked—that is the whole matter in a nutshell. And the more ships that were built for trade or fishing, the more serious the crisis developed. Proportionately the value of a navy becomes greater, and thus the two services are bound to become less and less similar, as greater commercial demands are made on the one and purely warlike requirements are insisted on for the other.

The seventeenth century was the crisis in the career of the Mercantile Marine, for it was struggling for its very life amid many dangers, but it emerged with an independence and character of its own. In any long period of assured peace it reaches enormous heights of success, as, for instance, during the nineteenth century. But during the Caroline period a principle was being insisted upon. The position was this. Charles I was determined to compel the Dutch to acknowledge the English claim to the dominion of the seas, and that was the reason for the building, in 1637, of that marvellous and sensational warship the _Sovereign of the Seas_, a triumph of Pett’s design, which Van der Velde depicted for posterity. This 1683-ton “battleship,” as we should call her nowadays, was an expression, both in name and character, of the English attitude in regard to the use of the seas.

“We hold it a principle,” Charles had instructed his Minister at The Hague, “not to be denied, that the King of Great Britain is a monarch at sea and on land to the full extent of his dominions. His Majesty finds it necessary for his own defence and safety to reassume and keep his ancient and undoubted rights in the Dominion of the Seas.” Having forbidden foreigners to fish off our coasts without licence, Charles’ fleet attacked and put to flight a Dutch fishing fleet which had infringed this order. Some of these small craft were thus sunk by our men-of-war, and many of the rest took shelter in harbour. Finally the Dutch agreed to pay Charles I £30,000 for permission to finish that year’s fishing, and to pay a sum annually for the like privilege.

We can well understand the irritation which this line of action caused so great a maritime power as the Dutch. Great sea pioneers they certainly were, and before the first decade after the defeat of the Armada had passed, they had been the first country to send out a real Polar expedition. In 1651 came the celebrated English Navigation Act, which prohibited the importation of goods into England except in English ships, or in the ships of the country producing the goods. This was quite obviously aimed at the great Dutch sea-carriers. Relations became strained, the war-clouds gathered, and in the following year the first of the three Anglo-Dutch wars broke out inevitably between the English and Dutch republics.

The Navigation Act of 1651 was confirmed by that of nine years later, and thus the English Mercantile Marine had its future settled on sure foundations. In a word, the disputes as to where fishermen could shoot their nets to get herrings were the indirect means of giving the merchant ships their unique opportunity. Holland’s carrying trade fell into our hands, prosperity came to our country, the sailing ships of our nation penetrated everywhere, and, as you can see by the seventeenth-century architecture in the leading Dutch cities, the wealth obtained overseas suddenly ceased to flow in a big way. It is for those who have eyes a veritable story in stones, which ends suddenly and dramatically.

It is to the credit of the rulers of our country in the seventeenth century that they realised what the fisheries meant to us. The Act of 1651 was of great assistance in providing that no fish should be brought into England or Ireland, or exported thence to foreign parts, or even carried from one English or Irish port to another, except fish caught by English and Irish fishermen in English and Irish ships. In 1661 the Parliament of Scotland also passed navigation laws for the encouragement of their native shipping, and one Act for founding companies to extend the fishing industry. Very subtle, too, was the proclamation of James I in 1621 against eating flesh in Lent or on other “fish days,” the reasons given being “the maintenance of our navy and shipping, a principal strength of this island, and for the sparing and increase of fresh victuals.” This and similar proclamations considerably helped the fishermen.

In order fully to appreciate all that the fishing meant to the Dutch, it is necessary to mention also that not merely did they seek the herring as far away as the Thames estuary, the Orkneys, Shetlands and the Irish coast, but, owing to the ingenuity and enterprise of one Beuckels, they had learned how to cure and barrel this fish. In this way they enjoyed a wonderful monopoly in supplying Catholic central and northern Europe. In the year 1560, for instance, the value of the year’s fishing trade to Friesland, Holland, Zeeland and Flanders amounted to the enormous sum of £300,000. Just as to-day the steam fish-carriers go out to fetch the catch home from the fleets fishing off the Dogger Bank and elsewhere, so the Dutch in the seventeenth century were using a fast-sailing type of craft, called “vent-jagers,” to hurry into port the fresh herrings caught by the slow, round, tubby “busses.” This practice was in vogue certainly by 1604.

It was a statute of 1663, for the encouragement of our fisheries, which forbade any fresh herrings being imported into England except in English-built ships, and no ship could sail for Iceland from England until March 10, thus protecting the fish at breeding time. The Act of 1666 prohibited the importation of herrings caught by foreigners. And, having done all this, the time came when those Englishmen who owned capital thought they saw an opportunity for getting richer. Thus in 1677 a Royal Fishery Company was incorporated, the Duke of York and many peers and gentlemen being partners, with a capital eventually increased to £12,580. This was spent in the construction of seven busses, but some of these were captured by the French, who were now growing up as maritime and commercial people, and were rivals to us in our fishing. The remainder of the busses were sold off in 1680 and the company ended in debt.

Three years later another fishing company was started, and this failed also, whereas the Dutch were doing well with their nets, employing 8000 vessels and 200,000 hands, thus amassing the enormous sum of £5,000,000 a year. During the time of Charles II the Dutch fishermen had brought great prosperity to Great Yarmouth, sometimes as many as 1000 busses and fish-carriers being off that port, and buying bread, beer, flesh and butter from the East Anglians. They used to come ashore and dry their nets, and the town would find 10,000 of these foreign sailormen in their neighbourhood. To assuage their thirst, forty brewers were kept busy in the port. Any one who has any experience of human nature and of fishermen, will readily understand that there were many feuds and quarrellings. Ever since 1540 the Dutchmen had been herring-fishing off that port, and the Englishmen were none too pleased at this visitation; nor were the Scotch, who in 1532 attacked the Dutchmen and captured many of their busses, and for nine years prevented them from using Scottish waters.

As far back as the thirteenth century the herring had been caught in great numbers off Great Yarmouth, and in 1270 the Yarmouth herring fair was held for forty days. About that date some Flemish vessels put to sea and killed 1200 English North Sea fishermen, nor will these international fishermen’s quarrels ever cease as long as human nature remains what it is. Before the end of the thirteenth century Grimsby had begun fishing, and before the end of the sixteenth century the first Hull whaler had started out on her special industry, whaling having begun in England only four years previously. Few people are more conservative than the sailor, and of his service the most conservative of all is the fisherman, who did not take to steam generally for many a long year after it had become dominant in the carrying trade. Many of us can still remember the famous “blue” sailing fishing fleet out of Great Yarmouth; and the Brixham fleet and others round our coasts still stick almost exclusively to sail. In the olden days, wool, wheat, fish and other cargoes were sold by the “last.” Wool is no longer thus sold, but a hundred years ago wheat was thus reckoned at Great Yarmouth, and round our coasts to this day fish is still disposed of in the old-time manner, a Yarmouth “last” amounting roughly to 13,200 herrings or about two and a half tons.

In our British North Sea fishing craft the busses have given way very largely to steam drifters, but off the Dutch shores the Scheveningen “pink” is much the same craft in hull as were the vessels which caused so much friction in the seventeenth century. The very word by which these craft have been known is in itself symbolical of the antiquity of the industry. The mediæval Venetians had “buzi,” and throughout the Romance and Teutonic languages it has always meant a fishing boat, the seventeenth-century Englishmen getting the use from the Dutch North Sea craft.

The two principal types of fishing craft in the North Sea were the buss and the “dogger.” With regard to the former, the earliest illustration I have discovered is that by Elandts in the Municipal Museum at The Hague, made in 1664 from a picture of 1570. This “haring buys” is the prototype of the seventeenth-century buss, and consists of two masts, each having a square-sail. Like the modern drifter, the buss lowered her foremast and rode to her nets. This Elandts buss is really nothing more than a large open boat, with three hands in her; the length of the craft I reckon not more than about thirty feet. A rather bigger type, similarly rigged but with three masts, is depicted in the Dutch Waghenaer’s _Speculum Nauticum_ of 1584 riding to her nets, with fore and mainmasts lowered. Among the sixteen ships which Frobisher took with him in 1578, one was the _Emmanuel_ of Bridgewater, and she is described as a buss. It will be recollected that this was another attempt to find the north-west passage to China, and this craft performed most admirable service, and as she came homeward discovered an island which had never before been sighted. Thus, there is no question about the seaworthiness of this fishing type of craft.

In the Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam, there is an interesting painting by Bellevois showing a mid-seventeenth-century buss of a powerful type, with three masts, a square-sail on each, and riding with her mizzen up, but the other sails and masts lowered. Keymor, who wrote in 1601 on the Dutch fishing, describes these craft as being from sixty to two hundred tons, and carrying from forty to a hundred lasts. The anonymous author of _Britaine’s Busse_, published in 1615, describes them as being of from thirty-five lasts or seventy tons, and measuring fifty feet on the keel, with a beam of seventeen feet. Her cost, together with her boat, was £260. There is another fine picture of these craft by Storck, hanging in the Mauritshuis at The Hague, the date being 1683, and from the rounded stern and general lines of the ship it is easy enough to see that she belongs to the same family to which the familiar Scheveningen “pink,” so well known in modern art, belongs.

Often in the mediæval records one finds reference to a North Sea fishing type called the “dogger.” Exactly what these were like, it would be impossible to say, except that they probably had not more than two masts carrying square-sails, and that they were line fishers, for cod and ling, and did not use nets, their size in the seventeenth century varying from sixty to one hundred tons. It is reasonable to suppose, from the later illustrations which exist, that the dogger was in hull and square-sails not very different from the buss.

The end of the seventeenth century, then, saw the British Mercantile Marine both in respect of its fishing craft and its cargo-carriers, going ahead. As regards the latter, the finest of all were the ships of the East India Company of England and those of the Dutch East India Company, with their stately hulls, lofty sterns, high freeboard and two decks of guns. A picture of 1647 shows them with three masts, as well as bowsprit, and they even carry topgallant sails on fore and main. Such craft are, in fact, the connecting link between the last of the mediæval ships and the first of the famous clipper ships. The stolid majesty of their design and build, the elaborateness of their seventeenth-century carvings, were expressive of that permanence with which the Merchant Service now rightly regarded itself. Indeed so prosperous had the British East India Company become in the seventeenth century, that by 1681 this corporation owned about thirty-five ships, ranging in size from 100 to 775 tons, and in customs alone the company was paying £60,000 a year. They used to take out to India cargoes of lead, tin, cloth and stuffs, bringing back home raw silk, pepper and other Eastern goods. Trade prospered so well, indeed, that between 1682 and 1689 as many as sixteen East Indiamen of from 900 to 1300 tons were built, and all these ships had to be armed; for during the last decade of that century these merchantmen ran the risk of being attacked by French men-of-war as well as by privateers, so that in carrying from thirty to fifty guns these East Indiamen were very powerful vessels for any enemy to have to encounter.

Used in a British East Indiaman.]