The Herring 



garious behaviour between the various races and nobody had ever 

 been able to give a good reason for such a sudden demonstration 

 of kinship between groups of animals that usually acted independ- 

 ently of each other. Jan suggested, rather feebly to himself, that 

 perhaps Fladen was the ancestral home of all the North Sea herring 

 or, at least, that the water type of its deeper reaches was similar 

 to that in which the species had first evolved. He was thus able to 

 connect this aberrational behaviour with the return of all Atlantic 

 and Mediterranean eels to their ancestral home in the Sargasso and 

 the return of the salmon to fast-flowing rivers. But both the eel 

 and the salmon returned to spavsm while there was no indication 

 of large-scale herring spawning on Fladen. If the herring's arrival 

 were indeed a homecoming it was a singularly unpassionate and 

 torpid one. 



From what had been observed of it the Fladen population was 

 however more stable than any of the inshore shoalings. Even as 

 Jan looked through the columns of fishing news in the Aberdeen 

 Press and Journal he could observe the wild annual fluctuations in 

 the landings at ports like Lerwick in the Shetlands. Old-timers 

 remembered how near the beginning of the century, the harbour 

 of Lerwick had been so thick with wooden fishing boats that it 

 was possible to walk on them, in June, over three miles of water 

 and on to the neighbouring island of Bressay. When Jan himself 

 had last visited the port the industry had been so reduced that less 

 than twice the fingers of both hands accounted for the total num- 

 ber of herring boats. Total ruin was a constant preoccupation of 

 the whole island population. They depended on the fishing and, 

 in Shetland, fishing meant herring. 



It meant money to them, the wages of gutting girls, the shares 

 of seamen, the prices of diesel oil, the charges for machinery re- 

 pairs, the bills at the local hotels, expenses for incoming business 

 men: it meant money even for the women who stayed at home 

 knitting jerseys for fishermen and complicated shawls for the holi- 

 day makers who exulted in the spree of activity that met them at 

 the docks and did not cease till they, well rested, had said their 



193 



