Hitherto, this book has focused on the mechanics, economics, and ecology of fisheries in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ireland, so it can be easy to forget the prime reason why fishing was happening: to provide food. Of course, there are non-food uses for marine products; farmers would have scattered waste fish bones and meat over the fields to add nutrients to the soil. Seaweed too has been used on fields as fertiliser for centuries. But there is no indication that these practices supported large industries in the late medieval or early modern periods. In the twentieth century, the production of fishmeal for animal feed became a major industry; indeed, in some European countries, the consumption of fishmeal even outmatched the demand for fish as food. However, the fishmeal industry did not exist in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and Ireland has never been a major producer, even in modern times.

Food production was almost the sole focus of fisheries in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ireland; and like any foodstuff, elements of culture, taste, tradition and ritual factor into how people chose and consumed fish. Cured fish was also a vital supply for armed forces in this period and was commonly eaten by soldiers and mariners alike. If we want to fully understand fluctuations in the production and demand of fish, we have to try to understand these elements of food culture and consumption too.

Until recently, Irish historians have shown little interest in studying food or consumption in the early modern period. The task is a challenging one; it is difficult to determine what foods people from different social classes consumed daily, and even more difficult to know how consumption patterns changed over time. This situation is not helped by a dearth of documentary sources detailing daily diet. In 1992, Louis Cullen wrote that Irish consumption history had been too focused on the role of the potato and the Great Famine of the 1840s. He also contended that diet has been used by Irish historians to emphasise poverty and class distinctions, to the detriment of more analytical or detailed studies.

Macro View of Fisheries, 1500–1603

For the sixteenth century at least, it is possible to explore and answer many of the fundamental questions about fisheries. For example, where they operated, where fishers came from, how large the fisheries were, what species were caught and what methods were used to do the catching. Answering these basic questions is vital to understanding the diverse and distinctive nature of Irish fisheries in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, in the answers to these questions lie many of the factors that contributed to the economic significance of the industry and its ultimate decline by the end of the sixteenth century.

One of the most fundamental questions we can answer about fisheries around Ireland during the sixteenth century is where they took place. To this end, Map 2.1 shows the site of every fishing location mentioned in the sources from 1496 to 1603. Written accounts that explicitly discussed the location of fishing sites or fishing towns and centres were analysed to generate this map. These sites do not, therefore, in every case represent the exact location where fish was caught but do indicate the locations around which fisheries were based and where the majority of the catch was landed. For example, we have records that discuss Killybegs hosting a fishery, but it is likely that fishers made catches along the coast in the general vicinity of the town. In this instance, not all catches were made at Killybegs, but it was the central landing point.

The map includes river fisheries and lake fisheries, but the majority of sites recorded are sea fisheries. Table 2.1 also lists the ten most frequently mentioned sea and river fishing sites. Here locations that were very close but had different names have been combined in some cases into one central location. The spatial pattern of these locations fits into the general regions established in the previous chapter. There is a concentration of smaller fishing sites on the east coast between Dublin and Carlingford. On the Ulster coast, the English outpost of Carrickfergus stands out, as does the diverse fishery on the Bann.

1. Qualitative Methods

There have been few comprehensive studies of Ireland's late medieval or early modern fisheries, and most of what has been written tends to rely on anecdotes rather than methodically collected evidence. The current study aimed to change that by utilising a range of digital methods designed to collect and analyse evidence systematically from a variety of qualitative and quantitative sources. Information collected from these sources was then amalgamated into two central relational databases: the QFD for qualitative information and the FTD for quantitative. From these databases, three datasets have been released alongside this study. One dataset contains qualitative information related to fishing from the QFD, and another relates to piracy events from 1564 to 1603. The third dataset is a compilation of fish trade data from the FTD. All three are hosted on the file-sharing service Figshare. The rest of this appendix will detail how these databases and their related datasets were constructed and explore some of the methods used to analyse data from them.

No sources from early modern Ireland deal specifically with fisheries; the evidence is scattered throughout a range of primary sources and can be found in many different contexts. Three main categories of evidence have been employed in this study: qualitative, quantitative, and visual. Each of them demands a different method and approach. In addition, archaeological and ecological observations from existing studies were interwoven with the historical data.

The corpus of qualitative primary sources collected for this study contains ninety documents and over 11 million words. Given this scale, it would be nearly impossible to locate all entries relevant to fisheries using manual means. Instead, Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) methods were used to search sources. MaxQDA was the software chosen; it allows for the large-scale searching and coding of textual and multimedia sources. MaxQDA, and similar software packages, use ‘codes’ to collect and apply meaning systematically to text segments. In the a priori QDA approach, codes are determined prior to data collection, while in a more exploratory approach, codes are ‘continually refined as inductive codes are developed and applied to more data’. The latter approach was taken.

The methodology used was inspired by Robert M. Schwartz's analysis of the British parliamentary reports on sea fisheries.

The development of genetic studies on the African buffalo helped: to delineate subspecies number based on restricted gene flow criteria to either two or maximally three; to define three Conservation Units requiring separate management efforts, namely: (1) Eastern–Southern Africa, (2) the West–Central African forests and (3) the West–Central African savannas; to uncover major evolutionary demographic events, with the earliest identified expansion occurring 500–1000 kya; to evidence a strong population decline in Eastern–Southern Africa starting around 5 kya, and proposed to result from both climatic factors and explosive growth of human populations and their cattle. However, buffalo populations still display high genetic diversity and low genetic differentiation, and show primary sex-ratio distortion and high-frequency deleterious alleles in the buffalo genome and their potential effect on population demography and viability. Future management efforts are necessary to maintain gene flow, with the challenge that populations become more fragmented, distributed into a mosaic of conserved areas.

Much of the narrative for land clearing of wildlife is historic and frequently blames buffalo for livestock diseases, a dogma perpetrated throughout colonial history and inherited by emerging African states after decolonization. A review of this dogma indicates that the many significant problems for wildlife and cattle are related to introduced exotic livestock breeds that brought their diseases into Africa and the production and trade models that came with them. Reproducing European economic agricultural systems in Africa has failed in most African countries so far, challenging us to reconsider current agricultural economic development models in the context of human-induced global ecological changes, human relations to nature and our planetary limits. The next generation of African farmers, wildlife managers and policymakers have the opportunity to frame new coexistence and productive models between wildlife, including African buffalo, and livestock-based agriculture in the ecosystems in which they have coevolved.

Buffalo are ranched primarily to produce trophy animals, but inferior animals represent a good potential for meat production. Estimating and applying the well-reasoned stocking rates and feed supplementation during periods of nutrient shortages are essential to ensure the maintenance of good body condition. Protein supply, and the intake thereof, is the main constraining factor with regards to production performance in buffalo during the dry season on rangeland. Through optimized nutrition, year-round breeding may be supported, earlier attainment of sexual maturity can be realized, and more cows can be served by one bull (1 bull:30 cows sex ratio), thereby improving the productivity of buffalo herds in captivity. Buffalo have carcass yields similar to those of domestic beef cattle, and by applying the suggested grading system presented in this chapter, meat processing of buffalo carcasses may be optimized regarding allocation of carcasses and cuts according to their expected quality. Primal cuts should be vacuum-packed and matured for a minimum of 25 days under refrigerated conditions before being sold, with the sirloin and topside muscles being valuable cuts.

There are only a few infections that cause disease and mortality in African buffalo. These include rinderpest (historically – now eradicated), anthrax, bovine tuberculosis, bovine brucellosis, bovine papillomatosis and possibly Rift Valley fever. Historically, buffalo were probably the original source and maintenance hosts of several important cattle diseases, namely the SAT strains of FMD and theileriosis caused by Theileria parva. More recently, cattle-adapted strains of these two diseases have evolved, and they now cycle in several areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the total absence of buffalo. Buffalo may also be important reservoirs of trypanosomes in tsetse fly-infested areas, and may be a source of heartwater rickettsias in open systems within the distribution range of the Amblyomma vector ticks. Buffalo are susceptible to a whole range of important livestock diseases, including bluetongue, epizootic haemorrhagic disease, peste des petits ruminants, bovine ephemeral fever, bovine viral diarrhoea and anaplasmosis, but large knowledge gaps remain. Although these pathogens can infect and replicate in buffalo, buffalo appear to play little or no role in the epidemiology and maintenance of these livestock diseases. Buffalo appear to be totally refractory to several important infections of livestock like lumpy skin disease, contagious bovine pleuropneumonia and dermatophilosis. Buffalo, like most wildlife species, naturally carry a complement of ecto- and endo- macroparasites. With few exceptions, most of these parasites do not appear to deleteriously affect the health of free-ranging buffalo in any way. They may, however, become a problem in intensive ranching systems.

The current tribe Bovini may very well be polyphyletic. African buffalo might be descended from African Boselaphini, but the African fossil record before 8 Myr is quite poor. Palaeontological data tally well with nuclear DNA data showing that African buffalo and Asian buffalo separated some 8 Myr ago and are very distantly related. Cross-fertilization experiments and (failed) implantation tests of embryos of Asian Bovini into African buffalo wombs underscore the fact that these species are evolutionarily very distantly related. Karyotypic evolution of African buffalo is also very different from these Asian Bovini. This may warrant the establishment of a separate tribe for the African buffalo and its ancestors, namely, the Syncerini. Until recently there were two species of buffalo in Africa, Syncerus caffer and S. antiquus, which in some parts of their range coexisted. The ecology of the single surviving species of African buffalo may thus have been co-shaped by that recently extinct sister taxon. Because the present species is so distantly related to wild cattle and Asian buffalo, little or nothing can be learned from studying these species for the ecology or management of the African buffalo, even if much were known about these species in the wild (which is not the case).