Reflections on Fish, Fishermen and Sea Fishing
By Robb Robinson
Since time immemorial, coastal people have taken to the water to catch and then consume sea fish, but their pursuit defies easy definition. Even today, you cannot really classify our modern commercial sea fisheries as conventional industry, transport or agriculture and yet the trade contains components of all these three fundamental economic activities. But dip below the surface, take a deeper look, either literally or metaphorically, at the history and there you will encounter something much more primeval, even elemental, about sea fishing. In the British Isles, as in many other places, its origins can be traced back into an ancient obscurity, to a time long before people began manufacturing or even farming, indeed right back to the early hunter-gatherer epoch of human history. Throughout the long saga of the sea fish trade, one substantial element of continuity has been retained; today it remains almost the only large-scale commercial activity in the western world still based on the skills of the hunter.
Even modern fishing craft, fitted with the latest contemporary array of electronic aids, powered catching gear, synthetic nets and suchlike, are still basically hunting implements at heart and the ability to weather and work offshore, often far from land, in all sorts of sea conditions and to understand the haunts and habits of the wild and fugitive prey they pursue across vast maritime wildernesses are still essential skills for any contemporary fishing skipper. Without such hunting and survival skills no consistent livelihood could be won from the sea, without them there would not have been any economic sense in any age to invest in whatever passed for contemporary catching technology, fishing boats, or processing equipment. By its very nature, deep sea fishing always has been an extreme occupation and in Britain, for example, it has long been viewed as the nation’s most dangerous job; since the earliest of times the oceans of the world have always exacted an unrelentingly high toll in human lives for the taking of sea fish. In Hull alone, more than 6000 fishermen have lost their lives at sea whilst on trips to the fishing grounds from the Humber since the 1840s.
The success or otherwise of those engaged in catching sea fish has always been subject to an extraordinarily wide mix of variables: apart from the more obvious economic, social, technological and political dimensions, the interplay of a range of environmental, climatic and marine biological factors have always had a major effect on the performance of individual fisheries. Fish farming apart, fishermen have traditionally had little control over the size of the stock – the biomass – from which they take their catches to provide much of the world’s fish supplies.
Another singular aspect of this unique activity surrounds ownership. Landed definitions of property cannot be easily applied to fishing: many of the seas that fishermen work have not been individually appropriated in the conventional landed sense of the term, indeed, we usually hear talk of fishing grounds rather than say fishing fields and it is the actual capture of a fish that converts it from what is, for all intents and purposes, a common or wild resource into an item of private property with a subsistence or commercial value for an individual or crew.
Moreover, the maritime context has bred ignorance ashore about the lives and work of not only fishermen but mariners of all descriptions. To those living and working on land, the seas and oceans of the world have often been perceived as colossal, capricious and uncontrolled watery wastes, desolate places with wild weather, home to innumerable strange creatures and all too often the haunt of outlaws and pirates. Everything about the world’s seas and oceans seemed untamed when viewed from a landed perspective. All too often the enigmatic, and often brooding offshore oceans seemed to possess the potential to inundate what passed for landed order.
Artists and Scientists
Though this powerful harsh and wind-blown wilderness, incessantly reworked by weather and waves, repelled many landlubbers, other individuals, most notably painters, were fascinated by those who made their living pursuing fish in all sorts of weather across all four seasons. J.M. Turner, for example, not only interpreted the natural and human dramas encountered by mariners and trading vessels in his vividly coloured seascapes but also depicted the harsh lives and work of fishermen and fishing communities in paintings such as Fishermen at Sea (1796) or Fishermen Upon a Lee Shore in Squally Weather (1802). Long before Turner’s time, artists such as Joachim Beucklaer in his sixteenth century painting The Fish Market, a version of which can be seen in Hull’s Feren’s Art Gallery, celebrated fish and the rich abundance of the sea’s harvests.
However, artists apart, for centuries the maritime environment attracted scant curiosity from so many scientific observers. Marine Biology and Oceanography only really developed as scientific disciplines from the later nineteenth century and previously there were few systematic attempts to seek an understanding of all things maritime, not least fish and fisheries. Indeed, in terms of fishing, the methodical and scientific collection of data relating to catches and the like only really commenced towards the end of the nineteenth century and this has tended to skew views of long term-exploitation of the seas.
The first really serious attempt to understand the nature and scope of the British fisheries and the issues that confronted them was the Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries which reported in 1866, at a time when scientific understanding of the oceans and of sea creatures was still in its infancy. There was then little real understanding about the activities of fish, other than the fact that they produced millions of eggs and the seas in which they swam were so huge that it was commonly thought by many scientists of the day that fishermen could have little effect on the size of stocks and such views were accepted by the Royal Commission and the government of the day subsequently removed most ancient regulations which had previously sought to restrict fishing activities in offshore waters.
Since then, our understanding of the dynamics affecting the size of fish stocks has grown considerably and national and international legislation aimed at protecting fish stocks has been extended but so also has the level of exploitation of fish stocks across the world. At one time the number of fish caught and sold was constrained by limitations in catching technology and by the perishable nature of most types of fish which limited the amounts that could be conveyed to sizeable inland markets away from the coast but such limitations had largely been eliminated by the early twenty-first century. Even though recent research into traditional fisheries suggests that some important commercial fisheries were probably being denuded by human activity long before the modern era, overfishing is a problem that has grown massively in the modern epoch. In more recent times, technological innovation in terms of both powering vessels and locating and catching fish has amplified the efficiency of the fish hunters whilst methods of processing fish for the consumer have also vastly improved and removed many barriers that previously restricted consumption of fish away from the coasts.
Fish Saving.
Being a perishable commodity, sea fish had always been ill-suited to long distance conveyance or even storage without some form of processing or preservation. In earlier epochs, when transport was much slower and uncertain, fish usually had to be dried, smoked or salted if it was to be kept for any length of time. In North-west Europe, for example, white fish such as cod was often dried in the sun and wind. The resulting product, known as stockfish, was a medieval staple, requiring only open ground or wooden racks where fish could be laid out to dry, similar to those you can still see today in Norway’s Lofoten Islands. A combination of drying and salting led to the production of saltfish in areas with access to salt, not least the Shetland Islands and along the Yorkshire Coast. Much saltfish, like stockfish, was produced ashore although fishermen working off the coasts of other potentially hostile foreign states sometimes had to process their catches on board and their fish was often gutted, headed and split before being packed in barrels between layers of salt – cod packed in such a way was often known as Green Cod.
Herring and similar species such as pilchards, having an oilier consistency than white fish, deteriorated more rapidly, making them unsuitable for dry curing and the tendency therefore was to salt cure them and pack them in barrels, a product often known as white herring. Another method of preserving both white fish and herring was to smoke them heavily for several days ‘Red Herrings’, as they were known were often smoked for ten days or more. This form of curing, however, depended on the provision of costly smokehouses and easy access to fuel such as timber or peat.
All forms of processing in earlier ages added to costs but even so the products they produced were still in great demand, particularly in an era when Catholicism encouraged abstention from meat eating on Fridays and the like. Such cured fish might keep for a year or more and was also one of the few sources of protein available in winter in the medieval and early modern period and the trade was immensely valuable and proved an early source of wealth for many cities and nations. The trade in stockfish and herring processed from fish caught off the Norwegian and Baltic coasts, for example, was a major component of the trade handled by Hanseatic merchants whilst cities such as Copenhagen, Ystad and Malmo probably originated as temporary fishing stations for the herring trade, as did the now lost town of Ravenser Odd off the East Yorkshire coast. In later centuries, large fleets of Dutch fishing vessels, known as busses, not only caught but also cured herring at sea when fishing off the east coast of the British Isles, a trade which contributed greatly to the early maritime prosperity of the Low Countries, indeed, it has been said that Amsterdam has grown up on a foundation of herring bones.
Such was the value of processed fish that from the sixteenth century onwards European fishermen built up a considerable trade in dried and salted cod off the coasts of New England and Newfoundland. To this day, a 150 cm effigy known as the ‘Sacred Cod’ hangs in the chamber of the Massachusetts House of Representatives as a memorial to the importance of the fish to the prosperity of the first European colonists.
Fish and Chips and Railways
Throughout the centuries there had always been a valuable trade in fresh fish but the costs of getting such species as cod, haddock and sole to market before they deteriorated meant the consumption of good quality fresh, uncured sea fish was limited to the tables of the rich. However, the advent of railways from the mid-19th century onwards transformed the prospects for marketing fresh fish inland.
Britain pioneered the development of the railways and between 1840 and 1860 much of the country’s national railway network was constructed. The railways provided swift, cheap and reliable transport for perishable commodities like fish from the coast to the burgeoning inland industrial cities. In a short period, fresh fish became an article of cheap mass consumption across Britain and over the same decades as the railway network was being constructed, some genius - and we still really don’t know who - began selling fried fish with potato chips and a national institution was born. Fish and chips were the Victorian and Edwardian fast food and the great trawling fleets of ports such as Hull and Grimsby grew up in order to satisfy our demand for this nutritious and wonderful product. Other fish products which emerged during the railway age include the kipper - herring cured more for the taste produced from smoking than for enhanced keeping qualities - and once a favourite food on the nation’s breakfast tables. This was also the era when canned fish production increased and railways and steamships put products such as canned sardines in domestic shopping baskets across enormous swathes of the world
Pressure on Fish Stocks
During the twentieth century, the skills and techniques surrounding the freezing of fish, both at sea and in subsequent storage ashore were developed and refined and the quality of frozen fish has improved exponentially. The increased availability of good quality fish has enhanced global demand and placed ever greater pressure on our fish stocks. By the later twentieth century, reports were indicating that most of the world’s largest fishing areas were already being fished at a limit likely to be above the ability of the wild stocks to replenish themselves and many of these problems relating to over fishing remain issues to this day. Politicians, fishermen, scientists and coastal states continue to argue about the level of total allowable catch for different species that should be taken from the seas.
For all the problems associated with finding a suitable balance between demand and the sustainability of the wild stocks sought by fishermen, fishing remains a fascinating activity, though ancient in origin its vitality remains very relevant for peoples across the world and the future success of our endeavours to maintain or restore the health of the oceans and its wonderful creatures provides much more than a bellwether for our ability to keep our planet safe and sound.
Robb Robinson
Honorary Research Fellow
University of Hull