“Scottish Sailors”

Summary

How many sailors were there in Scotland? The simplest questions are always the most difficult to answer. We do not know for most of the period of sail how many men were involved. Naturally the number varied from season to season, week to week, and was seriously disrupted by trade fluctuations and wars, while the total desiring employment, including those between jobs and those lost in the Baltic, was doubtless greater than the number actually employed. This grand total of men who might call themselves sailors was never assessed and cannot now be estimated with any degree of confidence. The easiest and probably the most sensible way of envisaging changes in the mercantile marine is to count ships, or tons, employed; and by this imperfect measure there was only a handful of Scottish sailors until the early eighteenth century. A government-inspired survey in 1656 revealed only eighty vessels of more than twenty-five tons in the whole of Scotland. The number was probably depressed by the Civil War, and T.C. Smout has estimated the number of active Scottish ships at between 200 and 300 for the two decades preceding the Union with England in 1707. In the latter year there were 14,485 tons of Scottish shipping: less, Smout points out, than that possessed by the English port of Whitby. Moreover, the Scottish ships were still very small, reflecting the poor quality of many harbours, the relative poverty of shipowners, and the difficulty of filling ships trading from diminutive ports with fragile hinterlands of self-sufficient crofters. Indeed, before the Union many of the larger foreign-going vessels were Dutch-owned. Nor were Scottish vessels - commonly Dutch-built - kept in the best of condition, as one crew found when they sank off Heligoland in 1680: “the ship is lost,” it was said, “for being keepen so long at sea; the ship grew so leaky that it was impossible for the seamen to keep her any longer above water.”

By far the largest part of Scottish foreign trade in 1707 was with northern Europe, and most was consequently pursued from long-established ports on the east coast.