242 



THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE SEA 



was therefore put forth in the following year. Preparations 

 were made to deal with 1500 lasts, and vessels were chartered 

 to carry them from Stornoway to various Continental markets. 

 But less than 443 lasts were cured in the second year; some 

 were sent to Dantzic and fetched "mean prices," the rest 

 reached London " when Lent was wellnigh over," and were 

 sent on to Dunkirk and Dantzic, the vessels coming back in 

 ballast, and the loss in this year was 8163, 19s. 4d. x In this 

 way the operations of the Society went on. The herrings then 

 failed to come into the lochs, and the Society turned its at- 

 tention to the salting and exportation of beef, salmon, cod, 

 and coal-fish, a course fraught with less disastrous financial 

 results, but not well calculated to carry out the objects for 

 which it was founded. 



Ill-fortune was encountered in other directions. Both th 

 islanders and the Scots from the east coast treated the Englis 

 adventurers badly. The Bishop of the Isles and the herito 

 insisted on their tithes and dues in spite of the king's charter. 

 The busses were attacked by bands of Highlanders, armed with 

 "swords and bows and arrows and other warlike weapons," 

 who took various articles from them in lieu of dues. The 

 Lowlanders, under the leadership of "one Thomas Lindsay, a 

 fisherman of Crail," who pretended to be the deputy to th 

 deputy of the Vice-Admiral of Scotland, were still less con 

 siderate. Lindsay " villified " their certificates, declared tha 

 King Charles had nothing to do with the Lewes, and vow 

 that "he would be the death of every Englishman on th 

 island." He forcibly seized one of the vessels laden wit 



1 Simon Smith, who was latterly Secretary to Pembroke's association, afterwarde 

 stated that the Society had attained to the proper cure of herrings, and was likelj 

 to have been ultimately successful. This opinion was not shared by Dutch writer 

 The author of The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Hollai 

 published under the name of De Witt, says the herrings the Society sent to Dantzic 

 in 1637 and 1638, though caught at the same time and place as the Hollander 

 herrings, were "esteemed naught to the very last barrel" ; and a contemporar 

 author, Meynert Semeyns, a skipper of Enkhuisen, in a work written in 1639 (Een 

 corte beschryvinge over de Haring-visscherye in Hollandt), says the same thing. 

 "The Dutch," he boasted, "catch more herrings and prepare them better than 

 any other nation ever will ; and the Lord has, by means of the herring, made 

 Holland an exchange and staple-market for the whole of Europe." No other 

 nation, he added, ever tried the industry but to their loss, and the example adduced 

 was the Society's herrings sent to Dantzic. 



