British Fishing-Boats and Coastal Craft
By E. W. White
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British Fishing-Boats and Coastal Craft - E. W. White
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Herring-Buss (c. 1584)
Map showing British Ports and Waterways
PLATES
PREFACE
WHEN the Royal School of Naval Architecture was established at South Kensington in 1864, the large collection of Ship-Models which had been accumulated at Somerset House was transferred to South Kensington for the use of the students. This collection, which owed much to the energy of two successive Surveyors of the Navy, Sir Robert Seppings, 1813-1832, and Sir William Symonds, 1832-1847, received numerous additions from unofficial sources while it was at South Kensington.
In 1873 all models belonging to the Admiralty were transferred to the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, but what remained formed a nucleus round which has been built up in the course of more than seventy years a collection of Ship-Models which aims precisely at illustrating the development of ships and ship construction. Besides providing detailed information regarding the design and construction of ships of the past, with their rigging, and of the more modern ships with their propelling machinery, an endeavour has been made to arrange the collections in such a way as to show the successive steps by which shipbuilding has reached its present day degree of excellence.
The collection of Fishing-Boats and other types of Small Craft, from all parts of the world, which has been formed in more recent years, has quite a special value, for some region can nearly always be found in which a particular usage of our ancestors still remains the common practice of to-day. For example, the best illustration of the means by which the Elizabethan seamen hoisted their yards is to be found in the present day dhows of the Arabian Sea, while the detailed construction of the quarter-galleries of that period is well exemplified in the existing junks of Northern China.
In 1883, the Fisheries Exhibition was held at South Kensington and, in addition to stimulating national interest in our fisheries, presented an occasion for the construction of a number of excellent models of British Fishing-Boats. As the majority of these were the work of local boat builders they may be accepted as accurate representations of the various types then in use at our fishing ports. Fortunately for the nation, the best of these models are preserved at the Science Museum, where they form an important part of the Small Craft Collections.
The edition of British Fishing and Coastal Craft by the late G. S. Laird Clowes, published in 1937, forms the basis for this later work consisting of two parts. Part II will serve as a Descriptive Catalogue of the related Collections.
PORTS AND WATER WAYS
British Fishing-Boats
and Coastal Craft
INTRODUCTION
FISH have formed an important item of the diet of many of the inhabitants of these Islands from the earliest recorded times but, owing to the great difficulties of transport, its principal use must have been confined to the inhabitants of the river valleys and to those of the scattered settlements which had collected along the estuaries of rivers and on other of the less exposed portions of the coast.
Boats of skin and wicker were found in Britain by Julius Cæsar at the time of the Roman invasion and are recorded in his De Bello Gallico. These vessels appear to have been similar to the round wicker coracles still employed by salmon fishers of the Severn and some Welsh rivers. Another of Cæsar’s contemporary records De Bello Civile, concerning hostilities against another Roman army in Spain in 49 B.C., refers to his orders to construct skin boats with keels and frames of light timber of the kind he had knowledge of in Britain. These craft were to be employed to transport troops across the river Segre, and consequently implies that they were not river coracles but of the larger type of skin-covered craft known as curraghs, such as the Irish used in the Bronze Age and such as still persist on the west coast of Ireland. While it may be safely assumed that, in Cæsar’s time, the wicker boats of the Ancient Britons were used for fishing in the rivers and estuaries of the south coast of England, it appears also that skin boats of both coracle and curragh type were contemporary.
There is no evidence of the existence of any off-shore fisheries along the coasts of the Channel at such an early date, although the Britons may well have worked the inshore fisheries during favourable conditions.
The small round coracle, however, as it appears to have existed in Cæsar’s time, and as it still exists in Wales and on the Welsh border, is entirely unsuited to coastal work. For its primary characteristic is that while it can be steered as it drifts downstream—and is even capable of propulsion to some extent—it can only be used efficiently in fast-moving rivers provided that no attempt is made to paddle it against the stream. Its very lightness enables it to be so easily transported along the bank that it is quite unnecessary to attempt to compete against the stream. But at sea the occupant, when he encountered an adverse current, would have no opportunity of stepping out and walking with the coracle on his back, and in consequence the craft would surrender its principal advantage.
Similar difficulties curtailed the utility of the birch-bark canoe of the North American Indians, although to a less degree—for such canoes paddle very well—and, not very long since, like tactics were employed on some of the Nile cataracts. A Berthon collapsible boat, built in small sections each resembling a coracle, there proved admirable for journeys downstream, while against the stream the boat could easily be dismembered, collapsed and loaded on camels.
From the above considerations it would seem, therefore, improbable that the coracle represents an early form of British sea-fishing boat, and it is much safer to assume that such vessels consisted of dug-out canoes, of which so many remains have been discovered in the estuaries of these Islands. A dug-out canoe is so heavy in proportion to its size that it is quite useless where porterages of any sort are involved—a point well emphasized by the pathetic misadventures of Robinson Crusoe when he built, or rather hollowed out, his first boat. But, for work on the coast, this weight is no drawback, while the strength which it provides is highly advantageous.
Lest it should be thought that the curachs
, or the recognised English equivalent curraghs
, still used off the west coast of Ireland upset this contention, it must be realized that they occur in parts of the country where no sizeable timber is available, that they are used among islands and shallows where porterages are often highly advantageous, and that on the more rocky islands their safety depends upon the speed with which they can be lifted out of the water when once they reach their landing place, which may well be nothing more than a rocky ledge over which the sea is still breaking.
Unfortunately, from the time of the first Roman invasion up to the fifteenth century there exists little evidence of the type of fishing-boat used along the coasts of Great Britain. Fisheries must have increased greatly in importance as soon as the Islands adopted Christianity—since the Roman Catholic religion enjoins a regular Friday diet of fish—but conformity to this rule was necessarily greatly circumscribed owing to the difficulty of transport. The probable result, therefore, was to develop the river and freshwater fisheries and confine the sea fisheries to those fish which could be effectively dried. In the twelfth century the Hanse towns had laid the foundation of their future great commercial wealth on the herring fisheries and these great cities must have flooded the British market in the matter of dried sea-fish. In 1425, however, the herrings changed their habits and ceased to visit the Baltic, leaving the great city of Wisby to perish miserably. There can be little doubt that this alteration in the habits of the herring provided the stimulus required to induce the British to further develop their sea-fisheries, which had been placed under Government control by the passing of the Statute of Herrings in 1357. Even for that period, and notwithstanding the existence of very early local records of the fishing industry, little useful information is available which enables