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Highland
Fisheries
Traditionally, in the eighteenth century and earlier, fishing
by the coastal dwellers of the north-west Highlands and Islands
was for subsistence, to eke out the food grown on the smallholdings
which provided the basic occupation. Tiny boats, owned in shares
by the mass of the population, were used to catch a variety of
fish, such as cod, ling, skate and saithe, by hand line and herring
by drift net. While the appearance of herring shoals within the
narrow waters of the lochs (the main areas for fishing) was uncertain,
most families had the security of a barrel of salt herring kept
for consumption through the year.
Exceptionally, the great-line fishing for cod and ling, pursued
offshore, also provided a saleable product and the assurance of
a small income for a few communities from which there was access
to the main cod banks. Herring, sometimes caught much in excess
of local food needs, might on occasion be sold to curers arriving
from the south with the needed stores or to the greater vessels
which were fitted out in the Clyde region for long sojourns at
sea and had facilities for curing on shipboard.
The nineteenth century saw the advance of commercial fishing and
the involvement of the people of the north-west in the struggle
to earn money by fishing, both because of increased need and because
of widening opportunity. In Caithness profitable and fairly dependable
herring fishing, of which the output was cured and largely exported,
was growing decade by decade, and soon many of the east coast
ports were turned over to this fishing in the summer. This essentially
east coast fishing had great effects on the west. Hundreds, ultimately
thousands, of men moved seasonally to the east coast ports to
engage as hired hands, an important form of employment that was
to last until 1914.
Further, a handful of crews round the north-west corner were able
to acquire the larger boats that allowed them to participate directly
in the east coast fishing and to bring home unprecedentedly high
incomes.
The most influential development, however, was the establishment
in the 1840s of a deep-water herring fishing in the Minch, starting
annually in May. This fishing was based on the stations established
by curers at several points along the east coast of Lewis and
latterly in Barra. About a hundred herring
boats of local origin found employment in this form of fishing.
The home locations of these necessarily large boats and crews
now shifted from the mainland coasts to Lewis and Barra, and there,
by 1900, were to be found communities of farmer-fishermen able
to make increasing incomes from a herring fishing that extended
from May to September. Between 1900 and 1914 they reached the
height of their prosperity, but the men never lost their hold
on the land.
The higher incomes being earned along the eastern side of the
Long Island were not matched in the widespread loch fishings of
the mainland. Here the fishings continued to be utterly unreliable;
while a few crews were able to improve their prospects after 1900
by fitting paraffin engines to their boats to give them greater
mobility, and while marketing was made somewhat easier by the
use of steam vessels for transport, fishing became increasingly
an activity pursued by a minority clustered around the main marketing
centres of Lochalsh and Mallaig. They made higher incomes than
in the past, but there were many fewer of them. The inter-war
years brought all-round decline. (
packing herring )
Herring fishing generally was perplexed by the loss of the main
markets in the Baltic, and the Long Island fishermen, equipped
mainly with sailing boats dating from before 1910, remained herring
fishermen only because of the low running costs of such boats
as compared with those of the more efficient steam drifters, of
which very few were owned by west coast crews. Even this precarious
activity ran down in the 1930s, when the boats reached the end
of their useful lives; without funds for replacement, the fleet
and the number of men with any true dependence on fishing shrank
markedly. So it was, too, on the mainland, where the best
yield of the sea was found to be lobsters, caught with tiny boats
and on a part-time basis.
In recent times, fishing, which was once the almost universal
mainstay of the coastal communities of the west coast, has become
restricted to the few communities which have been able to equip
themselves with the boats and gear needed fully to exploit the
fewer and fewer resources of the Minch.
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