The people of “Fittie” are progressing in morals and civilisation. One of the local journalists who took the trouble to visit the place lately, in order to describe truthfully what he saw, says:—“They have the reputation of being a very peculiar people, and so in many respects they are; but they have also the reputation of being a dirtily-inclined and degraded people, and this we can certify from personal inspection they are not. We have visited both squares, and found the interior of the houses as clean, sweet, and wholesome as could well be desired. Their white-washed walls and ceiling, their well-rubbed furniture, clean bedding, and freshly-sanded floors, present a picture of tidiness such as is seldom to be met with among classes of the population reckoned higher in the social scale. And this external order is only the index of a still more important change in the habits and character of our fisher-toun, the population of which, all who know it agree in testifying, has within the past few years undergone a remarkable change for the better in a moral point of view. Especially is this noticed in the care of their children, whose education might, in some cases, bring a tinge of shame to the cheek of well-to-do town’s folks. Go down to the fisher squares, and lay hold of some little fellow hardly able to waddle about without assistance in his thick made-down moleskins, and you will find he has the Shorter Catechism at his tongue-end. Ask any employer of labour in the neighbourhood of the shore where he gets his best apprentices, and he will tell you that for industry and integrity he finds no lads who surpass those from the fisher squares. Inquire about the families of the fishermen who have lost their lives while following their perilous occupation, and you will find that they have been divided among other families in the square, and treated by the heads of these families as affectionately as if they had been their own.”
As regards the constant intermarrying of the fisher class, and the working habits of their women, I have read an Italian fable to the following effect:—“A man of distinction, in rambling one day through a fishing-village, accosted one of the fishermen with the remark that he wondered greatly that men of his line of life should chiefly confine themselves, in their matrimonial connections, to women of their own caste, and not take them from other classes of society, where a greater security would be obtained for their wives keeping a house properly, and rearing a family more in accordance with the refinement and courtesies of life. To this the fisherman replied, that to him, and men of his laborious profession, such wives as they usually took were as indispensable to their vocation as their boat and nets. Their wives took their fish to market, obtained bait for their lines, mended their nets, and performed a thousand different and necessary things, which husbands could not do for themselves, and which women taken from any other of the labouring classes of society would be unable to do. ‘The labour and drudgery of our wives,’ continued he, ‘is a necessary part of our peculiar craft, and cannot by any means be dispensed with, without entailing irreparable injury upon our social interests.’ Moral.—This is one among many instances, where the solid and the useful must take precedence of the showy and the elegant.”
As I have already mentioned, the fishers are intensely superstitious. No matter where we view them, they are as much given to signs and omens at Portel near Boulogne as at Portessie near Banff. For instance, whilst standing or walking they don’t like to be numbered. Rude boys will sometimes annoy them by shouting—
“Ane, twa, three;
What a lot o’ fisher mannies I see!”
It is also considered very offensive to ask fisher-people, whilst on their way to their boats, where they are going to-day; and they do not like to see, considering it unlucky, the impression of a very flat foot upon the sand; neither, as I have already explained, can they go to work if on leaving their homes in the morning a pig should cross their path. This is considered a particularly unlucky omen, and at once drives them home. Before a storm, it is usually thought, there is some kind of warning vouchsafed to them; they see, in their mind’s eye doubtless, a comrade wafted homeward in a sheet of flame, or the wraith of some one beckons them with solemn gesture landward, as if saying, “Go not upon the waters.” When an accident happens from an open boat, and any person is drowned, that boat is never again used, but is laid up high and dry, and allowed to rot away—rather a costly superstition. Then, again, some fisher-people perform a kind of “rite” before going to the herring-fishery, in drinking to a “white lug”—that is, that when they “pree” or examine a corner or lug of their nets, they may find it glitter with the silvery sheen of the fish, a sure sign of a heavy draught.
But the fishermen of other coasts are quite as quaint, superstitious, and peculiar as those of our own. The residents in the Faubourg de Pollet of Dieppe are just as much alive to the signs and tokens of the hour as the dwellers in the square of Fittie, or those who inhabit the fishing quarter of Boulogne. It is a pity that the guide-books say so little about these and similar places. The fishing quarter of Boulogne is not unlike Newhaven: there is the same “ancient and fish-like smell,” the same kind of women with a very short petticoat, the only difference being that our Scottish fishwives wear comfortable shoes and stockings. We can see too the dripping nets hung up to dry from the windows of the tumble-down-like houses, and the gamins of Boulogne lounge about the gutter’s side on the large side stones, or run up and down the long series of steps just the same as the fisher-folks’ children do at home.
A FRENCH FISHWOMAN.