The Silver Of The Sea
About an Icelandic museum dedicated to herring
I’ve spent most of my waking hours this week in a conference room in Geneva, concentrating on reading the lines between the diplomatic language and protocols, talking to as many people as possible, and wondering at the blatant, wilful blindness of some folks.
It has been both fascinating and exhausting, but it also left me with little time to do any original reporting or analysis for Thin Ink. In fact, I’m writing this from the nosebleed section of a vast auditorium during a break in the proceedings.
So please let me re-up an old but favourite issue from nearly four years ago where I wrote about one of my favourite museums in the world. I’ve tightened the copy a little bit to reflect the passing of time but left it mostly as is.
Enjoy! Also, thanks for the tips on where to eat in Geneva. I’m keeping them for next time, because as it turns out, I just want to head home after 10 hours in a conference that makes you feel like you’re in a twilight zone.
An ode to the humble herring
The Herring Era Museum is located in Siglufjörður (pronounced sig-ler-fyear-dur), a small but stunning town in the north of Iceland. In fact, it’s the northernmost town of mainland Iceland, located in a fjord of the same name, and a mere 50 kilometers from the Arctic Circle.
With a population of around 1,300, the town known locally as ‘Siglo’ is wedged between imposing mountains and a sliver of water. It was the undisputed capital of herring fishing, not only in Iceland but in the whole Atlantic. It has a special place in my heart, not least because of family connections through my better half.
The award-winning museum, housed in five separate but connected buildings, charts the history of the herring boom and bust in Iceland. To me, it is also a parable of what could happen in the near future if we don’t take care of our exhaustible natural resources.
“Herring is one of this century's principal shapers of Icelanders' destinies. Without herring it is questionable whether the modern society that now exists in Iceland could ever have developed.”
- Icelandic Historical Atlas, Vol.3, p.40
This quote is from the Museum’s history page and it beautifully encapsulates the importance of herring to this rocky outcrop in the North Atlantic, an island of otherworldly vistas, volcanic fire and glacial ice.
Herring is the origin of Iceland’s independence, the liberation of the country’s women, and contributed significantly to it becoming the rich, industrialised nation that it is now, according to Kristína Berman, a friend who was working at the Museum when we visited in 2021 (my second visit).
“Herring fishing started in a big way in the fishing grounds close to the north shore of Iceland in 1903.”
“It all started with Norwegian fishermen, who were tracking the route that the herring travelled annually, to see where it stopped and fed and was at it's fattest. It turned out to be by the north and east coast of Iceland where they fed for three months every year, in June, July and August.”
The Norwegians wanted to have the herring processed fresh, so they brought the fishing vessels full of herring to shore, and offered Icelanders the work of processing it in exchange for cash.
The pay was very good so the Icelanders were eager to partake in the work. Also, this was the time of year when Icelandic sheep were grazing in the mountains, so they had time to spare.
Word of mouth spread, and people quickly started travelling from all over Iceland to the fjords in the north and east to process herring in the summer. There was a lot of work, so every pair of hands could get a job, young and old, men and women.
“Women's main job was to cut, clean and pack the herring into wooden barrels with salt.”
Their work was piecemeal, so they got paid for every filled barrel of herring they packed. This was the first job that paid Icelandic women in cash, so if they were quick workers and if it was a good year for fishing, they could make a lot of money during the summer.
“This was a game changer for Icelandic women. All of a sudden some of them had money to get education or to buy a part in a farm. The wages from the herring processing had a big impact on the movement of independence of the Icelandic women,” according to Stína.
In addition to salted herring in wooden barrels, which was exported to the Baltic countries, herring was also used to produce fish meal and oil.
One of my favourite exhibits in the museum is related to these women Stína spoke of. It’s in the last building where the living and sleeping quarters are kept in their original state.
The kitchens and the bedrooms - with tiny bunk beds where apparently two women usually shared a single bed - are all amazingly intact and give a vivid sense of what life must have been like half a century ago.
In fact, my mother-in-law was, very briefly, one of those women who tried working at a herring factory in Siglufjörður. She was born in the area and after a summer day spent with the herrings, she went back to school and never left - she’s been a professor of computer science for decades. Perhaps this little personal connection made the whole museum experience richer for me.
In the 1920s, Icelanders pushed the Norwegians off the land, with new legislation giving only Icelanders the right to own companies on shore. What this means is that no matter which nation was fishing in the Icelandic waters, most of it would be sold to Icelandic companies on shore for processing.
At some pointer after this, Icelandic managers decided to lower the workers wages, but the workers, who contributed much to the company profits, didn’t agree. This move gave birth to workers’ unions in Iceland, Stina said.
Factories that were processing fish meal and fish oil from herring became government run. Exports of herring products grew and Iceland started profiting richly from them.
“In 1944 Iceland could claim its independence from Denmark. One of the main factors enabling Icelanders to do so was the wealth they had made from the export of herring product,” Stína said.
During the late 1960s, herring accounted for up to half of Iceland's export income, according to the Museum. Siglufjörður itself also grew from a small village into a town of 2,000 inhabitants in the space of two decades.
Unfortunately, the herring boom, aided by new, bigger fishing boats and increased processing capacity, didn’t last. In a classic example of overfishing - although this wasn’t the only reason, it is one of the main reasons, see below - the stock collapsed spectacularly at the end of the 1960s and did not recover for nearly 30 years.
Until the crash, it was “one of the largest fish stocks in the world”, according to this 2006 paper.
“The catch in 1971 was only 20,000 metric tons in contrast with the record of 2 million tons in 1966 and the spawning stock declined from 10 million tons to 10,000 tons in 20 years,” it added.
“With hindsight the cause of this disaster was a combination of biological, technological, economical and ecological factors, but the most important ones were over-fishing, recruitment failure and the cooling of the East-Icelandic current which was one aspect of a global climate change in this part of the world during the period 1965-2000.”
The crash was a painful one for Iceland and the herring towns that sprung up during the boom, but it also provided an important lesson to the Icelandic authorities, who later devised a new, science-based fishery management system that has since been praised as a model.
The boom and bust of herring in Iceland isn’t an isolated story. It is something we can - and should - learn from, particularly because we need to prevent today’s fisheries from experiencing another bust, but one that will be much larger and more widespread.
There are several challenges facing fisheries today: the warming waters, the massive fishing vessels that can catch significantly more fish than we ever could a century ago, the world’s rising appetite for fish and seafood, just to name a few.
Warming oceans have already caused fish stocks to move. See this story I wrote years ago on how more mackerel are turning up on Iceland’s shores. This is good news for the country, but rising temperatures also threaten shellfish, another key species for Iceland, because they won’t be able to build strong shells.
I also wrote about increased temperatures putting Iceland’s iconic glaciers at risk.
Fish movement could also pit neighbouring nations against each other in a fight for who has the right to the fish. Remember the Cod Wars, where Iceland also played a leading role?
Exploiting its rich fishing grounds and defending its waters - and fishing rights - from its larger and richer neighbours helped Iceland escape grinding poverty, but some question whether some of its companies are now taking advantage of others.
A few years ago, news broke that Samherji, Iceland’s biggest fishing company, has been bribing Namibian officials for trawling rights. See these pieces from The Guardian and local paper Stundin.
Some heads rolled but obviously not enough, because journalists who exposed the rot faced a campaign of harassment by the company. Also, the company’s CEO left following the bribery allegations in 2019 but by 2021, he was back at the helm.
If fishing rights can make a nation, the lack of it could also break one. In northern Finland, indigenous Sámi said they face a choice of breaking the law or feeding themselves because of a salmon fishing ban agreed between Finland and Norway, according to Ánne Nuorgam, a Finnish Sámi politician and Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
The ban on her home river was instituted “because the salmon stocks in the Atlantic Ocean have decreased quite a lot”, she said (remember this was in 2021).
“So at the moment, all people are forbidden to fish salmon whereas international fishing boats are allowed to fish. We see this as extremely unfair because we are forbidden to practice our culture.”
“We have to break the law in order to fish salmon to get food for our refrigerators for the winter… or obey the law and go to the store and buy commercially-produced salmon,” she said during a press briefing of a precursor event to The Food Systems Summit.
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