Though perhaps precious is hardly the apt word, for the Crew had reached the stage of rebelling against using the water itself, alleging impurities which I assured her were no more than gravel and healthy brown peat moss. So I had screwed out the tap, and then, I must confess, it took the Mate and myself the better part of two hours, using countless buckets of salt water, to clean out what must have been the accumulated deposits of twenty-five years. But let me draw a veil over that noisome business and get back to those plumbers who in no time ground in the cock, fitted a handsome brass handle with a black grip, and charged a shilling. It was carried through the streets of Oban in triumph; it fitted perfectly; it turned with one finger; and the well water that came through was crystal. After that anyone would fill the kettle. Occasionally it does happen in life that one can purchase a shilling’s worth of magic.

So we were disposed to think that everything in Oban was flourishing, but I knew I had yet to visit the fish mart, and there alasl was not even one phosphorescent scale of magic. What had once been the busy herring-curing stations was now a waste land boarded round and overgrown with grass. Of the first four of the fish-salesmen’s offices, one sold ice cream and three were vacant. I had a long talk with a fish-salesman and his story was depressing. Already at Mallaig and elsewhere we had seen that the herring fishing on the West had this year been a failure.

‘But what if a late herring season comes along?’

‘Make no difference,’ he answered. ‘Mallaig and Castlebay will handle it easy—particularly as far as the Scottish boats are concerned.’

‘You mean?’

‘The Scottish boats are so much in debt that they can’t fit out for a late fishing—very few of them, anyway.’

I asked him if the Herring Industry Board’s report was out. In the same laconic voice, he said it was. Later, in the press, I read extracts from it and recognised it as the most desperate document yet issued on the subject, amounting in pith to little more than a statement endeavouring, by the aid of analytic reason, to show the inevitability of the early death of the whole Scottish herring fishing industry based on the system of the family boat.

It gave countenance, wittingly or not, to a recent press campaign against the Scottish system of family-owned boats and in favour of the English system of company-owned boats. And it was difficult logically to counter it, because, clearly, boats run by a shore syndicate, with capitalist resources to tide over difficult times, are bound in the long run to oust individual or family ownership, living from hand to mouth or at least from season to season.

We were seeing taking place before us the death of an ancient way of life that had many very fine qualities. For the skipper of the typical Scottish fishing boat has always been not only owner of his vessel but one of the crew, who called him naturally by his Christian name. He is one of themselves, one of a small company working for their common good, with powers of leadership and decision vested in him, and receiving an ‘extra share’ for the boat. Because of their common religious beliefs, for example, it would not occur to him to go to sea on Sunday—nor would any outside power compel him to go, whatever the material loss involved. To the dangerous business of the sea they brought the human factors that give to man his integrity and dignity, a matter conceivably of some significance for the world at the moment. For the universal problem appears to be: how to manage efficiently the economic machine and at the same time retain the maximum amount of individual freedom. The old Scottish system of family-owned boats represented perhaps the only great industry left in the world where some attempt at solving the problem continued to be made.