Anyone who has seen Robert Flaherty's great film Man of Aran knows the dangers and hardships of the men who, in their frail boats, went after the basking sharks with harpoons. As far back as 1737, fishermen of the West had gone after what is also widely known as the sun-fish. A verse of that year urged western fishermen to equip their boats with harpoon and lance and: "So shall returning Gold reward our toil. When London lamps shall glow with Irish oil." Getting oil from other fish was a part-time occupation too, in the West. In 1765 Government bounties of 30 shillings per ton for fish oil were offered and in 1774 the Dublin Society (RDS of today) announced premiums of £3 per ton for oil "extracted from fish without fire". Herrings were rendered down for oil in a glut year: it was sold for 10 pence per gallon. Lord Sheffield, writing in 1785, suggested herrings, seals, dogfish and sun-fish as good sources.
But sun-fish or basking shark was already becoming a major industry in the West and was the biggest source of all, already in the second half of the 18th century. All of this is taken from a fascinating, well-researched and clearly-presented book The Sun-Fish Hunt by Kenneth McNally, published in 1976 by Blackstaff of Belfast, with many illustrations: the hunt for what Gaelic speakers on the coast knew as the liabhan mor or liabhan chor greine. Off Donegal, it is recorded, 42 sunfish were taken by one family in one week in 1761, "each of which yielded from half to one ton of oil". But much of this fishing was less an organised business than a farmer-fisherman enter-prise.
James A. Morris of Clifden is quoted as saying that seasons varied, so that one year only a few fish might be seen and on another a thousand. Often the sun-fish was pursued far away from the coast. McNally quotes from The Deep Sea and Coast Fisheries of Ireland (1848) by Brabazon as locating a sun-fish bank "about 100 miles west of Clew Bay . . . the fishermen there reckon it a day's sail out of sight of the land." They were brave and adventurous, these Western fishermen.
Other oils were coming onto the market: colza or coleseed; paraffin was extracted from coal and, of course, petroleum was discovered in Pennsylvania. Not the end of the sun-fish, which lives on in such excellent accounts as this (well illustrated with maps and contemporary advertisements etc). A great read.Y