506 FISHERIES AND FISHERMEN 



sovereignty of the seas could never have been acknow- 

 ledged to be the property of England, or indeed of any 

 one nation alone. A matter of greater moment treated by 

 Sir John is the disposition of the fisheries around our coast 

 about that time. Herrings were caught from July to 

 November. Cod visited Lancashire in the spring, the west 

 coast of Ireland during the summer, and took up its winter 

 quarters near Padstow. Pilchards appeared from May to 

 Michaelmas. Hake favoured the Irish seas rather late in 

 the year, and ling both the north-east and south-west 

 coasts of England. 



One not unnatural consequence of the fury for adven- 

 turous enterprise was an amount of reckless speculation 

 which could end at last only in disaster, and which in fact 

 collapsed with so wide-spread a deluge of ruin as almost to 

 attain the dimensions of a national calamity. During the 

 early years of the eighteenth century, the speculation in 

 fisheries attained its height, and all sorts of bubble com- 

 panies sprang into ephemeral existence. There were 

 Greenland companies and Orkney companies, private com- 

 panies, such as Cawood's and Garraway's ; there was to be 

 a royal company of ten million, a company to fish up coral, 

 and another to fish for wrecks off the Irish coast. But of 

 all the projects then fostered none attained such importance 

 or created such misery as that of the South Sea Fisheries 

 Company. The scheme was founded upon grounds not 

 unworthy of consideration ; and a similar plan had been 

 advocated a hundred years before by Sir B. Rudyerd in 

 the House of Commons in order to cut out the King of 

 Spain. Its designs, however, were probably too large for 

 the machinery of the time, and the economical fallacy of 

 the mercantile theory entered too prominently into its 

 calculations. Its chief promoter was Sir John Eyles, one 

 of the Commissioners for the Estates forfeited in the 



