304 HISTORY OF THE OUTER HEBRIDES. 



shore in the Firth of Forth. King James being a man who 

 would stand no nonsense, sent men-of-war after them, and 

 many of the foreigners were captured. As a warning to 

 their compatriots, the King decapitated the prisoners, and 

 sent a barrelful of their heads to Holland, with their names 

 affixed to their foreheads on cards.* In 1594, the Dutch 

 appeared on the coast of Lewis for the first time, armed 

 with a license granted to them by James VI., which 

 permitted them to fish outside a limit of twenty-eight 

 miles. In very early times, the Hebridean herring fisheries 

 were worked by Frenchmen and Spaniards, but it was not 

 until after 1580, that the wealth surrounding the Lewis 

 coast was discovered by the fishermen of the Lowlands. 

 The latter confined their operations to the loch fishings of 

 the island, where their success was, beyond doubt, the 

 main factor in instigating the proceedings which led to the 

 expedition of the Fife Adventurers. 



By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the 

 Hollanders had made great strides in the fishing industry. 

 According to the testimony of Sir Walter Raleigh and 

 John Keymer,f the work of the Dutchmen in British waters 

 gave employment to a huge army of their fishermen, 

 seamen, and tradesmen ; and the States of Holland derived 

 from the fisheries alone, a revenue twice as large as that 

 yielded by the entire Customs of England. As many as 

 3,000 Dutch busses were sometimes at work on the Scottish 

 coasts, Shetland, especially, being their favourite ground. 

 Their encroachments gave rise to various complaints on the 

 part of the natives, and ultimately to the appointment of a 

 Commission for the purpose of arranging with the States 

 to redress the Scottish grievances. The negotiations wjere 

 fruitless, and the Duke of Lennox was on the point of 

 forming a Scottish Fisheries Company, when his death 

 nipped the project in the bud. Meanwhile, certain Dutch 



* MS. in Public Record Office, State Papers, Vol. CLIL, No. 63. See 

 Appendix D. 



f In 1674, according to L'Estrange, there were twice as many Dutch 

 busses as there were in Raleigh's time, and the value of the fish taken by 

 foreigners in British seas was no less than ^10,000,000. 



