CO-OPEEATION AMONG THE FISHERS. 813 



waste their time in the tavern. Indeed, in some Scottish fishing 

 villages there is not even a public-house. The Buckhaven men 

 delight in their boats, which are mostly " Mrth-built," — i.e. 

 built at Leith on the Firth of Forth. Each boat with its appur- 

 tenances has generally more than one owner ; in other words, it 

 is held in shares. This is rather an advantage than otherwise, 

 as every vessel requires a crew of four men at any rate, so that 

 each boat is usually manned by two or three of its owners — a 

 pledge that it will be looked carefully after and not be exposed 

 to needless danger. With all the youngsters of a fishing village 

 it is a point of ambition to obtain a share of a boat as soon as 

 ever they can ; so that they save hard from their allowances as 

 extra hands, in order to attain as early as possible to the dignity 

 of proprietorship. We look in vain, except at such wonderful 

 places as Eochdale, to find manufacturing operatives in a similar 

 financial position to these Buckhaven men : in fact, our fishermen 

 have been practising the plan of co-operation for years without 

 knowing it, and without making it known. The co-operative 

 system seems to prevail among the English fisher-folk as well. 

 At FUey, on the Yorkshire coast, many of the large fishing yawls 

 — these vessels average about 40 tons each — are built by little 

 companies and worked on the sharing principle : so much to 

 the men who find the bait, and so much to each man who 

 provides a net ; and a few shUlings per pound of the weekly 

 earnings of the ship go to the owners. In France there are 

 various ways of engaging the boats and conducting the fisheries. 

 There are some men who fish on their awn account, who have 

 their own boat, sail, and nets, etc., and who find their own bait, 

 whether at the sardine-fishery or when prosecuting any other 

 branch of the sea-fisheries. Of course these boat-owners hire 

 what assistance they require, and pay for it. There are other 

 men again who hire a boat, and work it on the sharing plan, each 

 man getting so much, the remainder beiug left for the owner. A 

 third class of persons are those who work off their advances : 

 these are a class of men so poor as to be obliged to pawn their 

 labour to the boat-owners long before it is required. We can 

 parallel this at home in the herring-fishery, where the advance 

 of money to the men has become something very like a curse to 

 aU concerned. 



The retired Buckhaven fishermen can give interesting in- 

 formation about the money value of the fisheries. One, who 

 was a young fellow five-and-thirty years ago, told me the 



