Bottom Trawling - History

History

An early reference to fishery conservation measures comes from a complaint about a form of trawling dating from the 14th century, during the reign of Edward III. A petition was presented to Parliament in 1376 calling for the prohibition of a "subtlety contrived instrument called the wondyrchoum". This was an early beam trawl with a wooden beam, and consisted of a net 6 m (18 ft) long and 3 m (10 ft) wide,

"of so small a mesh, no manner of fish, however small, entering within it can pass out and is compelled to remain therein and be taken...by means of which instrument the fishermen aforesaid take so great abundance of small fish aforesaid, that they know not what to do with them, but feed and fatten the pigs with them, to the great damage of the whole commons of the kingdom, and the destruction of the fisheries in like places, for which they pray remedy."

Another source describes the wondyrchoun as

"three fathom long and ten mens' feet wide, and that it had a beam ten feet long, at the end of which were two frames formed like a colerake, that a leaded rope weighted with a great many stones was fixed on the lower part of the net between the two frames, and that another rope was fixed with nails on the upper part of the beam, so that the fish entering the space between the beam and the lower net were caught. The net had maskes of the length and breadth of two men’s thumbs"

The response from the Crown was to "let Commission be made by qualified persons to inquire and certify on the truth of this allegation, and thereon let right be done in the Court of Chancery". Thus, already back in the Middle Ages, basic arguments about three of the most sensitive current issues surrounding trawling - the effect of trawling on the wider environment, the use of small mesh size, and of industrial fishing for animal feed - were already being raised.

Until the late 18th century sailing vessels were only capable of towing small trawls. However, in the closing years of that century a type of vessel emerged that was capable of towing a large trawl, in deeper waters. The development of this type of craft, the sailing trawler, is credited to the fishermen of Brixham in Devon. The new method proved to be far more efficient than traditional long-lining. At first its use was confined to the western half of the English Channel, but as the Brixham men extended their range to the North Sea and Irish Sea it became the norm there too.

By the end of the 19th century there were more than 3,000 sailing trawlers in commission in UK waters and the practice had spread to neighbouring European countries. Despite the availability of steam, trawling under sail continued to be economically efficient, and sailing trawlers continued to be built until the middle of the 1920s. Some were still operating in UK waters until the outbreak of World War II, and in Scandinavia and the Faroe Islands until the 1950s.

English commissions in the 19th century determined that there should be no limitation on trawling. They believed that bottom trawling, like tilling of land, actually increased production. As evidence, they noted that a second trawler would often follow a first trawler, and that the second trawler would often harvest even more fish than the first. The reason for this peculiarity is that the destruction caused by the first trawl resulted in many dead and dying organisms, which temporarily attracted a large number of additional species to feed on this moribund mass.

Bottom trawling has been widely implicated in the population collapse of a variety of fish species, locally and worldwide, including orange roughy, barndoor skate, shark, and many others.