1. That payment of the fish on delivery would be 'impracticable;'
which is explained to mean, (1) that it would necessitate the
employment of more highly paid factors at the stations, and the
conveyance of considerable sums of money for distances of many
miles, there being no banks in Shetland except at Lerwick; and (2)
that the settlement with the men would take up a long time and
detain them from the prosecution of the fishing, which, during the
summer months, requires incessant activity.
On the other hand, it may be said that every cargo of fish is now
received at the station by a factor employed by the curer, who
weighs the fish and enters the weight of each kind in his fish-book.
If the price of the fish were fixed, there could be no difficulty in
ascertaining the money share of each man in a particular haul, or
in the catch of a week or a fortnight, as is done in Fife and in some
of the Wick fisheries; and the factor might either pay it in cash or
give an order, which the fisherman or one of his family could cash
at the merchant's counting-house. If the price were left to be
fixed at the end of the season, the law might require payment of a
proportion of the estimated price, as it does now in the case of the
Northern whale fishery.
The argument, that the settlement would take up an intolerable
time, and prevent crews from getting to sea in favourable weather,
is sometimes fortified by the assertion that the people of Shetland
are singularly defective in arithmetic. Even if we assume this
statement to be correct, there is so little intricacy in a calculation
of the price of 18 cwt. of fish at 6s. 6d. per cwt., and dividing the
sum among five or six men, that a very low arithmetical faculty
would not be severely taxed in checking it. There is little doubt
that in stating this objection, which scarcely deserves refutation,
the simple settlement at landing a cargo of fish, or at paying cash
for a week's fishing, is confounded with the very different kind of
settlement to which the witnesses are accustomed at present, and
in which all the transactions of a year in fish, cattle, meal, tea,
clothing, soap, fishing lines, and a hundred other things, have to
be gone over in detail, and checked generally, on one side at least,
from memory.