scholarly journals The Smacksmen of the North Sea

1976 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-411
Author(s):  
John Rule

The modern history of British deep-sea fishing begins with the railway expansion of the mid-nineteenth century. Rapid transport and the increasing use of ice as a preservative made it possible for fresh sea fish to enter the diets of the inhabitants of inland towns. Fresh sea fish was regarded as almost a luxury food before the railway age, yet by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it had become a major protein source for the working classes of the industrial towns, and the fried-fish shop had become a working-class institution. The sea-fishing industry underwent a vast market-induced expansion. The census of 1841 enumerated only 24,000 males as being employed in fishing. By 1881 there were 58,000. If the inland consumer ever gave thought to the fishermen who supplied his table, he probably conjured up a picture of a weather-beaten village fisherman going daily to the fishing grounds to return in the evening to his waiting wife and children, bringing the silver harvest of the sea. While he had been at sea his family had busied themselves baiting lines, making and mending nets, and, in the case of the fish wives, performing their traditional function of selling the catch. Such a picture may have been broadly true of the fishing villages of Scotland, Cornwall, Northumberland or the South coast, but a feature of the second half of the nineteenth century was the creation of a new kind of fisherman who crewed the sailing trawlers of the North Sea. The expansion of the market has coincided with the discovery of the rich beds of the North Sea, and to such an extent did the North Sea trawling ports come to dominate the fishing industry that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Hull and Grimsby were together receiving as much fish as all the remaining ports of England and Wales put together. Those who toiled on the grey North Sea were known as the “smacksmen”, and it is the extreme nature of their occupation which is the subject of this study.

Author(s):  
F. S. Russell

1. Details are given of the types of hooks lost in tunny in the North Sea in the summer of 1933.2. Data are given on the measurements made on thirty-two large migrating fish caught in the North Sea in August and September, 1933.3. In certain body proportions the tunny measured differ from those in the G4 Group (200 to 260 cm. in length) given by Heldt for fish from Tunis and by Frade for fish from Algarve on the south coast of Portugal, while in some characters they resemble the Tunis fish and in others the Algarve fish, but all the North Sea fish were between 232 and 271 cm. in length.4. It was found that there was a tendency for fish with short second dorsal fins to have short first dorsal, anal, and caudal fins, and for those with long second dorsals to have these other three fins long.5. Measurements were made to supply data on the condition of the fish.


2016 ◽  
Vol 154 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
SVEN SACHS ◽  
MARKUS WILMSEN ◽  
JOSCHUA KNÜPPE ◽  
JAHN J. HORNUNG ◽  
BENJAMIN P. KEAR

AbstractThe Saxonian Cretaceous Basin constitutes an important source of rare Late Cretaceous marine amniote fossils from Germany. It is also historically famous, having been documented in a series of monographic works published by the distinguished German palaeontologist Hanns Bruno Geinitz in the nineteenth century. The most productive rock units include the upper Cenomanian Dölzschen Formation and upper Turonian Strehlen and Weinböhla limestones (lower Strehlen Formation). A survey of curated specimens recovered from these deposits has now identified isolated teeth of probable polycotylid and elasmosaurid plesiosaurians, as well as several humeri that are referred to protostegid marine turtles. The Saxonian Cretaceous Basin formed a continuous epeiric seaway with the Bohemian Cretaceous Basin during late Cenomanian – Turonian time. A western connection to the North Sea Basin also existed via the North German and Münsterland Cretaceous basins. The Mesozoic marine amniote remains from these regions therefore record a coeval northern European fauna that was probably homogeneous across the northern peri-Tethyan margin during Late Cretaceous time.


2012 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon P. R. Greenstreet ◽  
Stuart I. Rogers ◽  
Jake C. Rice ◽  
Gerjan J. Piet ◽  
Emma J. Guirey ◽  
...  

Abstract Greenstreet, S. P. R., Rogers, S. I., Rice, J. C., Piet, G. J., Guirey, E. J., Fraser, H. M., and Fryer, R. J. 2012. A reassessment of trends in the North Sea Large Fish Indicator and a re-evaluation of earlier conclusions. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 69: 343–345. Previous analysis of the Large Fish Indicator, the basis for the North Sea “fish communities” EcoQO, suggested a strong recovery between 2001 and 2008. Discovery of a mistake in this earlier analysis now suggests that this recovery is not as strong as first thought, but reanalysis of the corrected data still supports the majority of conclusions drawn in the original paper.


2009 ◽  
Vol 66 (9) ◽  
pp. 1985-1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. J. Piet ◽  
R. van Hal ◽  
S. P. R. Greenstreet

Abstract Piet, G. J., van Hal, R., and Greenstreet, S. P. R. 2009. Modelling the direct impact of bottom trawling on the North Sea fish community to derive estimates of fishing mortality for non-target fish species. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 1985–1998. This study introduces a spatially explicit model that combines abundance data for all the main fish species in the demersal North Sea fish community with international effort data and estimates of gear-, species-, and size-dependent catch efficiency to determine the mortality of non-target fish species caused by bottom trawl fisheries and its spatial variation. Where necessary information was lacking, assumptions were made, and a sensitivity analysis performed to examine the impact of these issues on model results. Model outcomes were validated using international landings and discard data for five target species: cod, haddock, whiting, sole, and plaice. This showed that depending on its configuration, the model could reproduce recorded landings and discards of these species reasonably well. This suggests that the model could be used to simulate rates of fishing mortality for non-target fish species, for which few data are currently available. Sensitivity analyses revealed that model outcomes were most strongly influenced by the estimates of gear catch efficiency and the extent to which the distributions of fishing effort and each species overlapped. Better data for these processes would enhance the contribution that this type of model could make in supporting an ecosystem approach to fisheries management.


2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-25
Author(s):  
Roger Stonehouse

Located in Northumberland, 35km north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and 3km from the North Sea, the mid-nineteenth-century East Lodge to Togston Hall was originally a simple, linear, rectangular single-storey cottage of whinstone with a dual pitch roof. It had acquired an accumulation of ugly, pebble-dashed, flat-roofed extensions to the south and was in poor condition.


2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUTTA SCHICKORE

This article compares investigations of the process of vision that were made in early nineteenth-century Britain and the German lands. It is argued that vision studies differed significantly east and west of the North Sea. Most of the German investigators had a medical background and many of them had a firm grasp of contemporary philosophy. In contrast, the British studies on vision emerged from the context of optics. This difference manifested itself in the conceptual tools for the analysis of vision, deception and illusion and shaped the experiments on visual phenomena that were carried out. Nevertheless, both in Britain and in the German lands vision studies were driven by the same impetus, by epistemological concerns with the nature and reliability of knowledge acquisition in experience. The general epistemological conclusions drawn from researches on vision and deception were optimistic. Precisely because mechanisms of deception and illusion could be uncovered, the possibility of acquiring empirical knowledge could be secured.


2010 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg H. Engelhard ◽  
Jim R. Ellis ◽  
Mark R. Payne ◽  
Remment ter Hofstede ◽  
John K. Pinnegar

Abstract Engelhard, G. H., Ellis, J. R., Payne, M. R., ter Hofstede, R., and Pinnegar, J. K. 2011. Ecotypes as a concept for exploring responses to climate change in fish assemblages. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 68: . How do species-rich fish assemblages respond to climate change or to other anthropogenic or environmental drivers? To explore this, a categorization concept is presented whereby species are assigned with respect to six ecotype classifications, according to biogeography, horizontal and vertical habitat preference, trophic guild, trophic level, or body size. These classification schemes are termed ecotypology, and the system is applied to fish in the North Sea using International Bottom Trawl Survey data. Over the period 1977–2008, there were changes in the North Sea fish community that can be related to fish ecotypes. Broadly speaking, there were steady increases in abundance of species that were either Lusitanian, small-bodied, or low-/mid-trophic-level ecotypes, and generally declining or only marginally increasing trends of most Boreal, large-bodied, or high-trophic-level ecotypes or combinations of them. The post-1989 warm biological regime appears to have favoured pelagic species more than demersal species. These community-level patterns agree with the expected responses of ecotypes to climate change and also with anticipated vulnerability to fishing pressure.


Author(s):  
Jelle van Lottum

This chapter argues that prior to the mass migration and globalisation of the nineteenth century, an earlier era of mass migration can be identified in the North Sea region between 1600 and 1950. It offers a quantitative analysis of Northwest Europe’s first major waves of internationalisation. It provides and analyses emigration rates and mobility patterns throughout the period, and seeks to determine the causes of increased migration within the region spanning Scotland, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. It identifies two main waves of migration, occurring between 1550-1800 and 1850-1950 respectively. In exploring migration patterns, it defines four phases of movement: introductory, growth, saturation, and regression. Chain migration, industrialisation, the growth of urban populations, and the needs of the labour market are all considered, before concluding that the populace of the pre-industrialisation North Sea region was fairly mobile, linked to the supply of labour across the region, and statistically similar to the age of mass migration that followed later.


2010 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon P. R. Greenstreet ◽  
Stuart I. Rogers ◽  
Jake C. Rice ◽  
Gerjan J. Piet ◽  
Emma J. Guirey ◽  
...  

Abstract Greenstreet, S. P. R., Rogers, S. I., Rice, J. C., Piet, G. J., Guirey, E. J., Fraser, H. M., and Fryer, R. J. 2011. Development of the EcoQO for the North Sea fish community. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 68: 1–11. Development of the Ecological Quality Objective (EcoQO) for the North Sea demersal fish community is described. Size-based metrics were identified as the most effective indicators of the state of the community, but such metrics are also sensitive to environmental influence. Redefining the large fish indicator (LFI) produced a metric more sensitive to fishing-induced change and therefore more useful to managers. Fish stocks were thought to be exploited at a sustainable rate in the early 1980s, so in a process echoing the precautionary approach to fish stock management, this was considered the reference period for the LFI, suggesting a value of 0.3 as the appropriate EcoQO. The LFI declined from around 0.3 in 1983 to 0.05 in 2001, followed by a recovery to 0.22 in 2008. However, analyses of the longer-term groundfish survey data suggest that, even were fishing pressure to be reduced to early 20th century levels, the LFI would be unlikely to rise much above a value of 0.3. The response of the LFI to variation in fishing pressure suggested a more complex relationship than anticipated, underscoring the need for operational theoretical size-resolved multispecies fish community models to support management towards broader ecosystem objectives.


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