Note BB — Chapter XII

I have heard elderly fishermen of the Moray Frith state, in connection with what they used to term "the haddock dearth" of this period, that, for several weeks ere the fish entirely disappeared, they acquired an extremely disagreeable taste, as if they had been boiled in tobacco juice, and became unfit for the table. For the three following years they were extremely rare on the coast, and several years more elapsed ere they were caught in the usual abundance. The fact related by Creech, a very curious one, I subjoin in his own words; it occurs in his third Letter to Sir John Sinclair: "On Friday, the 4th December, 1789, the ship Brothers, Captain Stewart, arrived at Leith from Archangel, who reported that, on the coast of Lapland and Norway, he sailed many leagues through immense quantities of dead haddocks floating on the sea. He spoke several English ships, who reported the same fact. It is certain that haddocks, which was the fish in the greatest abundance in the Edinburgh market, have scarcely been seen there these three years. In February, 1790, three haddocks were brought to market, which, from their scarcity, sold for 7s. 6d."

The dead haddocks seen by the Leith shipmaster were floating by thousands; and most of their congeners among what fishermen term "the white fish," such as cod, ling, and whiting, also float when dead; whereas the bodies of fish whose bowels and air-bladders are comparatively small and tender, lie at the bottom. The herring fisherman, if the fish die in his nets, finds it no easy matter to buoy them up; and if the shoal entangled be a large one, he fails at times, from the great weight, in recovering them at all, losing both nets and herrings. Now, if a corresponding difference obtained among fish of the extinct period—if some rose to the surface when they died, while others remained at the bottom—we must, of course, expect to find their remains in very different degrees of preservation—to find only scattered fragments of the floaters, while of the others many may occur comparatively entire. Even should they have died on the same beds, too, we may discover their remains separated by hundreds of miles. The haddocks that disappeared from the coast of Britain were found floating in shoals on the coasts of Norway. The remains of an immense body of herrings, that weighed down, a few seasons since, the nets of a crew of fishermen, in a muddy hollow of the Moray Frith, and defied the utmost exertions of three crews united to weigh them from the bottom, are, I doubt not, in the muddy hollow still. On a principle thus obvious it may be deemed not improbable that the ichthyolites of the Lower Old Red Sandstone might have had numerous contemporaries, of which, unless in some instances the same accident which killed also entombed them, we can know nothing in their character as such, and whose broken fragments may yet be found in some other locality, where they may be regarded as characteristic of a different formation.