The English traveller Charles Richard Weld spent two months in the Highlands in 1859, and recorded his experiences in detail. Here he encounters fisherwomen in the thrumming harbour at Wick, carrying on one of the country’s most lucrative but vulnerable seasonal trades.
On leaving our hotel we bent our steps to the harbour. Wick, at any time, cannot be a lovely town; but during the herring fishing it is odious. The stationary population of 6,722 souls is increased during the fishing season to upwards of 16,000, and as the houses do not increase in the same proportion, and the sanitary arrangements are not of the highest order of excellence, you may imagine that this great influx of population is not calculated to improve the appearance of Wick.
But as we walk through the fishy streets, there is no sign of an overflowing population; the thoroughfares are nearly peopleless, and, with the exception of children making dirt pies here and there, and old crones airing themselves at open doors, there is no one to be seen.
The explanation is easy; the men are in bed, the women at work among the herrings, as we shall soon see. We pass through more streets, the population of which is sunk in slumber, and emerging on the harbour, we are amidst a world of women.
The harbour is full of fishing-boats, as close as they can pack; no room for a punt. You wonder how they ever got in, and equally how they ever get out. This is not the commercial port. Ships trading with Wick lie in the more commodious harbour of Staxigo, belonging to the adjacent village of that name.
Wick harbour is surrounded on the land side by hundreds of erections, looking like abortive attempts at building wood houses, some twenty feet square, for the walls are only about three feet high. These are the gutting troughs. Round them stood rows of what close inspection led you to conclude were women, though at first sight you might be excused for having some doubts respecting their sex. They all wore strange-shaped canvas garments, so bespattered with blood and the entrails and scales of fish, as to cause them to resemble animals of the ichthyological kingdom, recently divested of their skin, undergoing perhaps one of those transitions set forth in Mr Darwin’s speculative book ‘On the Origin of Species.’ And if a man may become a monkey, or has been a whale, why should not a Caithness damsel become a herring? Here you may see, during the fishing season, the transition process going on before your very eyes. Skin becoming scaly – as to metempsychosis, surely there can be no paradise for a Caithness gutter where herrings are absent. I was sceptical respecting mermaids, ranking them among the creations of mythical zoology, and with Caithness gutters before you, mermaids, and mermans too, you will say, may exist.
Badinage apart, the women do cast their skins. Work over, they don gay dresses, and, flaunting in colours, you would not know the girls that you meet in the evening to be those whom you saw in the morning coated with blood and viscera …
Let us watch the operations. First, the herrings are carried as fast as possible in baskets from the boats to the gutting-troughs until the boats are emptied of their scaly treasures. Then, the women, familiarly called gutters, pounce upon the herrings like a bird of prey, seize their victims, and, with a rapidity of motion which baffles your eye, deprive the fish of its viscera. The operation, which a damsel not quite so repulsive as her companions obligingly performed for me at slow time, is thus effected. The herring is seized in the left hand, and by two dexterous cuts made with a sharp short knife in the neck an opening is effected sufficiently large to enable the viscera and liver to be extracted. These with the gills are thrown into a barrel, the gutted fish being cast among his eviscerated companions. Try your hand, as I did, at this apparently simple process, and ten to one but your first cut will decapitate the herring. If this does not happen, you will mangle the fish so seriously in your attempts to eviscerate it that you will render it entirely unworthy the honour of being packed with its skilfully gutted companions. And even if you succeed in disembowelling herring artistically, you will probably spend many minutes in the operation, whereas the Wick gutters – I timed them – gut on an average twenty-six herrings per minute.
The herrings undergo successive packings at various intervals of time before the barrels are finally closed. At each packing more salt is added, and at the final packing great care is taken to dispose the herrings in even layers. The viscera is deposited in barrels and sold to farmers for manuring purposes, at the average price of 1d. per barrel …
As may be supposed, considerable drunkenness and immorality prevails at Wick during the fishing season. Much of this is due to the indiscriminate herding together of sexes. The ministers complain that while great pains are taken to promote the success of the fishers of herrings, little care is taken to promote that of the fishers of men. Temperance societies have, however, been highly beneficial. A few years ago, I am assured that during the herring fishing season five hundred gallons of whisky were consumed daily. Now the quantity is much less.
When the weather is unfavourable and the boats cannot venture out, broils arising from drink and clanship occur, though they rarely attain the magnitude of a riot. Last year, however, was an exception; a quarrel, commenced by a couple of boys wrangling over an apple, was taken up by the idle fishers. Ancient clan feuds broke out between Highlanders, Lowlanders and Islanders. Knives were drawn and blood flowed so fast that the riot act was obliged to be read, and military brought from Edinburgh, at great expense to the country. I happened to be visiting Sir John Sinclair, at Barrock House, near Wick, when the riot occurred, and had a good opportunity of hearing accounts of the outbreak. As usual, these differed greatly, but sufficiently agreed in two respects to lead the impartial hearer to the conclusion that the fierce dissensions of clanship which formerly raged are not yet extinct.