Following the fickle fish

Fish stories come in two varieties: the micro-version of a hundred riverside bars, blokeish boastings of rod-and-line tussles with individual fish in which man and beast are fairly evenly matched. Then there is the macro-version, the one that tells of the fate of entire stocks — the cod of the Grand Banks, the European hake, the bluefin tuna of the Mediterranean, the haddock of the Atlantic, the whale everywhere. In this version, technology and greed have the upper hand and the narrative invariably moves from scenes of boundless plenty to ones of catastrophic scarcity.

Donald S. Murray’s Herring Tales is one of these. As a native of Lewis, a Gaelic speaker, he recalls Stornaway crammed with herring boats; you could cross the harbour on their decks. He cites a 15th-century document which tells of two Swedish fishing villages employing 5,000 people in the herring season. A few centuries earlier, the waters off southern Sweden were said to be so thick with herring that boats sometimes became stuck in them.