CORRESPONDENCE.
THE HARVEST OF THE OCEAN.
ITo THE EDITOR OF THE " SPEATEATOR."1 Morning Post of December 29th, 1917, appeared the
" FISHERMEN'S SEIZURE OF LAND.
Twenty-seven men, mostly the heads of families, have seized part of the northern border of the Island of Barra, Inverness-shire, and they are determined to hold the land until driven away by force. They are willing to pay a fair rent for the patches they have pegged out. One of the squatters, in reply to the question of a Pressman, remarked, 'In consequence of the war we cannot exist by fishing operations. Hunger is facing us, while our eons are laying down their lives on land and sea.'" By a curious coincidence, the same post brought the writer the Spectator of December 22nd, containing your admirable article, " The Harvest of the Sea," and the 1914 Reportof the Fishery Board
for Scotland. From the latter one gathers that Barra is the head-
quarters of a fishery district. The fishing community numbered some nine hundred and ninety men and boys before the war. Their waters produced some six million pounds' weight of fish annually— chiefly herring and cod. But their catches were dwindling before the war, and it is not wonderful that they should have gone out of the fishing. Not wonderful. But infinitely disquieting, inasmuch as they are twenty-seven experts removed from the columns of supply. They might be feeding the Allies. They will be culti- vating sheep runs. Unfortunately, there is too much reason to believe this minor disaster in the Hebrides to be symptomatic of a grave danger which may threaten—not the United Ringdore only, but the Allied cause. You say : " Granted a sufficiently active demand for more fish and cheaper fish, the Government might be induced to give serious attention " to the fisheries pro- blem. Were it your duty, as it is the writer's frequently, to discuss menus with squadron cooks and hungry machine-gunners, you would have little doubt about the " demand " ! That it is not "active" is due to our national ignorance of the subject : ignorance carefully fostered by a " Trade" whose every energy has been concentrated on " rigging" the fish markets for generations. Nevertheless, Government is giving serious attention to the subject. It realized long since that fish might replace the dwindling stocks of meat. Where we have failed, as it seems to me, is not in "atten- tion," but in achievement. We have thought—but thought parochially. What is the situation as regards the fisherfolk? The old men and the boys alone are left to feed us. Most praiseworthy efforts are made to keep the residue of their vessels, thus under- manned, at sea. But where?
So few of your readers know where their fish come from that no apology is needed for listing our fishing grounds in order of pro- ductivity. They were before the war :—(i) The North Sea [370], (ii) Iceland [200], (iii) Faroe Islands [70], (iv) South of Ireland [69], (v) West of Scotland [67], (vi) Irish Sea [25], (vii) Lofoten Islands and Baltic [22], (viii) English Channel [21], (ix) West Ireland [16], (x) White Sea [13], (xi) Bristol Channel [12], (xii) Rockall [6], (xiii) Portugal and Morocco [6], (xiv) Bay of Biscay [1]. The %Wee in brackets indicate roughly the harvests of each Feld in millions of pounds. They do not include the catches of herring and mackerel, which varied from six hundred to twelve hundred million pounds annually. These herring left our shores in huge quantities to feed Germany and Russia.
The war, of course, at once closed down fishing in many of these grounds altogether. It requires no inner knowledge to say that none of them is outside easy striking distance for Beebe sub- marines. It follows that losses among fishing craft must be heavy and will be heavy as long as the war continues. The Italian% Portuguese, and French are faced with exactly the.same problem. and they are far more dependent on fish as a staple diet than se are. The old men and the boys have not failed us, and will not fail es—they will catch fish till they die ae long as it is possible, without thought of their lives. But their best results will never produce even a small percentage of the pre-war catch as long as they work grounds in the war zone. In fact, the Allies in their fishing operations, which are essentially an operation of war, are committing a cardinal strategic error : they are operating exaetlY where the enemy Naval Staff would ask them to operate, and the attempt to substitute fish for meat is inevitably being defeated by the Hun. There is one side of the picture—the fisherfolk of four Allied countries carrying on a struggle for an objective which is coati in' able. It is not wonderful that twenty-seven of them should haTe been overcome by despair. A good commander, when he finds his terrain unfavourable and his men out of heart, shifts his forces- Unfortunately the Allied Fisheries have no Commander and lie General Staff, and consequently little co-ordination of purP•0'.
I have shown that the fishing fleets are at present operating '° waters which favour the enemy. Are there available waters
SIR,—In the following :—
which the advantage would rest with us? The essentials of any new position must be as follows : (1) The waters must abound in fish. (2) They should be distant from the enemy submarine bases. (3) They must not be already exploited to the limit of their capacity. (4) The routes from them to the Allied collecting stations must be through open seas. All these requisites are to be found in Newfoundland. There is an island with an immense coastline; its area larger than the British Isles; its population rather smaller than that of Shropshire; its waters teeming with untold wealth of cod, herring, salmon, hake, torsk, halibut, megrim, mackerel, flounders, haddock, smelt, dogfish, skate, tunny, and lobster. As Mr. Duff, of the Fisheries Board for Scotland, has shown, the island abounds in ideal fishing harbours. Its own small force of fishermen—sadly depleted on the battlefields of the Western Front, where they have been second to none—is far from being able to market a tithe of the fish available. They are masters of one art only—the art of " longlining " for cod. They know practically nothing of netsmanship—of "drifting" or "trawling" or " seining." For the taking of their neglected herring and flatfish and tunny, and all the other valuable species for which France, Italy, and Great Britain are crying out, they lack boats and geai and knowledge. Above all, they lack men.
All fish brought to the war zone from Newfoundland must be frozen or cured, and any transference of labour to these waters will be successful only if cold storage can be established at suit- able depots in the island, to be fed by fast " carrier " vessels equipped with cold-storage plant, and evacuated by a line of Transatlantic fish steamers similarly equipped, and armed against the submarine.
The further development of these waters in which three of the Allies have treaty rights is essentially an " Allied," not a merely " British " task. Even before the war the average catch of American vessels on the " treaty coasts" of Newfoundland was over twenty-one million pounds a year, chiefly herring, cod, and halibut: in 1909 two hundred and twenty-five French vessels landed over twelve hundred million pounds' weight of Newfound- land cod. Britain, France, Portugal, and Italy can supply some of the crews and boats required; but Nova Scotia and New Eng- land, if the project is to succeed, must assist with boats and engines, fishing gear and local knowledge, while the protection of the fleets will naturally be the task of the American Navy— and the American Secret Service. No waters are inexhaustible, and the Newfoundland seas must not be reduced to the pitiable con- dition to which official improvidence has reduced the North Sea and the English Channel. It will probably be necessary at once to start State cod, flatfish, lobster, haddock, mackerel, and salmon hatcheries on the Southern coast. It will therefore be unthink- able to make any move without the assistance of the United States Commissioner of Fisheries, who is the doyen of the fisheries world in all branches of his craft. In other words, success will depend on good " staff work " by an " Allied Board of Fisheries," which must be armed with funds and full executive powers to carry out its own projects. Possibly the simplest and most expeditious plan would be to grant a loan to the Newfound- land Government, and direct it to " carry on," for bold decisions are needed, not " reports " by giant sub-committees on evidence collected from ill-informed multitudes. Should the Allied Board develop into an International Fisheries Council after the war the world would be the richer—even the fishmonger, though he knows it not, would gain. But the immediate problem is to wean the twenty-seven Barra squatters, and all their colleagues suffering from a like caffard, from thoughts of farming bad lands (which they will certainly make a mess of) to plying their own craft in happier circumstances. Hunger will face them no more; and they will be assisting their sons in the grimmer work on the
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