by Mike Smylie
At last as the day broke (about 4 p.m.) we saw that we were nearing the land – it was then pouring with rain as well as exceedingly tempestuous, with dark overladen sky. The first hint we got of any disaster was a number of oars floating in the water, for we had seen no other boat during the night. As we approached the haven at Gloup Voe we saw an empty boat driving ashore, overturned on its side, mast and sail keeping it in that position. Then as we entered the Voe itself, we saw a great concourse of people – wives, sisters, parents, and some children – gathered on the shore with a great lamentation, and a boat manned by twelve men rowing towards us to get hold of the upturned boat. The people had come from miles around to view what they dreaded and expected, for the storm had broken suddenly in the midst of a fine night, and they knew their men were at sea. When we landed they asked if we had seen any other boats, but of course we said we had not.12
It was the development of a serious herring fishery based on Shetland – the fishermen knew all about herring here having been forced to watch the Dutch master Shetland waters back beyond the 1700s – that resulted in the slackening of the grasp of the lairds over their tenants as they shunned the haaf fishery in favour of the summer herring. Boats were again imported (and many owned), this time from the east coast, though the local builder Hay & Co. produced several of the new breed of decked boats. For a short while herring was king, until the markets collapsed in the second decade of the twentieth century.
There’s an old Hebridean proverb that says ‘Dh’iarr am muir a thadhal’ – the sea wants to be visited. Over on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, the small harbour at the Port of Ness was once base to more than fifty fishing boats. Ness is actually a conglomeration of some sixteen villages including Lionel, Habost, Swainbost, Cross, North and South Dell, Cross Skigersta, Skigersta, Eorodale, Adabrock, Knockaird, Fivepenny and Eoropie. Before 1784 there was no shelter for vessels along the northeast coast of Lewis and around to Stornoway. In 1803 it was described as ‘a terrible sea to fish on, and as terrible a shore to land upon’.13 After Lord Seaforth, the owner of Lewis, arranged parcels of land for the fishermen to work from, it was decided a harbour was vital to the well-being of these fishers. The first pier was built by 1836 with a second phase being completed twenty years later. Even so, there was little shelter for boats. Then, on the night of 18 December 1862, while the boats were out at sea, a storm rose up and the entire crews of five Ness boats were lost, thirty-one men in total, in what has become known as Am Bathadh Mor – the ‘Day of the Great Drowning’. This one disaster emphasised the urgency in the fishers having a proper harbour of refuge. No fish meant there was no money to pay rents which would only lead to eviction. Thus, by 1885 an inner harbour had been built though it was immediately a failure because of silting up. Within five years work started on moving the harbour entrance and building a new breakwater, as can be seen today. However, the harbour suffered from poor design, shoddy construction, erosion and more silting so that it was never a successful enterprise even if fifty boats were once based there.
Orkney yoles landing at Skippigeo, Bressay. These are two-masted boats, though the main has been lowered here for the run onto the beach. Boats were either lug-rigged or sprit-rigged, depending whether they were used in the north or south of the islands. Subtle hull shapes and boatbuilding techniques differed between the two areas, dependent on usage, the southern boats working in the notorious Pentland Firth and thus being heavier built. (Courtesy of Orkney Library Archive)
Boats were able to use it though, even if it dried out. The sgoth Niseach (Ness skiffs) were large 32ft beach boats – in fact the largest beach boats in Britain, probably brought about by the fact that they were initially designed for use in a harbour that was not intended to dry out. Like all the Scandinavian-influenced fishing craft, they were double-enders, not dissimilar to the Shetland boats, also rigged with a dipping lug, replacing the earlier squaresail. Later boats adopted a long overhanging stern, similar to that of the east coast Zulus.
Macdonald gives a lovely description of how the boats were launched and beached on the open shores, how they pushed them down on pieces of wood called lunnan, ballasted with stones, the four oarsmen at the ready and the bowman, on his shout, pushing the boat out as the rowers dipped their oars. Coming back in was even more skilful, especially on a dark and stormy night. They hove-to close to the shore to ready the boat – sail and mast down and stowed, lines and nets placed out of the way, ballast dumped overboard and the skipper prepared for his perfect timing through the fath, the calm period between the waves, and onto the shore, the bowman ready to jump. The thrill of the event is almost tangible.14
These sgoths fished for ling and cod in the same way as the sixareens did, though they didn’t sail out to the edge of the continental shelf which was many miles more distant from Lewis. They were the lucky ones for rich pickings of the fish could be had a mere 2 miles off the east coast of the island. Again it was the Lewis factor and his tacksmen (farm tenants) who instigated the cod and ling fishery early in the eighteenth century and compelled the tenants to fish, providing them with boats and fishing gear. Refusal meant eviction.
The Royal Commission provides a good insight to the building of these boats. Boatbuilder John MacLeod told them how he could build ‘six or seven a year’ for both fishermen and curers, the latter giving their crews the boats on three years’ shares. The cost was £30 for a boat and if they managed to pay £10 a year for three years, then the boat was theirs. Total cost for boat, sail and fishing gear was ‘£42 or £43’. A good boat could catch 1,000 ling in a year though he remembered a time when 6,000 was the normal. MacLeod also suggested building a better harbour as many of the local fishermen had to travel to the east coast to work on the herring boats there as, with the harbour not suitable for larger vessels, they were unable to compete with the larger boats for the herring fishery. They, on average, returned with £5 to £20.15 Today the harbour at Ness is quiet, bar for a few boats but it could have been a different story. It’s a lovely harbour, all twisting and turning, longer than wide and still tidal. But maybe if the owners had listened more to the fishermen and those who knew, they wouldn’t have ended up with a harbour pretty useless for its purpose.
A Ness sgoth in the harbour at the Port of Ness, Isle of Lewis. The shape again is reminiscent of the Scandinavian double-ended boats that so encouraged Shetlanders and the Lewis men to copy in many respects.
Today Ness is more renowned for the guga (young gannets, considered a delicacy thereabouts) hunt on Sula Sgeir, an uninhabited island some 40 miles to the north of the Butt of Lewis. In 1549 it was reported by Dean Munro that the Ness men sail their small boats and ‘fetche hame thair boatful of dry wild fowls with wild fowl fedderi’ and they continue the tradition right up today, with a special licence granted by Scottish Natural Heritage.16 It is probably true that the fishermen were practising this for generations before Munro, given their fanaticism for the young birds in the face of a monotonous diet of fish and potatoes, and it’s good that these traditions have survived, even if there are groups opposed on the basis of cruelty.
Fishing was often about travel, with or without a boat. West Coast ring-netters went to the east coast, while east coast fifies and Zulus fished around the Outer Hebrides. The Manx ring-netters fished in the Minch while Cornish fishermen worked just off the Isle of Man coast. In the 1850s the fisherfolk from Buchan, on the east coast of Scotland, sailed 150 miles around via the Pentland Firth to fish the Minch. They set up bothies on Lewis or camped in local barns near Port nan Giuran and Pabail where they could moor their craft. By 1880 there were at least a dozen boats at Port nan Giuran, fishing for herring in summer and cod and ling with long lines (great lines), often staying away from base for weeks at an end. The fish was cured in salting houses along the shore, three of which were in Port nan Giuran.17 But many of these fishers were still crofter men who lived off both land and sea. The sea might want to be visited, but any visitor wants to be s
ure there’s a safe haven to return to.
When the Royal Commission visited Skye, Angus Stewart spoke for the crofters. Aged 40, he was one of seven living in his father’s house at Peinchorran, on Loch Sligachan, where small crofts ran down to the shore. He began by saying that it was the poverty that they complained most about. ‘It is great hardship that all of our earnings at the fishing we have to put into meal for the support of our families.’ Part of the problem seemed to be the sub-dividing of the crofts:
In my grandfather’s time, there were five tenants in Peinchorran and now there are twenty-six or twenty-seven. When the land is sub-divided, the new crofter has to build his own house … I cannot tell the exact acreage of my father’s croft but I can say there is not one acre of it worth cultivating or worth putting to seed into. It is rocky, mossy ground.
On the west side of Skye it was Norman Robertson who spoke:
I am not a fisherman now. We seldom fish for cod and ling. Those who have nets go to the Loch Hourn herring fishing but there are not many in our township who have nets. They are not able to buy them. People would go to the fishing if they had more nets. The south county people are spoiling the fishing in Loch Hourn – fishing it in daylight and trawling, and so spoiling it for the poor people – trawling even on the Sabbath.18
He continued:
Herrings were 2s.6d. to 18s. per cran last year. 2s.6d. is a very small price. If the poor people could salt them they could wait and get a better price for them. If they money to buy barrels and salt, they themselves could sell the herring when they had cured them.
So, not only was it the grasping lairds taking all their earnings, it was the ring-net fishermen from the Clyde and Loch Fyne that were taking their herrings. This was 1883 remember, and trawling for herring with a ring-net had been legalised some sixteen years earlier.
Others cited the lack of harbours as one reason for the lack of commitment in fishing. From Reiff, north of the Summer Isles, Duncan Mackenzie pleaded on behalf of the forty young men who needed help to buy bigger fishing boats and gear, and a harbour where they could land their fish. The present harbour was exposed to the southwest and they had to draw their boats up the beach.
In Tarbert, Loch Fyne, there were few crofter-fishermen according to Hugh Carmichael:
Perhaps half a dozen. They work them partly themselves, and their families, but they do not remain at home from the fishing to work their crofts. With the Loch Fyne fishing as it is at the present they would do as well without crofts … There is more fish landed now in the village, owing to the trawling system … It is skiffs we use here. We have got them larger now; this year or two back some have been getting what they call decks and they can live on them now.19
Loch Fyne had two distinct advantages: the proximity to the Glasgow markets and the more predictable Loch Fyne herring and the Commission learned how fishing in Loch Fyne was a profitable alternative to crofting and this would point the way to a more equal social structure. One wonders!
Crofter-fishermen did not go away as the nineteenth century faded into history. Angus Duncan lived on the small island of Scarp, off the coast of Harris and regarded all the men as crofter-fishermen, which, he says, described them perfectly. He remembers how in his youth (he was born in 1888) ‘all able-bodied men were absent during the East Coast herring season, leaving home when the planting was done and returning in time for the harvest’.20 In winter the men turned their attention to the lobster fishery. Duncan also says that the long-line fishery was unknown in his day though when it was in vogue the men went off to sea for ‘a day or two’ with the dried fish being sent to Stornoway. Boats from the east coast came to set long lines, based on Fladday where they lodged in huts on the beach. His mother, she told him, recalled having tea with a woman in one of the huts so some of the men must have brought their family over with them for the duration.
On Eriskay it was the same. Before the herring fishery it was the haaf, fishing out on the 60-fathom line where the only visible land was the top of Bhen Mhor on South Uist.21 With the arrival of the herring fishery, it was just left to the old men and the very young to fish with lines. The young men went herring fishing, especially when nearby Castle Bay had a thousand herring boats in the bay during the summer season. One dramatic story, or near disaster, Angus MacInnes recounts was in the early 1900s when the herring fleet of a thousand boats was sailing up the Sound of Sandray when a strong southeasterly wind rose up quite unexpectedly. Boats collided with each other and one after another crew had to be rescued while boats were sinking. A count was made in Castle Bay and, although thirty-seven boats had been sunk, there was, almost miraculously, no loss of life. Every one of the three hundred or so crew who lost their boats was saved. But by this time the crofter-fisherman on Eriskay was a thing of the past, as it was throughout the majority of Scotland.
Then, of course, the change to steam created similar circumstances. Despair came as the fish disappeared and the locals were unable to compete. In 1914, the Provost of Stornoway explained to the Scottish Departmental Committee in their report of the North Sea Fishing Industry:
There were some men who had the boats, but they became disheartened with the boats and became hired men … The pith is knocked out of the fishermen with their sail boats, so that they cannot compete with the steam drifters nowadays.22
Notes
1 James R. Coull, ‘Crofter-Fishermen’, in J.R. Coull et al. (eds), Scottish Life and Society – Boats, Fishing and the Sea, Edinburgh, 2008.
2 R. Stuart Bruce, ‘The Haaf Fishing and Shetland Trading’, in The Mariner’s Mirror, vol. 8, no. 2, 1922.
3 HMSO, Second Report to the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Truck System (Shetland), Edinburgh, 1872.
4 A.D. Cameron, Go Listen to the Crofters – The Napier Commission and Crofting a Century Ago, Stornoway, 1986.
5 James R. Coull, The Sea Fisheries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1996.
6 J.R. Nicolson, Shetland’s Fishing Vessels, Lerwick, 1981.
7 Coull, op. cit., 2008.
8 Mike Smylie, Traditional Fishing Boats of Britain & Ireland, Shrewsbury, 1999.
9 James Anderson, An Account of the Present State of the Hebrides and Western Coasts of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1785.
10 Coull, op. cit., 2008.
11 Cameron, op. cit., 1986.
12 Shetland Times, 1881.
13 James Hogg, Highland Journeys, Edinburgh, 2008.
14 Donald Macdonald, Lewis: A History of the Island, Edinburgh, 1990.
15 Cameron, op. cit., 1986.
16 Dean Munro, Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1774.
17 Calum Ferguson, Children of the Black House, Edinburgh, 2003.
18 Cameron, op. cit., 1986.
19 Ibid.
20 Angus Duncan, Hebridean Island – Memories of Scarp, East Linton, 1995.
21 Angus Edward MacInnes, Eriskay Where I Was Born, Edinburgh, 1997.
22 As quoted in Paul Thompson, Living the Fishing, London, 1983.
4
LONGSHOREMEN OF ENGLAND
According to the Oxford dictionary a ‘longshoreman’ is a North American word for a docker, but sometimes the dictionary is wrong as that is not all it is. A longshoreman is also a person who makes his living on or along the shore, or close to it, and this normally refers to a fisherman who works with a small beach boat which he lands and launches from the beach, who fishes not far from the coast, and who often has a shack at the top of the shore where he sells his fish. That is, indeed, the case in much of Europe, though throughout the rest of the world the first two descriptions might be accurate, but it will be unusual to see the fish being sold from a shack and is probably sold in a nearby spontaneous market – or taken home to feed the family.
Regardless of their geographical location, longshoremen are a vast part of the army of small-scale fishers of the world. Their contribution is immense: small-scale fishers account for some 95 per cent of all fishers. Using their simple
fishing gear small-scale fishers capture somewhere in the region of half the world’s seafood though they only use a tenth of the fossil fuel that large-scale fishers use with their diesel-guzzling industrial vessels plundering the oceans. Small-scale fishers also hold a huge amount of knowledge concerning the waters around them and the life living in them. They are at one with their surrounding environment and care for the future unlike those on the deep-sea boats who are learned at operating machinery and gazing at screens but have little care or thought for their surroundings. They have to service large loans to banks and are more beholden to bankers and financiers than to the oceans. Small-scale fishers, and their indigenous, often colourful, vessels are also well photographed as any visit to the postcard shop in any seaside town or a look through any travel magazine will tell you. Like the fishers from a gone age, they, in a world of waste and technology, are photogenic, have an encyclopaedic intimacy and remain ecologically sound when many around them are not.
Contrary to crofter-fishermen, longshoremen earn all their living from the sea unless they find it financially vital to have a second employment to subsidise the first. For instance, Adrian Sellick who operates stake nets on the muddy Sterk Flats, in Bridgwater Bay, Somerset, and who uses a wooden mud-horse to bring his catch ashore, works in a local factory to supplement his meagre income from fishing. He is a true longshoreman. But why then, you might ask, does he do it? Because it’s in his blood and his father Brendan taught him, and his grandfather before him did it, much the same as was once widely heard throughout fishing communities everywhere.