FISHERMEN AND MERCHANTMEN
Up to the end of the sixteenth century we have seen the progress of
the Mercantile Marine influenced by the pilgrim and cargo trade in the
south of Europe, and in the Iberian peninsula by the long ocean voyages
east and west for the purpose of spreading Christianity, trading, and
obtaining greater territory. In the north of Europe we have seen that
the crusades, as in the south, had their effect, and that pilgrims and
merchandise were regularly carried across the Bay of Biscay.
But we have seen, too, that the Hanseatic League and the fishing
industry had from early times done much; nor were these influences
yet dead. It is interesting, as showing the far-sightedness of the
Hanseatics, to note that they were careful to get into their hands
the entire corner of hemp, from which ropes were made. Everywhere
the League had extended its tentacles as a powerful European trading
combine. The market of Bruges was a place where you met all the great
travellers and merchants of Europe. Every one who was any one in
commerce sooner or later came here. In London they had entrenched
themselves with characteristic German astuteness, and their privileges
had been marvellously protected by the English sovereigns from the
twelfth century. Indeed the Hanseatics became, so to speak, the
Rothschilds of Europe for financing regal schemes. The Wars of the
Roses and the hostilities with France were the means of making the
Hanseatics very useful financially, and they got their reward in the
shape of special privileges, which their depôt just above London Bridge
in Thames Street enjoyed for many a year. Down to the time of Edward VI
they indeed prospered exceedingly.
In Portugal the League had established a factory at Lisbon, and thence
they traded with the Italian commercial republics and also got a
hold on the big Levantine trade. But during the reign of Elizabeth
Englishmen began to realise their own strength and capabilities at sea.
The defeat of the Armada, and the many fights with the Spanish and
Portuguese, had given them a confidence which they had never before
enjoyed. The English sailors were to justify their maritime ability
not merely against the southerners, but against these very powerful
and historic members of the northern league. Consequently they did
not hesitate to seize sixty Hanseatic ships about to enter the Tagus
with grain for the Spaniards. In 1598 the Hanseatics were turned out
of England, and though they were allowed eventually to come back,
and their property in the city of London was not sold until 1853,
when the Cannon Street railway station was erected, yet the rise of
English sea-power, expressed not merely in actual fighting, but in the
maritime spirit generally, had given the ancient league its death-blow.
Thereafter it merely lingered.
But simultaneously with the decline of the Spanish and Hanseatic
Mercantile Marines was growing up the Dutch. And it cannot be
emphasised too strongly that this was owing to the herring having in
the fifteenth century begun to spawn in the North Sea instead of the
Baltic, as already mentioned. It seems curious that an innocent fish
should thus be the deciding force of international history. If you
examine modern Dutch charts you will still see marked channels and
shoals which show the intimate connection which that country had with
fishing. The “haringvliet,” or mouth of the Maas, and the “Schotsman”
shoal, off the island of Walcheren, at once suggest the time when the
Low Countries were acquiring wealth by their fisheries and doing a
good deal of trade with Scotland. Then they became more ambitious, and
built those fine great ships, which you see in the paintings of Vroom
and other artists, that were the means of bringing home from their
East Indies wealth in another form once enjoyed by the Venetians and
Spaniards.
So invaluable had the fisheries been to the Dutch, both in regard to
shipbuilding and in creating a fine school of seamanship, that by
the time of Cromwell these Netherlanders were the “waggoners of the
sea,” had the world’s carrying trade and owned four-fifths of all the
merchant ships that sailed the seas. Now, having regard to the young,
keen sea spirit which had made the sixteenth century so illustrious,
it was hardly surprising that before long there should be trouble
between the English and the Dutch. It was analogous to the years which
immediately preceded the Great War of 1914. Collision was certain:
it was a question only of time. Thus, as early as 1608, Grotius, the
famous Dutch jurist, wrote his _Mare Liberum_, wherein he contended
that the high seas were open to all. Contemporary with him was living
the English jurist Selden, who in 1618 had begun his treatise _Mare
Clausum_. At the request of James I it was not published for fear of
complications with the Danes, but in 1635 Selden again took up this
work at the desire of Charles I. In the previous year Charles began to
levy ship-money, which really was intended in order to strengthen the
fleet against the Dutch in the probability of war.
Legislation is merely the expression of the nation’s contemporary
fears, and in the long series of maritime Acts from the fourteenth
century onwards we can see the national nervousness of the time lest
the foreigner should dominate the success of our Mercantile Marine. We
have already seen Edward I styling himself “Sovereign of the Seas.”
Then in the last years of the fourteenth century we have what was
the first of the Navigation Acts. The basic aim was to exclude the
ships, seamen and trade of the foreigner and to encourage those of
our country. We will not bore the reader with a legal dissertation,
but it will help us to understand the difficulties of the time if,
very briefly, we show how the State was helping the subject of our
study. During the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth there
was legislation dealing with the privileges of English shipping. At a
later date the claim to the sovereignty of the seas was expressed by
compelling the Flemish subjects of Philip, who married our Queen Mary,
to pay a fine and an annual rent of £1000 for twenty-one years’ lease
of the fishing near the north Irish coast, whilst a similar lease with
similar conditions was granted by Mary to the Hanseatics. Without a
licence foreign subjects were forbidden to fish in English waters,
though with the decline of English sea-power in the seventeenth century
foreigners ceased to be bound by these claims.
The doctrine of the “Dominion of the Seas” is inseparably bound up in
the growth of our Mercantile Marine and our fishing industry. Matters
reach a crisis in the dispute, and then the discussion is settled by
an appeal to force in the shape of war. The Anglo-Dutch wars were
fundamentally caused by the herring fisheries and the Mercantile
Marines of the two nations. Every other reason was entirely artificial
and subservient. Whether the seas could be free to all everywhere to
trade, whether the fisherman could shoot his nets where he liked—that
is the whole matter in a nutshell. And the more ships that were
built for trade or fishing, the more serious the crisis developed.
Proportionately the value of a navy becomes greater, and thus the
two services are bound to become less and less similar, as greater
commercial demands are made on the one and purely warlike requirements
are insisted on for the other.
The seventeenth century was the crisis in the career of the Mercantile
Marine, for it was struggling for its very life amid many dangers, but
it emerged with an independence and character of its own. In any long
period of assured peace it reaches enormous heights of success, as, for
instance, during the nineteenth century. But during the Caroline period
a principle was being insisted upon. The position was this. Charles I
was determined to compel the Dutch to acknowledge the English claim to
the dominion of the seas, and that was the reason for the building, in
1637, of that marvellous and sensational warship the _Sovereign of the
Seas_, a triumph of Pett’s design, which Van der Velde depicted for
posterity. This 1683-ton “battleship,” as we should call her nowadays,
was an expression, both in name and character, of the English attitude
in regard to the use of the seas.
“We hold it a principle,” Charles had instructed his Minister at The
Hague, “not to be denied, that the King of Great Britain is a monarch
at sea and on land to the full extent of his dominions. His Majesty
finds it necessary for his own defence and safety to reassume and
keep his ancient and undoubted rights in the Dominion of the Seas.”
Having forbidden foreigners to fish off our coasts without licence,
Charles’ fleet attacked and put to flight a Dutch fishing fleet which
had infringed this order. Some of these small craft were thus sunk by
our men-of-war, and many of the rest took shelter in harbour. Finally
the Dutch agreed to pay Charles I £30,000 for permission to finish that
year’s fishing, and to pay a sum annually for the like privilege.
We can well understand the irritation which this line of action
caused so great a maritime power as the Dutch. Great sea pioneers
they certainly were, and before the first decade after the defeat of
the Armada had passed, they had been the first country to send out a
real Polar expedition. In 1651 came the celebrated English Navigation
Act, which prohibited the importation of goods into England except in
English ships, or in the ships of the country producing the goods. This
was quite obviously aimed at the great Dutch sea-carriers. Relations
became strained, the war-clouds gathered, and in the following year the
first of the three Anglo-Dutch wars broke out inevitably between the
English and Dutch republics.
The Navigation Act of 1651 was confirmed by that of nine years later,
and thus the English Mercantile Marine had its future settled on sure
foundations. In a word, the disputes as to where fishermen could
shoot their nets to get herrings were the indirect means of giving
the merchant ships their unique opportunity. Holland’s carrying trade
fell into our hands, prosperity came to our country, the sailing
ships of our nation penetrated everywhere, and, as you can see by the
seventeenth-century architecture in the leading Dutch cities, the
wealth obtained overseas suddenly ceased to flow in a big way. It
is for those who have eyes a veritable story in stones, which ends
suddenly and dramatically.
It is to the credit of the rulers of our country in the seventeenth
century that they realised what the fisheries meant to us. The Act
of 1651 was of great assistance in providing that no fish should be
brought into England or Ireland, or exported thence to foreign parts,
or even carried from one English or Irish port to another, except fish
caught by English and Irish fishermen in English and Irish ships.
In 1661 the Parliament of Scotland also passed navigation laws for
the encouragement of their native shipping, and one Act for founding
companies to extend the fishing industry. Very subtle, too, was the
proclamation of James I in 1621 against eating flesh in Lent or on
other “fish days,” the reasons given being “the maintenance of our
navy and shipping, a principal strength of this island, and for the
sparing and increase of fresh victuals.” This and similar proclamations
considerably helped the fishermen.
In order fully to appreciate all that the fishing meant to the Dutch,
it is necessary to mention also that not merely did they seek the
herring as far away as the Thames estuary, the Orkneys, Shetlands and
the Irish coast, but, owing to the ingenuity and enterprise of one
Beuckels, they had learned how to cure and barrel this fish. In this
way they enjoyed a wonderful monopoly in supplying Catholic central
and northern Europe. In the year 1560, for instance, the value of
the year’s fishing trade to Friesland, Holland, Zeeland and Flanders
amounted to the enormous sum of £300,000. Just as to-day the steam
fish-carriers go out to fetch the catch home from the fleets fishing
off the Dogger Bank and elsewhere, so the Dutch in the seventeenth
century were using a fast-sailing type of craft, called “vent-jagers,”
to hurry into port the fresh herrings caught by the slow, round, tubby
“busses.” This practice was in vogue certainly by 1604.
It was a statute of 1663, for the encouragement of our fisheries,
which forbade any fresh herrings being imported into England except in
English-built ships, and no ship could sail for Iceland from England
until March 10, thus protecting the fish at breeding time. The Act of
1666 prohibited the importation of herrings caught by foreigners. And,
having done all this, the time came when those Englishmen who owned
capital thought they saw an opportunity for getting richer. Thus in
1677 a Royal Fishery Company was incorporated, the Duke of York and
many peers and gentlemen being partners, with a capital eventually
increased to £12,580. This was spent in the construction of seven
busses, but some of these were captured by the French, who were now
growing up as maritime and commercial people, and were rivals to us in
our fishing. The remainder of the busses were sold off in 1680 and the
company ended in debt.
Three years later another fishing company was started, and this failed
also, whereas the Dutch were doing well with their nets, employing
8000 vessels and 200,000 hands, thus amassing the enormous sum of
£5,000,000 a year. During the time of Charles II the Dutch fishermen
had brought great prosperity to Great Yarmouth, sometimes as many as
1000 busses and fish-carriers being off that port, and buying bread,
beer, flesh and butter from the East Anglians. They used to come ashore
and dry their nets, and the town would find 10,000 of these foreign
sailormen in their neighbourhood. To assuage their thirst, forty
brewers were kept busy in the port. Any one who has any experience
of human nature and of fishermen, will readily understand that there
were many feuds and quarrellings. Ever since 1540 the Dutchmen had
been herring-fishing off that port, and the Englishmen were none too
pleased at this visitation; nor were the Scotch, who in 1532 attacked
the Dutchmen and captured many of their busses, and for nine years
prevented them from using Scottish waters.
As far back as the thirteenth century the herring had been caught in
great numbers off Great Yarmouth, and in 1270 the Yarmouth herring
fair was held for forty days. About that date some Flemish vessels put
to sea and killed 1200 English North Sea fishermen, nor will these
international fishermen’s quarrels ever cease as long as human nature
remains what it is. Before the end of the thirteenth century Grimsby
had begun fishing, and before the end of the sixteenth century the
first Hull whaler had started out on her special industry, whaling
having begun in England only four years previously. Few people are more
conservative than the sailor, and of his service the most conservative
of all is the fisherman, who did not take to steam generally for many a
long year after it had become dominant in the carrying trade. Many of
us can still remember the famous “blue” sailing fishing fleet out of
Great Yarmouth; and the Brixham fleet and others round our coasts still
stick almost exclusively to sail. In the olden days, wool, wheat, fish
and other cargoes were sold by the “last.” Wool is no longer thus sold,
but a hundred years ago wheat was thus reckoned at Great Yarmouth, and
round our coasts to this day fish is still disposed of in the old-time
manner, a Yarmouth “last” amounting roughly to 13,200 herrings or about
two and a half tons.
In our British North Sea fishing craft the busses have given way very
largely to steam drifters, but off the Dutch shores the Scheveningen
“pink” is much the same craft in hull as were the vessels which caused
so much friction in the seventeenth century. The very word by which
these craft have been known is in itself symbolical of the antiquity
of the industry. The mediæval Venetians had “buzi,” and throughout the
Romance and Teutonic languages it has always meant a fishing boat, the
seventeenth-century Englishmen getting the use from the Dutch North Sea
craft.
The two principal types of fishing craft in the North Sea were the buss
and the “dogger.” With regard to the former, the earliest illustration
I have discovered is that by Elandts in the Municipal Museum at The
Hague, made in 1664 from a picture of 1570. This “haring buys” is the
prototype of the seventeenth-century buss, and consists of two masts,
each having a square-sail. Like the modern drifter, the buss lowered
her foremast and rode to her nets. This Elandts buss is really nothing
more than a large open boat, with three hands in her; the length of
the craft I reckon not more than about thirty feet. A rather bigger
type, similarly rigged but with three masts, is depicted in the Dutch
Waghenaer’s _Speculum Nauticum_ of 1584 riding to her nets, with fore
and mainmasts lowered. Among the sixteen ships which Frobisher took
with him in 1578, one was the _Emmanuel_ of Bridgewater, and she is
described as a buss. It will be recollected that this was another
attempt to find the north-west passage to China, and this craft
performed most admirable service, and as she came homeward discovered
an island which had never before been sighted. Thus, there is no
question about the seaworthiness of this fishing type of craft.
In the Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam, there is an interesting painting by
Bellevois showing a mid-seventeenth-century buss of a powerful type,
with three masts, a square-sail on each, and riding with her mizzen up,
but the other sails and masts lowered. Keymor, who wrote in 1601 on the
Dutch fishing, describes these craft as being from sixty to two hundred
tons, and carrying from forty to a hundred lasts. The anonymous author
of _Britaine’s Busse_, published in 1615, describes them as being
of from thirty-five lasts or seventy tons, and measuring fifty feet
on the keel, with a beam of seventeen feet. Her cost, together with
her boat, was £260. There is another fine picture of these craft by
Storck, hanging in the Mauritshuis at The Hague, the date being 1683,
and from the rounded stern and general lines of the ship it is easy
enough to see that she belongs to the same family to which the familiar
Scheveningen “pink,” so well known in modern art, belongs.
Often in the mediæval records one finds reference to a North Sea
fishing type called the “dogger.” Exactly what these were like, it
would be impossible to say, except that they probably had not more
than two masts carrying square-sails, and that they were line fishers,
for cod and ling, and did not use nets, their size in the seventeenth
century varying from sixty to one hundred tons. It is reasonable to
suppose, from the later illustrations which exist, that the dogger was
in hull and square-sails not very different from the buss.
The end of the seventeenth century, then, saw the British Mercantile
Marine both in respect of its fishing craft and its cargo-carriers,
going ahead. As regards the latter, the finest of all were the ships
of the East India Company of England and those of the Dutch East India
Company, with their stately hulls, lofty sterns, high freeboard and
two decks of guns. A picture of 1647 shows them with three masts, as
well as bowsprit, and they even carry topgallant sails on fore and
main. Such craft are, in fact, the connecting link between the last
of the mediæval ships and the first of the famous clipper ships. The
stolid majesty of their design and build, the elaborateness of their
seventeenth-century carvings, were expressive of that permanence with
which the Merchant Service now rightly regarded itself. Indeed so
prosperous had the British East India Company become in the seventeenth
century, that by 1681 this corporation owned about thirty-five ships,
ranging in size from 100 to 775 tons, and in customs alone the company
was paying £60,000 a year. They used to take out to India cargoes of
lead, tin, cloth and stuffs, bringing back home raw silk, pepper and
other Eastern goods. Trade prospered so well, indeed, that between 1682
and 1689 as many as sixteen East Indiamen of from 900 to 1300 tons were
built, and all these ships had to be armed; for during the last decade
of that century these merchantmen ran the risk of being attacked by
French men-of-war as well as by privateers, so that in carrying from
thirty to fifty guns these East Indiamen were very powerful vessels for
any enemy to have to encounter.
[Illustration: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DUTCH EAST INDIAMEN.]
[Illustration: SIGNAL CODE.
Used in a British East Indiaman.]