Sea Fishing and Ecological Awareness in the Nineteenth Century Britain
Robert M. Schwartz
Mount Holyoke College (USA)
This project investigates sea fishing in the United Kingdom from the 1860s to the 1914. It
uses text mining and GIS to create a spatial history of attitudes and practices in sea fishing, and
the development of ecological awareness, that is, the sensitivity to the limits of the maritime
environment for food. The key questions that Victorian fishermen, scientists, and governing
authorities pondered evolved as the fishing industry expanded and knowledge of marine life
increased. In the first of a series of Parliamentary inquiries in the the 1860s, commissioners
concentrated on the basics: How many fish were in the sea? Were supplies abundant? Growing?
Declining? In subsequent inquiries, questions of statistical and scientific evidence became
prominent as did issue of improving the management of sea fishing both in the British Isles and
internationally. Once it was recognized that fish stocks were limited and the vast increase of
catching power pressed them further and further, effective management of maritime resources
moved to the top of prevailing agendas.
Thomas Huxley, a vocal supporter of Darwin, scientist in his own right, and president of
a Royal Commission that looked into the matter in the 1860s, proclaimed that the major sea
fisheries were probably inexhaustible. Other observers and writers had less confidence in
Huxley’s pronouncement, and some took issue with it. What fishermen thought then became
part of a continuing debate, and many of them were concerned about declining fish stocks.
Studying the opinions in this debate is useful because it can help us gauge the timing and
character of ecological awareness during the period. Looking back from today, when overfishing and collapsing fish stocks are widely recognized problems, we can ask how, whether, and
when the expansion of industrialized fishing came to be seen as less sustainable than Huxley
believed.
To pursue the problem I am examining a large corpora of texts recording the views of
scientific experts, investigators, journalists, writers, and thousands of fisherman who gave
testimony in state-sponsored enquiries into a trade that was undergoing exponential growth as
new technologies in steam powered trawling and rapid rail transport transformed the fishing
industry. In the United Kingdom, the attitudes and practices arising from the transformation are
well documented in the records of a succession of enquires by Royal Commissions of the British
Parliament beginning in 1863. All told, the minutes of evidence and reports for the commissions
of 1863, 1893, 1900, and 1908 run to some 10,000 pages of dense, two-column text now
available in digital form in PDF format. The process of identifying attitudes, events, and
narrative patterns is proceeding in a number of steps. First, a tool of text mining—natural
language part-of-speech classification—extracts geographic place names that can be used to
anchor the textual information on attitudes and practices to specific locations of sea fishing.
Software for computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDA)1 then facilitates
interactive coding of key words in context (KWIC) for investigating research questions as the
following suggest:

Did the commissioners stick to a “script” in questioning witnesses, posing the same
questions over and over again? Or did each one seem to follow a different “script”?

To what extent did the responses of fisherman vary by fishing port or region? To what
extent and in what ways did they vary also over time?
Locations in the UK
Great Grimsby (England)
Swansea (Wales)
Dumfires (Scotland)
Galway (Ireland)
Commissioner questions
Responses by fishermen
The results are then mapped and studied further in Google Earth and, more extensively, through
spatial analysis in GIS software.
In gathering testimony the Royal Commission of 1863-65 conducted interviews in 127
fisheries in the United Kingdom: 23 in Ireland, 21 in Scotland and 83 in England and Wales.
(See Figure 1.) In examining witnesses in England and Wales, the questions posed by the Royal
commissioners—James Caird, Thomas Huxley, and George Shaw Lefevre—sometimes differed
in pursuing particular details of fishing equipment and practice. In Torcross, Devonshire, for
example, Huxley and Shaw Lefevre showed a keen interest in learning more about the kinds of
nets in local use. In each interview, nonetheless, they were at pains to pursue the main question
of their charge: “Whether the supply of fish from sea fisheries is increasing, stationary, or
diminishing?” Not surprisingly, the responses by the fishermen varied by status—active
fisherman, retired fisherman, on-site manager—and, more importantly, by sea port, of which
more will be said below.
An important step in extracting evidence and detecting patterns entails creating key terms
and using studying them in context. The term “increase” subsumes, for example, the terms
“increase,” “more fish,” “large catch,” etc. in the testimony, just as “decline” subsumes the terms
“decrease,” “small catch,” “decline,” “less than previous years,” etc. Once defined, the text
surrounding the key terms is extracted and arranged by location to permit further study. Table 1
below provides an example of the terms “increase” and “decline in context for four of the ports
visited by the commission: Great Grimsby on the east coast in Lincolnshire—the largest fishery
in the U.K.—Swansea on the south coast of Wales, Billigsgate in London, and Boston in
northern Lincolnshire. In this selection, the most optimistic reports came from Grimsby where
continuing abundance was expected. Testimony form Swansea, on the other hand, suggests two
aspects of decline, the first concerning sea fishing and the second, fishing in the bay that
depended upon conditions in the tributary river.
Figure 1. Fisheries visited by the Royal Commission of 1863-64
Table 1.
Fishery Location and Date of Testimony
(Numbers for each exchange are those in the BPP volumes for Testimony; highlighted text identifies the place,
data, and pages in the volumes)
Key Term in
Context
Increase/
Decline
Great Grimsby
Lincolnshire 30
November 1863
Swansea Glamorganshire 8
October 1864
16.103. Then in stormy weather
the largest proportion of your take
will be offal fish?—Yes, unless we
have an extremely cold and severe
winter. Then the soles are in great
abundance in the Great Silver Pits
and about there, as they have been
in years gone by.
57.411. Do you agree with the last witness,
who told us that the herrings have not been
here in great abundance for the last five or
six years?—I do.
16.104. Will you name the
different fishing grounds your
vessels frequent from Grimsby?—
Yes, there are what we call the “off
grounds.”
16.105. Will you be good enough
to begin at the Thames and name
them in regular order?—We fish
off the coast of Holland
sometimes.
RTF\Great Grimsby Lincolnshire
30 November 1863, 236-238
16.123. There is no fishing
ground that you have found falling
off in the supply of fish it
yields?—We may have found them
beginning to give in, but then in a
month there will be an abundance
of fish caught in them.
16.124. You have never
exhausted any particular
57.412.
Previous to that time, were they
more abundant?—Yes.
57.413. Used they before that to come in
with regularity?—No, they were irregular
in their visits.
RTF\Swansea Glamorganshire 8 October
1864, 326-328
57.389. Do you think that the increase
of works on the river and the
discoloration of the water has had any
effect upon the fishing in the bay?—
Well, I have no doubt that that has had
an effect upon the bay fishing.
RTF\Swansea Glamorganshire 8
October 1864, 304.
57.498. During those 16 years, have
you found any increase “or decrease in
the quantity of fish you can take?—
There have been less fish taken since a
heavy frost we had eight or nine years
ago, than previously.
57.499. What influence had the frost
on the fisheries?—I do not know. We
Billingsgate London
18th November 1863
Boston Lincolnshire 28
November 1863
12.433. Then haddock? —Of late They had been caught here in
years on the northern ground they abundance. Then are they falling
have caught a great abundance of off?—Yes.
haddock in the trawl.
Can you trace the gradual
12.434 In the trawl? — Yes
decrease of the smelts?—Yes.
Where there used to be a smelt
12.435. Were they not formerly
fishery the bed of the Wash has
caught by the trawl? —Yes, more generally been filled up by the
so on the Holland coast than now recent improvements.
on the northern ground.
RTF\Boston Lincolnshire 28
RTF\Billingsgate London 18th
November 1863, 279-281
November 1863, 48-50
15,187. Is the take of oysters
213. 031. Do you remember any increasing or diminishing?—It is
year in which there was such a much about the same. I think it
great abundance? —No, not would increase very much if they
within my experience.
made the rings of the bottom bag
with which they catch them less.
213.32.
Have you any
accurate statement to give us as to 15.488. How long does your
the quantity supplied to the experience extend with regard to
market here? — No.
the oyster take here?—We have
always had them in Lynn Well
213.33.
Can you tell and Boston Deeps, but they get
us how much comes into the
them very small compared with
market in a week, or a day, or a
what they did formerly.
season? —No.
15.489. Has the quantity very
RTF\Billingsgate London 18th
much decreased altogether?—
November 1863, 736-738
Yes.
RTF\Boston Lincolnshire 28
213.42.
Where do you November 1863, 364-366
get the principal supply of sprats
ground?—No.
16.125. Have you fished the
Great Silver Pits? — Yes.
RTF\Great Grimsby Lincolnshire
30 November 1863, 258-260
had great quantities of herring in them;
but we have had none since.
57.500. Do you catch many herrings
in that way? —Sometimes.
'
RTF\Swansea Glamorganshire 8
October 1864, 422-424
from? —A great abundance in the 15.553. (Mr. Caird.) Do you
season comes from Southampton. think that any improvement
would be likely to be made
213.43.
Do they come
by rail? —Yes, and a great many
by water. Sometimes there are 20
or 30 boats in a day, and at other
times only five or six.
213,14.
Where
do
they come from? —According to
where the fish lie. Sometimes they
lie a great way down and
All in all, the witnesses from English and Welsh fisheries expressed more concern about
declining fish stocks than Huxley believed would be true. In the ports visited, witnesses offered
opinions and experiences that variously attested to “increase” as well “decline” in stocks. In each
location reports of “decline” were relatively substantial, with the most affected fisheries being in
the northeast ports of Holy Island, North Sunderland and Cullercoats and in the ports of
southwest England and southern Wales. Increases were reported in every port as well, with the
balance in favor of abundance being most prominent in the fisheries of Kingston upon Hull and
London.
Figure 2. Witness Reports on the decline or increase of fish in their experience, 1863-1865
Interestingly, the Royal Commission’s final Report took little head of the evidence on decline, expressing
instead confidence in the continued growth of the fisheries. Twenty years later at the International Sea
Fishing Exhibition of 1883, in the inaugural address to the attendees, Huxley restated his position with a
few qualifications. “Are fisheries exhaustible?” he asked. “That is to say, can all the fish which
naturally inhabit a given area be extirpated by the agency of man?” There were certain fisheries,
he acknowledged, that were exhaustible, giving the example of river salmon and oysters whose
stocks were in danger of disappearance. But major sea fisheries were not in danger:
“I believe, then, that the cod fishery, the herring fishery, the pilchard fishery, the
mackerel fishery, and probably all the great sea fisheries, are inexhaustible; that is to
say, that nothing we do seriously affects the number of the fish. And any attempt to
regulate these fisheries seems consequently, from the nature of the case, to be
useless.”
Figure 3. Huxley delivering his inaugural address at the International Exhibition on Sea Fishing,
London, 18832
Two conclusions are worthy of further discussion. In terms of methods, the blending of
qualitative evidence and historical GIS extends the promise and capabilities of spatial history. In addition
to part-of-speech tagging, Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDA) provide tools for
making sense of large corpuses of textual information in the British Parliamentary Papers, contemporary
journals of the Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Agricultural Society of England, in newspapers,
and in the papers of international conferences on fishing, agriculture, and railways. The varied and
shifting geography of attitudes and opinions, together with quantitative data on fish landings by port, can
then be explored the spatial tools of GIS.
The findings sketched here carry interesting implications for environmental history. One that
emerges clearly in the papers of the Royal Commission on Sea Fishing of 1863 concerns the relationship
between scientific “knowledge” and practical “knowledge,” between expert belief and everyday practice
Members of the scientific community who read the minutes of evidence were likely to question the thesis
of inexhaustible fish stocks. Indeed, some criticisms of inexhaustibility were voiced at the 1883
International Exhibition, attesting to increased scientific interest in the experiences and reports of working
fishermen. That this attention was growing and changing ideas of elites may likely be borne in my
continuing research into the later Royal Commissions on Sea Fishing of 1893, 1900, and 1908. In this
respect, the Royal Commission of 1863 represents an initial lesson in the sustainability of industrial sea
fishing.
The program that I’m using is MaxQDA from Germany, which handles large corpora of PDF
files somewhat better than other programs such as nVivo.
2
“Inaugural Address, Fisheries Exhibition, London (1883).” Accessed June 6, 2013.
http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/SM5/fish.html.
1