FUERZAS POLÍTICAS LEGALES

In conclusion, the most important aspect of the policing of fishermen in the nineteenth century must be the use of the numbering, lettering and registering system. Despite abuses of the rules, the fact that it has survived virtually unchanged up to the present day speaks for the value of the system. While the modifications in 1887 and 1894 may have sometimes confused the registrars, it presented very little change or confusion for the fishermen themselves; and it was only with such a numbering system that the fishery officers and cruisers could attempt to enforce the regulations for ensuring good order at the fisheries.

Every category of dispute, whether due to the proximity of boats on the grounds, the jealous guarding of traditional fishing waters, or the incompatibility of different fishing methods, needed policing. Nonetheless, it is not clear that the regulations succeeded in significantly reducing the level of depredations on the grounds. The trend of the herring shoals to congregate further offshore throughout the century meant that drift nets could be shot with much more sea room, and hence there was a reduced chance of conflicts between drifters. Furthermore, the small number of fishery cruisers and the large area of ocean that had to be policed meant that a cruiser could not always be in the right place at the right time, and so the damage wrought by careless or malicious trawler skippers continued. Sometimes fishermen would of course be glad of the cruisers’ work, particularly when they rendered good service in the saving of lives and the recovering of lost gear. Their useful and valuable role of acting as arbiters in some disputes between fishennen allowed problems to be sorted and smoothed over without recourse to litigation or violence.

When new regulations pitted the fishery officers and cruisers directly against fishermen as at Loch Fyne, or with the trawlers in the Moray Firth, then it proved very difficult indeed to enforce the law. Even in the enclosed waters of Loch Fyne, the illegal fishermen seem to have managed to run rings around the boats from the cruisers; and in the open sea there were never enough cruisers. Active discrimination against any one class of fishermen created lawlessness which required excessive restriction and force to quell. Nevertheless proactive and interventive measures were re-introduced.

The idea of putting the registers to a good use other than their police role alone seemed sensible. Establishing a form of title to allow fishermen access to loans and mortgages is laudable, but it seems clear that on the evidence so far gathered the fishermen felt no need for a different system. Further registers must be examined to see whether the

very limited use of Part B of the 1887 registers at Dundee, Arbroath and Broadford are representative of a greater part of the registers as a whole.

A study of individual volumes in a register for a particular port has given an insight into the working of the registers by the registrars and the way they manipulated the

information within them. Although every registrar was operating the same system, it is important to have an understanding of the idiosyncrasies of each e.g. whether lists of

owners in Part A signify succesive owners or joint owners. Only then can the information be extracted for effective use by historians.

There are some important differences between the nature of the information collected and published by the Fishery Board, and the information held in the fishing boat registers. These differences define the useful nature of the registers as a resource, and since the data is , primary material rather than a previously collected set of statistics made by a fishery officer,

they can be used in full as individual records.

Each boat in the register can be traced from her building to her breaking up. If the information in the surviving fishing registers were to be put into a suitable computer database then not only could the complete history of an individual boat be extracted, but the patterns of boat-building and operation could be created for specific areas of coastline. For example the registers could reveal in this way who was building new boats, and who was then buying them second-hand. The movements of a boat could be linked from port to port, and changes in her owners etc. over time could be seen.

This approach to linking the boat entries in the registers together can be extended to a study of the boat ownership patterns within a particular port or area. From the registers particular individuals at particular addresses can be identified, and generalisations about the ownership of fishing boats can be fully tested.

Grahame Farr in his paper on the Custom House Ship Registers^ expressed a wish that the material held in the Merchant Shipping Registers could be transcribed, indexed and made more generally available to researchers. The task of wading through the registers for that purpose was immense, nevertheless the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich attempted to get a register transcription scheme off the ground. Using volunteers with standard forms a start was made but the project never came to fruition.

Since that time a number of factors have changed. The registers are more accessible to researchers and electronic aids help with the speeding up and the accuracy of repetitive tasks. Using portable computers and a suitable database the job of entering the data from the registers becomes much less onerous, and the data could be transformed into an accessible and freely available form relatively quickly. There are of course fewer fishing registers to study than merchant shipping registers. Such a database would for example eliminate the

difficulty created by the Dundee boats hopping from folio to folio. It could also match masters to their boats to assess how many they may have.

An important initial task would be to locate the whereabouts of the surviving register books. Since 1988 the modem registers have been centralised and computerised at Cardiff, but it is understood that not every customs officer or fishery officer responded to a call to send all the old registers there. These could now be located by direct enquiry, and

negotiations begun to ensure their preservation and accessibility by placing them in an appropriate record office or equivalent.

Inevitably this study has been forced by space restrictions to leave out of

consideration some areas which could throw additional light on the subject. For example it has not looked in detail at the use of the numbers and letters for the enforcement of

,conservation measures, but rather has concentrated on their original use for the prevention of disorder at sea. Furthermore keeping within the framework of the nineteenth century does not allow discussion of the problems and solutions used in the twentieth century. For example, entry into the European Community fishery policy has brought great stress to bear on fishermen and fishery officers alike, and the current ideas of conservation of fish by coercion of fishermen could form an interesting parallel with the trawling disputes of the

1890's.

The full role of the Fishery Board in the development of the regulations and the manner in which the officers on the ground dealt with and reported the problems could also have been explored. The unpublished records and returns of the Fishery Board are available for researchers in Edinburgh under the records of the Agriculture and Fisheries Department of the Scottish Office.

It could also be useful to fully examine the relationship between the registering of boats under the first convention act and the Merchant Shipping Registers. Since fishing boats do appear in some registers in the 1820’s, it can be asked whether between 1843 and 1869 customs officers were using that type of register to record numbered fishing boats? Or are there fishing boat registers prior to 1869 somewhere in an archive ?

Finally, the work of the fishery cruisers in the nineteenth century deserves some attention. Graeme Somner has produced a monograph on the vessels of the Scottish Fishery Protection squadron^ but he takes the reconstitution of the Fishery Board in 1882 as his starting point, and does not take into consideration the important role of the cruisers right from the start; and which differs in approach and detail from their role at the end of the century.

1 Farr 1969.p3.