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One of the most significant
changes in comparatively recent years in the commercial arrangements of the
county is the vanishing of commercial ships, especially sailing ships. Some
sixty years ago the shipping industry of Banffshire employed much capital
and many men on sea and on land: today it may well be said not to exist.
Some of the larger ships
owned in the county seldom saw their port of registration. They were
employed largely on foreign service—breaking records on a voyage from China
with the new crop of tea, or in the emigrant trade (for it was no uncommon
thing in those days for a ship to leave a Banffshire port direct for
Melbourne or Quebec with cargo and passengers), or in a sealing expedition
in the northern seas. But the majority of the ships were engaged in purely
local trade—carrying coals from the Tyne, or shipping grain, cattle, salmon
and products of the kind for southern ports, or cured herrings for the
Baltic. In the winter months many of the ships lay up in their home
harbours, a period used by the younger and more ambitious members of crews
to go back to school and study navigation in order to secure the certificate
of the Board of Trade. Stout sturdy fellows they were, bringing with them to
the school all the romance of the far seas. Although that is now unknown,
the spirit of sea adventure continues to find an outlet, and in the
engine-room today of many passenger liners or cargo ships Banff lads hold
responsible posts.
A Macduff gentleman, recently
dead, who went to sea first in 1843, has recited the names of over one
hundred Macduff vessels he had known during his own life-time, and he lived
to see a day when the town had not a schooner belonging to it. In the town
of Banff, so lately as i 865, a list was made up of sixty-five persons in
the town having shares in local ships, a wonderful record for a community of
the size it was. There were foreign-going ships owned and registered in the
town; there was a fleet of coasting ships that engaged also in the Baltic
and Mediterranean trades; there were packets that sailed regularly to Leith
and London; there were emigrant ships that left Banff harbour direct for
Canada and Australia; there were Banff ships that engaged in the
whale-fishing industry in the frozen north; and Banff ships, too, sailed
west and north seal-hunting. A Banff ship in 1718 took the kirk bell of
Banff, which had become "old and riven," to Holland to be recast, and when a
local ship went to Bordeaux, the Town Council of the day saw to it that part
of the return cargo was wine, euphemistically described as being for "the
town's use." So intimate were the business relations with some continental
ports that in 1730 a firm of merchants in Dantzig sent a fine brass drum,
with the town's arms upon it, as a present to the burgh; and seven years
later, when harbour repairs were under way in Banff, a Bordeaux merchant
sent a hogshead of "strong claret" as a gift to the scheme, the said wine
being rouped for eight guineas, while contributions in money were sent as
well by merchants in Rotterdam. In 1781 when the Anne of Banff was captured
by a Dunkirk privateer, Lord Fife had to lament "In it were all my clothes,
and the whole provisions for my family in the country, with many other
things." The shipping of the town and county was such that a battery with
cannon was mounted above the harbour, and numbers of the inhabitants were
taught to work the guns —this against depredations by French privateers—and
in 1790 a Custom House was established in the burgh, the only one then
between Aberdeen and Inverness.
On the absolute disappearance
from Banff of its sailing commercial craft, the Banffshire Steam Shipping
Coy. was formed, with its head-quarters in the town. Its first steamer, the
Rosecraig, was lost on the Bell Rock; its second and last ship, the Boyne
Castle, fell a victim to a German submarine while on a peaceful voyage to
Newcastle for coals; the Company itself is now dissolved, and Banff is in
the position of neighbouring ports in possessing no longer a mercantile
marine in any form.
Portsoy had in those days a
fleet of ships, and the commercial needs of the adjoining district as far
inland as Huntly were served from its harbour. Cullen, Buckie, and
Portgordon, particularly the last, were extensively interested in shipping.
Portgordon was the recognised seaport for Keith and a large inland area, and
from that little town came a race of seamen that for enterprise and skill
proved inferior to none in the county. In 1841 the registered tonnage
belonging to the village was 3231; between i 86o and 1870 it is believed
that the majority of the male population of the village were sailors, and at
one time in these years there belonged to it close on one hundred seamen who
had passed the Board of Trade examination and were able to command vessels
to all parts of the world, a record surely for a place of its size.
Interests so large had the
natural accompaniment of shipbuilding yards in practically every port, but
all acknowledged the superiority of Speymouth in the matter of ship
construction, and Garmouth and Kingston yards furnished many fine vessels
that carried the BF register into every sea. Probably the whole industry was
in its heyday about 1857, and the mercantile navy list of that year prepared
by the authority of the Board of Trade credited to the Port of Banff 142
ships, from the Corriemulzie of 606 tons, the Holyrood of 552 tons, and the
Lochnagar of 379 tons to trading smacks of 15 and 22 tons.
The introduction of steam
power, the coming of railways, the concentration of the herring industry at
distinct centres, developments in local commerce, as well as the general
speeding up of trade methods—all these had an influence in the disappearance
within a comparatively few years of the sailing craft of the county. |
