THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JULY, 1813.

ART. I.-The First and Second Reports of the Committee of the Fish Association for the Benefit of the Community, respecting the Measures to be adopted for the Supply of the Metropolis and its Neighbourhood, 1813.

1813.

An Account of a Supply of Fish for the manufacturing Poor; with Observations, by Sir Thomas Bernard, Bart. A Dissertation on the Public Fisheries of Great Britain, explaining the Rise, Progress, and Art of the Dutch Fishery, &c. &c. By Henry Schultes. 1813.

THE coasts of Great Brittaine doe yeeld such a continual seaharvest of gaine and benefit to all those that with diligence doe labour in the same, that no time or season in the yeare passeth away without some apparent meanes of profitable imployment, especially to such as apply themselves to fishing, which, from the beginning of the yeare unto the latter end, continueth upon some part or other upon our coastes, and therein such infinite shoales and multitudes of fishes are offered to the takers, as niay justly move admiration, not only to strangers but to those that daily bee employed amongst them.'* Such was the observation of that learned knight, Sir John Boroughs, in the year 1633, the truth of which is as indisputable now, as it was then. If, indeed, we except the agricultural improvement of a country, there is no other source of national wealth and strength more productive and permanent, than that of the fisheries, and more particularly, when the circumstances and situation of its coasts are favourable for the prosecution of them on a grand scale. The greater the extent of coast compared with the area of the land which it embraces, the nearer will the benefits derivable from the fisheries approach to those which are drawn from the soil. Our sea-girt islands are most happily situated in both respects. In addition to a highly productive soil, the seas which surround us afford an inexhaustible mine of wealth-a harvest, ripe for gathering at

*The Sovereignty of the British Seas proved by Records, History, and the Municipal Laws of this Kingdom, by that Learned Knight Sir John Boroughs, Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, 1633.

every time of the year-without the labour of tillage, without the expense of seed or manure, without the payment of rent or taxes. Every acre of those seas is far more productive of wholesome, palatable, and nutricious food than the same quantity of the richest land; they are fields which, perpetually white to harvest,' require only the labourer's willing hand to reap that never failing crop which the bounty of Providence has kindly bestowed.

These islands are, indeed, favoured in a peculiar manner for carrying on the fisheries to the greatest possible extent. Not only the seas belonging to them, but all their numerous inlets, creeks, bays, and havens; the lochs, the lakes, and the rivers all swarm with esculent fish. They are blessed, moreover, with an abundant population to enjoy this plentiful harvest-they have capital to supply all the necessary means for collecting, preparing, and distributing this valuable article of human sustenance-they have the uncontrolled command of the sea, which not only secures their fishermen from the molestation of an enemy, but prevents the interference of a rival in the field. An increased and increasing population ensures a consumption at home; and mines of salt, as inexhaustible as the supply of fish, enable us to export with advantage the surplus produce to such foreign nations as afford, in return, those necessaries and luxuries of life, that are not raised by ourselves.

But other considerations combine at this moment to excite us to a vigorous prosecution of the fisheries. Food of every description has risen to an extravagant and unprecedented price; butchers' meat, once in ordinary use, is now nearly beyond the reach of the great mass of the people; the labouring poor can scarcely hope to taste it; and as to fish, whether in the metropolis or the great inland towns of England, that may be considered as a prohibited article, even to the middling ranks in life. If then the seas which surround Great Britain and Ireland are, and nobody will deny that they are, capable of affording an inexhaustible supply of fish-if fishermen are able with all imaginable ease to take it in unlimited quantities and if, netwithstanding, the supply is not equal to the demand, either in the home or the foreign market, there must be some defect or discouragement, or some want of systematic regulations, to withhold so important an article of food from the community at large. Highly, however, as we estimate the public advantages derivable from the fisheries, and they can scarcely be too highly estimated, we are not sanguine enough to join in the confident expectations of Mr. Schultes, that the establishment of a national fishery' (on his own plan of course)' would extinguish the poor's rate, afford universal employment, prevent the necessity of naval impress, increase trade, diminish taxes, supply constant

and

and perpetual food, and augment the wealth of the nation annually twenty millions of pounds.' But we willingly yield our assent to the more moderate expectations of the members who form the committee of the Fish Association,' that, by the removal of certain obstacles to a more general use of fish in this country, sustenance may be provided for a great additional population, employment afforded for a numerous class of courageous and adventurous individuals, provision made for unfailing nurseries of seamen for our navy; and a considerable increase to the trade of the United Kingdom.

That the mine we have to work upon is in reality inexhaustible, a transient inspection will be sufficient to satisfy the most sceptical inquirer. We now know that travellers do not exaggerate, when they tell us of swarms of locusts obscuring the light of the sun; of flights of white ants filling the whole horizon like a snow shower; of herds of antelopes scouring the plains in thousands; neither are fishermen disbelieved when they speak of shoals of herrings, occupying, in close array, many millions of acres near the surface of the sea; nor when they tell us that, on the coast of Norway, in passing through the narrow inlets, they move in such deep columns, that they are known by the name of herring mountains. The cod, hake, ling, mackerel, pilchard, and salmon, though not quite so numerous as the herring, are all of them gregarious, and probably migrating animals. In thus ordaining that the most numerous of the finny tribe should be those which afford the most wholesome food for man, we acknowledge the benevolent intentions of an all-wise and good Providence.

We are yet imperfectly acquainted with the natural history of the herring. Its winter habitation has generally been supposed within the arctic circle, under the vast fields of ice which float on the northern ocean, where it fattens on the swarms of shrimps and other marine insects which are said to be most abundant in those seas. On the return of the sun from the southern tropic towards the equator, the multitudinous host issues forth in numbers that exceed the power of imagination. Separating about Iceland into two grand divisions, the one proceeds to the westward, filling, in its progress, every bay and creek on the coast of America, from the Straits of Bellisle to Cape Hatteras; the other, proceeding easterly in a number of distinct columns of five or six miles in length, and three or four in breadth, till they reach the Shetland islands, which they generally do about the end of April, is there subdivided into a number of smaller columns, some of which taking the eastern coast of Great Britain, fill every creek and inlet in succession from the Orkneys down to the British Channel; and others, branching off to the westward, surround the coasts of the Hebrides, and pene

trate into the numerous firths and lochs on the western shores of

Scotland. Another shoal, pursuing the route to Ireland, separates on the north of that island into two divisions, one of which, passing down the Irish Channel, surrounds the Isle of Man, the other pours its vast multitudes into the bays and inlets of the western coast of Ireland. The whole of this grand army, which the word herring emphatically expresses, disappears, on the arrival of the several divisions on the southern coasts of England and Ireland, about the end of October, to which period, from its first appearance in April, it invites the attack of a variety of enemies, besides the fishermen, in every point of its route. In their own element the herrings furnish food for the whale, the shark, the grampus, the cod, and almost all the larger kind of fishes; and they are followed in the air by flocks of gulls, gannets, and other marine birds, which continually hover about them, and announce their approach to the expectant fisherman.

To keep up this abundant supply and to provide against all the drains which were intended to be made upon it, nature has bestowed on the herring a corresponding fecundity, the spawn of each female comprehending from thirty to forty thousand eggs. Whether these eggs are deposited in the soft and oozy banks of the deep sea, abounding with marine worms and insects and affording food for winter's consumption, or whether they lie within the arctic circle amidst unremitting frost and six months perpetual darkness, is yet a doubtful point; but the former will probably be considered as the less objectionable conjecture.

The esculent fish, next of importance to the herring in a national point of view, is the codfish, which is also considered among the number of those which migrate from the north, in a southerly direction, to nearly the same degree of latitude as the herring. But there is reason to believe that its constant residence is on the rough and stony banks of the deep sea, and that it is rarely found beyond the arctic circle, and there only sparingly and in the summer months. On the great bank of Newfoundland, on the coasts of Iceland, Norway, Shetland, and the Orkney islands, on the Wellbank, the Dogger-bank, the Broad Forties, on the northern, western, and southern coasts of Ireland, the cod is most abundant and of the best quality: in some or other of these situations the fisheries may be carried on with certain success and to great advantage from November to Midsummer. On the western

coasts of Scotland and Ireland all the different species of the cod genus, usually known under the name of white fish, are plentifully dispersed. Every bank is, in fact, an inexhaustible fishery, for, with fewer enemies than the herring to prey upon it, the cod is at least a hundred times more productive. The fecundity of this

fish, indeed, so far exceeds credibility, that had it not been ascertained by actual experiment, and on the best possible authority, it would have been considered as fabulous to assign to the female cod, from three to four millions of eggs.*

Not only the hake, sometimes known by the name of poor John,' but more commonly by that of stock-fish, and the ling, are to be reckoned among the valuable products of the British fisheries, especially as articles of foreign consumption, but we may also include the haddock, which is another species of cod, as equally important for the supply of the home market. Haddocks assemble in vast shoals during the winter months in every part of the northern ocean, and bend their course generally to the southward, proceeding beyond the limits of the cod and the herring; but it is remarked that they neither enter the Baltic nor the Mediterranean, The two dark spots a little behind its head, are supposed to have gained the haddock, in days of superstition, the credit of being the fish which St. Peter caught with the tribute money in its mouth, in proof of which the impression of the Saint's finger and thumb has been entailed on the whole race of haddocks ever since. Unfortunately, however, for the tradition, the haddock is not a Mediterranean fish, nor can we suppose it to have belonged to the lake of Tiberias. The truth is the Italians consider a very different fish as that which was sanctified by the Apostle, and which after him they honour with the name of il janitore, a name that we have converted into Johnny Dory with the same happy ingenuity that has twisted the girasole or turnsol into a Jerusalem artichoke.

Several other kinds of white fish, as turbot, plaice, sole, and whitings are plentifully dispersed over various parts of the British seas, so as to afford an ample supply for the home market, the whole year round, without the smallest danger of that supply being exhausted or diminished,

The mackerel fishery in the English Channel continues about four months in the year, commencing in April or May. This too is a fish of passage, but, contrary to the course, of the herring, is supposed to visit the British seas in large shoals from the southward. The mackerel is chiefly caught for immediate consumption, but is sometimes pickled for winter use. Its fecundity is very great, each female depositing, at least, half a million of eggs.

of

The pilchard, like the herring, of which it is a species, is a fish passage. It makes its appearance, in vast shoals, on the coasts of Devonshire and Cornwall, and in the neighbourhood of the Scilly islands, from July to September. About the time that the pilchards are expected on the coast, a number of men called huers

*Philosophical Transactions, vol. 57, p, 280.

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