The Salt Roads
John Goodlad
(Birlinn, £16.99)

The Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author Halldór Laxness once wrote that “when all is said and done, life is first and foremost about salt fish”. To our ears, this sounds like ridiculous hyperbole. But after reading John Goodlad’s new book on the role played by salt fish in the economies and cultures of Shetland, Faroe, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands and the Basque country, Laxness’ claim makes a lot more sense.

A Shetlander who has worked in the industry all his life, Goodlad has always been obsessed with fishing. He writes evocatively here of listening to the trawler radio band as a boy, and of the momentous occasion he was allowed to accompany his father out on a fishing boat for the first time.

There’s probably no one better placed to write a history of the salt cod and salt herring industries, and it should be required reading for anyone who still thinks of Shetland as a remote, marginal outpost. In the days of sail, Shetland was far more intimately connected to its northern neighbours than it is today. Iceland is closer to Shetland than London. Faroe is closer than Edinburgh, and could be reached in little more than a day. At its height, Shetland was the hub of a thriving industry satisfying a demand for salt fish that stretched across Germany and Poland to Russia. Entire communities owed their existence to it, and fishing came to dominate and shape their cultures, leaving an indelible legacy.

That demand is now long gone. The First World War and the Russian Revolution devastated the once-booming market, and, as wages rose across Europe, forms of protein other than herring became more widely available. Salt fish is no longer part of our culture, so The Salt Roads is a valuable reminder of a forgotten time.

The fish may have been dry, but Goodlad’s history of the ascent of the cod market, and the subsequent herring bonanza, is anything but. His personal connection with the culture gives the book a real immediacy, and his informed, imaginative reconstructions of life at sea leave one awed by the heroic resilience and physical hardiness of generation after generation of fishermen.

The story of resourceful, innovative and skilled peoples with a shared language and way of life, The Salt Road chronicles how Shetland’s fishermen gradually wrested control away from landowners, who would evict any crofter who refused to fish for them, to the point where they could afford their own boats and earn wages that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier. But it’s also a story brimming with uncertainty and tragedy, of countless men drowned at sea and communities devastated by their loss.

Along the way, we’re introduced to some remarkable individuals: like the 15th Century Dutchman Willem Beukels, who perfected the method for preserving herring; Arthur Anderson, born in Lerwick in 1792, who went on to found P&O Ferries; and the poetic polymath James John Haldane Burgess, who, despite being blind, taught countless seamen the arcane art of navigation as well as composing the songs sung at Up Helly Aa.

“We forget about something slowly and, within a couple of generations, it is gone. It need not be like this,” Goodlad writes. As much as the rebuilt sailing vessel Swan in Shetland, and the salt silo repurposed as an arts centre in Tvøroyri, Faroe, this approachable history is part of the process of keeping a people and their lifestyle alive in the cultural memory, and a fitting tribute to the men who put their lives at risk every time they went to work.

By Alastair Mabbott