CHAPTER XI.
CONCLUDING REMARKS.
Are there more Fish in the Sea than ever came out of it?—Modern Writers on the Fisheries—Were Fish ever so abundant as is said?—Salmon-Poaching—Value of Salmon—Sea-Fish—Destruction of the Young—Is the demand for Fish beginning to exceed the Supply?—Evils of Exaggeration—Fish quite Local—Incongruity of Protecting one Fish and not another—Difficulties in the way of a Close-Time—Duties of the Board of White-Fisheries—Regulation of Salmon Rivers—Justice to Upper Proprietors—The one Object of the Fishermen—Conclusion.
The idea of a slowly but surely diminishing supply of fish is no doubt alarming, for the public have hitherto believed so devoutly in the frequently-quoted proverb of “more fish in the sea than ever came out of it,” that it has never, except by a discerning few, been thought possible to overfish; and, consequently, while endeavouring to supply the constantly-increasing demand, it has never sufficiently been brought home to the public mind that it is possible to reduce the breeding stock of our best kinds of sea-fish to such an extent as may render it difficult to repopulate those exhausted ocean colonies which in years gone by yielded, as we have been often told, such miraculous draughts. It is worthy of being noticed that most of our public writers who venture to treat the subject of the fisheries proceed at once to argue that the supply of fish is unlimited, and that the sea is a gigantic fish-preserve into which man requires but to dip his net to obtain at all times an enormous amount of wholesome and nutritious food.
This style of writing on the fisheries comes largely into use whenever there is a project of a joint-stock fishing company placed before the public. When that is the case obscure little villages are pointed to as the future seats of enormous prosperity, just because they happen to be thought of by some enterprising speculator as the nucleus of a fishing town; and we are straightway told that Buckhorn or Kirksalt, or some equally obscure place, could be made to rival those towns in Holland whose wealth and prosperity originated in even smaller beginnings. We are likewise informed, on the occasions of giving publicity to such speculations, that “the sea is a liquid mine of boundless wealth, and that thousands of pounds might be earned by simply stretching forth our hands and pulling out the fish that have scarcely room to live in the teeming waters of Great Britain,” etc. etc. I would be glad to believe in these general statements regarding our food fisheries, were I not convinced, from personal inquiry, that they are a mere coinage of the brain. There are doubtless plenty of fish still in the sea, but the trouble of capturing them increases daily, and the instruments of capture have to be yearly augmented, indicating but too clearly to all who have studied the subject that we are beginning to overfish. We already know, in the case of the salmon, that the greed of man, when thoroughly excited, can extirpate, for mere immediate gain, any animal, however prolific it may be. Some of the British game birds have so narrowly escaped destruction that their existence, in anything like quantity, when set against the armies of sportsmen who seek their annihilation, is wonderful.
The salmon has just had a very narrow escape from extermination. It was at one time a comparatively plentiful fish, that could be obtained for food purposes at an almost nominal expense, and a period dating eighty years back is thought to have been a golden age so far as the salmon-fisheries were concerned. But, in my opinion, it is more than questionable if salmon, or indeed any of our sea or river animals, ever were so magically abundant as has been represented. At the time, a rather indefinite time, however—ranging from the beginning to the end of last century, and frequently referred to by writers on the salmon question—when farm-servants were compelled to eat of that fish more frequently than seemed good for their stomachs, or when the country laird, visiting London, ordered a steak for himself, with “a bit o’ saumon for the laddie,” and was thunderstruck at the price of the fish, we must bear in mind, as a strong element of the question, that there were few distant markets available; it was only on the Tweed, Tay, Severn, and other salmon streams that the salmon was really plentiful.
No such regular commerce as that now prevailing was carried on in fresh salmon at the period indicated. In fact, properly speaking, there was no commerce beyond an occasional dispatch to London per smack, or the sale of a few fish in country market-towns, and salmon has been known to be sold in these places at so low a rate as a penny or twopence a pound weight. Most of these fish, at the time I have indicated, were boiled in pickle, or split up and cured as kippers. In those days there were neither steamboats nor railways to hurry away the produce of the sea or river to London or Liverpool; it is not surprising, therefore, that in those good old times salmon could almost be had for the capturing. Poaching—that is poaching as a trade—was unknown. As I have already stated, when the people resident on a river were allowed to capture as many fish as they pleased, or when they could purchase all they required at a nominal price, there was no necessity for them to capture the salmon while it was on the beds in order to breed. Farm-servants on the Tay or Tweed had usually a few poached fish, in the shape of a barrel of pickled salmon, for winter use. At that time, as I have already said in treating of the salmon, men went out on a winter night to “burn the water,” but then it was simply by way of having a frolic. In those halcyon days country gentlemen killed their salmon in the same sense as they killed their own mutton—viz. for household eating; there was no other demand for the fish than that of their own servants or retainers. Farmers kept their smoked or pickled salmon for winter use, in the same way as they did pickled pork or smoked bacon. The fish, comparatively speaking, were allowed to fulfil the instincts of their nature and breed in peace: those owners, too, of either upper or lower waters, who delighted in angling, had abundance of attractive sport; and, so far as can be gleaned from personal inquiry or reading, there was during the golden age of the salmon a rude plenty of home-prepared food of the fish kind, which, even with the best-regulated fisheries, we can never again, in these times of increasing population, steam-power, and augmented demand, hope to see.
At present the very opposite of all this prevails. Farmers or cottars cannot now make salmon a portion of their winter’s store: permission to angle for that fish is a favour not very easily procured, because even the worst upper waters can be let each season at a good figure; and more than all that, the fish has become individually so valuable as to tempt persons, by way of business, to engage extensively in its capture at times when it is unlawful to take it, and the animal is totally unfit for food. A prime salmon is, on the average, quite as valuable as a Southdown sheep or an obese pig, both of which cost money to rear and fatten; and at certain periods of the year salmon has been known to bring as much as ten shillings per pound weight in a London fish-shop! There have been many causes at work to bring about this falling-off in our supplies; but ignorance of the natural history of the fish, the want of accord between the upper and lower proprietors of salmon rivers, the use of stake and bag nets, poaching during close-times, and the consequent capture of thousands of gravid fish, as well as the immense amount of overfishing by the lessees of fishing stations, are doubtless among the chief reasons.
If these misfortunes occur with an important and individually valuable fish like the salmon, which is so well hedged round by protective laws, and which is so accessible that we can watch it day by day in our rivers—and that such misfortunes have occurred is quite patent to the world, indeed some of the best streams of England, at one time noted for their salmon, are at this moment nearly destitute of fish—how much more is it likely, then, that similar misfortunes may occur to the unwatched and unprotected fishes of the sea, which spawn in a greater world of water, with thousands of chances against their seed being even so much as fructified, let alone any hope of its ever being developed into fish fit for table purposes? In the sea the larger fish are constantly preying on the smaller, and the waste of life, as I have elsewhere explained, is enormous: the young fish, so soon as they emerge from their fragile shell, are devoured in countless millions, not one in a thousand perhaps escaping the dangers of its youth. Shoals of haddocks, for instance, find their way to the deposits of herring-spawn just as the eggs are bursting into life, or immediately after they have vivified, so that hundreds of thousands of these infantile fry and quickening ova are annually devoured. The hungry codfish are eternally devouring the young of other kinds, and their own young as well; and all throughout the depths of ocean the strong fishes are found to be preying on the weak, and a perpetual war is being waged for daily food. Reliable information, it is true, cannot easily be obtained on these points, it being so difficult to observe the habits of animals in the depths of the ocean; and none of our naturalists can inform us how long it is before our white fish arrive at maturity, and at what age a codfish or a turbot becomes reproductive; nor can our economists do more than guess the percentage of eggs that ripen into fish, or the number of these that are likely to reach our tables as food.