Pearls & Parasites

by Sir A. E. Shipley

It seems, indeed, that the time is hardly yet ripe for deep-sea fishery legislation, much as it may be needed; and the reason is that our knowledge of the questions involved, although rapidly increasing, is still too deficient to form a sound basis for law-making. We propose to confine our attention mainly to the North Sea, and, from another point of view, mainly to the English fishing authorities, as opposed to those of Scotland and Ireland, in each of which countries the fishing industry is controlled by a separate Board. The fundamental and central question to be settled is whether there is a diminution in the fish generally, or in any particular species of food-fish in the North Sea area, by far the most productive of our fishing-grounds. If the answer is affirmative, we may ask, What is the cause of this diminution? and, How can it be arrested?

In 1863 Professor Huxley, Mr. (afterwards Sir) J. Caird, and Mr. G. Shaw Lefevre were constituted a Royal Commission to inquire—(1) whether or not the value of the fisheries was increasing, stationary, or decreasing; (2) whether or not the existing methods of fishing did permanent harm to the fishing-grounds; and (3) whether or not the existing legislation was necessary. Three years later the Commission reported; and their Report forms an important milestone on the road of English fishery administration.

Since 1866 great progress has been made in our knowledge of the life-history of food-fishes; yet even to-day we are hardly in a position to answer the questions set to Professor Huxley and his colleagues. At that time nothing was known about the eggs or spawn of the food-fishes. Even while the Commission was sitting, in 1864, Professor G. O. Sars for the first time discovered and described the floating ova of the cod, and succeeded in artificially fertilizing the ova and rearing the young. The following year he did the same with the mackerel; and Professor Malm of Göteborg about this time obtained and fertilized the eggs of the flounder. Since that time we have found out the eggs of all the valuable food-fish, and artificially hatched most of them. But the facts about the cod’s eggs appear to have been unknown to the Commission. They had to rely upon such data as the return of fish carried by the railway companies, the current prices of fish in the market, the return on the capital invested, and the impressions of leading merchants and fishermen. They had little scientific knowledge of sea-fisheries to guide them, for the knowledge scarcely existed; and they had no trustworthy statistics. Nevertheless, as was usually the case when Professor Huxley was concerned, they arrived at very definite conclusions—conclusions which subsequent writers have felt to be, for the time when they were formulated, sound. There was no doubt that at that date, both in Scotland and in England, the fisheries were improving; the number and the value of the fish landed at our fishing-ports were annually increasing; the capital invested in the industry yielded a satisfactory return.

The Commissioners strongly opposed the bounty system, which had done so much to build up the herring-fisheries in Scotland. They recommended the policy of opening the ports and the territorial waters to foreign seamen. They regarded the sea as free to all, just as the International Congress of Lawyers in the autumn of 1906 declared the air to be. They found no reason to believe that the supply of fish was diminishing. They were aware of the enormous destruction, especially of immature fish, consequent upon the methods of fishing, but regarded this destruction as infinitesimal compared with what normally goes on in Nature, and held that it did no permanent harm to the fisheries. They recommended that all laws regulating fishing in the open seas should be repealed, and, with two exceptions, that similar laws dealing with inshore fisheries should also be repealed; and they suggested that an Act should be passed dealing with the policing of the seas. The Sea Fisheries Act of 1868 carried these recommendations into effect, removed from the Statute-book over fifty Acts, some dating back for centuries, and rendered it possible for a fisherman to earn his living ‘how, when, and where he pleased.’

But since 1868 much has changed. Beam-trawls continued to be increasingly used down to 1893, since which date they have been replaced, in steam-trawlers, by the more powerful otter-trawl. There has been an immense increase in the employment of steam-vessels. In 1883 the number of steamers was 225, with a tonnage of 6,654 tons; in 1892 the steamers numbered 627, with a tonnage of 28,271. During the same time the number of first-class sailing-vessels had sunk from 8,058 to 7,319, whilst the tonnage was practically stationary—244,097 tons in 1883, as compared with 244,668 tons in 1892. The introduction of the use of ice, which took place about 1850, and the invention of various methods of renewing and aerating the water in the fish-tanks, enabled the boats to remain much longer on the fishing-grounds, and to waste much less time in voyaging to and from the ports where the fish is landed. Further, the time spent on the grounds was appreciably lengthened by the employment of ‘carriers,’ which collect the fish from the fleet of trawlers and carry it to port. This process of ‘fleeting,’ as it is called, at first confined to the sailing-smacks, is still used by the large Hull fleets of steam-trawlers which provide Billingsgate and more recently, Hull, itself with daily supplies of trawled fish fresh from the fishing-grounds. There has also been a great growth in dock and other accommodation.

With the tendency to use larger vessels and more complex machinery came the tendency to form companies and syndicates. The fisherman ceased to own his boat, and now retains at best a share in it. The increase in size of both the vessel and the gear necessitates increased intricacy in the operations of fishing and increased specialization on the part of the hands. The old fishing community, whose fathers and grandfathers have been fishers, is disappearing before the advance of modern economic forces. The fishing-village is turning into the cheap seaside resort.

The scene of operations of the North Sea fisherman is by no means limited to the area in the map over which the two words wander. Roughly, for purposes of definition, we may say that a North Sea fisherman is one who lands his fish at an eastern port. Should he do so at a southern or western port, even though he hail from Lowestoft or Scarborough, he temporarily ceases, for our purpose, to be a North Sea fisherman. The North Sea codmen work along the Orkneys, the Shetland and Faröe Islands, Rockall and Iceland. The fishing-grounds of East Coast trawlers now range from Iceland and the White Sea to the coasts of Portugal and Morocco. Boats have gradually made their way along the Continental coasts on the eastern side of the North Sea, opening up, about the year 1868, the grounds to the north of the Horn reef off the Danish coast. In this direction, as in the Icelandic grounds, the pioneers have been the codmen and the ‘liners,’ who catch their fish on hooks attached to long lines—sometimes seven miles in length and carrying 7,000 hooks—which are lowered to near the bottom and attached to buoys. The ‘liners’ also first exploited the more central portions of the North Sea, fishing the great Fisher Bank for many years before the appearance there, about thirty years ago, of the trawlers, who have only used it as a winter-ground since about 1885. It was not until about 1891 that trawlers visited the Icelandic grounds.

In spite of the increase in the area of the fishing-ground which took place in the last century, the intensity of the fishing has more than kept up with the new areas exploited. Professor Huxley’s Commission held the view that not only were there as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, but that the fish were as many and as large as before, and that there was no reason to suppose their number would diminish. Indeed, when we consider that an unfertilized fish-egg is rarely found in the sea, and that, according to Dr. Fulton, of the Fishery Board for Scotland, the female turbot produces annually 8,600,000 eggs, the cod 4,500,000, the haddock 450,000, the plaice 300,000, the flounder 1,400,000, the sole 570,000, whilst the herring has to be content with the comparatively meagre total of 31,000, optimism seems permissible. On the other hand, the reflection that, if the stock of cod remains about constant, only two out of the 8,600,000 ova attain maturity, gives some idea of the destructive forces at work.

The eggs are expelled into water, whilst a male is ‘standing by,’ fertilized in the water, and (except in the case of the herring, whose eggs sink) those of the chief food-fishes float to the surface, where they pass the first stages of their development. Except, again in the case of the herring, which has definitely localized spawning-grounds, there has hitherto been little trustworthy evidence as to the existence either of stereotyped spawning migrations or of very definite breeding-grounds in the case of the chief food-fishes. The great Lofoten cod-fishery in spring is based on such a migration, as it is at this time of the year that the cod approach the coast in dense shoals for spawning purposes. During the summer, after the spawning is over, the cod disappear northwards. But with respect to the spawning habits of fishes in the waters most frequented by British fishermen we know little more than that the greater number of fish spawn in relatively deep water and at some distance from land. Light will doubtless be thrown upon this problem by the international investigations now in progress. The brilliant discovery by the Danish investigators of immense numbers of the fry of the common eel in the deep water of the Atlantic, west of Ireland, and the absence of the eggs and fry from the North Sea and Baltic, render it practically certain that the countless hordes of eels which leave the rivers of North Western Europe in autumn migrate to the ocean for spawning purposes; and, more remarkable still, that the delicate young elvers which enter the same streams in autumn have already overcome the perils of their long return migration.

Before considering the evidence for the existence of a progressive impoverishment of the fishing-grounds, it should be recorded that the Trawling Commission of 1885 held that the increase of trawling had led to a scarcity of fish in the inshore waters; and that to get good catches it was necessary to go farther to sea. Eight years later, the Select Committee of 1893 held that ‘a considerable diminution [had] occurred among the more valuable classes of flat-fish, especially among soles and plaice’; and that of 1900 reported that ‘the subject of the diminution of the fish-supply is a very pressing one, and that the situation is going from bad to worse.’