The North Atlantic Fisheries, 1100-1976 - University of Hull

transport by sea, if not daily then with connections a couple of times a
month to most places.
The economic pattern which characterized the villages in the Faroes
in the first half of the twentieth century was the self-sufficient household
combined with money earned by fishing or working with the dried salt
cod. The village was still a living framework around daily life, and
compared with today, people seldom went beyond the village boundary.
Those who moved were the smack fishermen and the women who went
to work with the dried salt cod. They met in the big villages, and that was
why a girl from the east could marry a man from the west. Most girls
settled down with their husband in his home village, unless they decided
to settle in one of the big villages and there live off their earnings. This
was the reason for a village like Tvøroyri growing so quickly in the days
of the smack. On the other hand these people did not have the subsistence
economy to fall back on in bad times, and at times their living standard
was considerably lower than that in the villages, where money could be
combined with a subsistence economy. A village such as Tvøroyri is in
this respect comparable with the villages which Gerald Sider describes in
Newfoundland, where the families were completely and utterly
dependent on the good will of the shopkeeper to give them credit in bad
times. 86 For in the Faroes too, a “truck-system” developed, although it
did not have such profound consequences as in Newfoundland. 87 The
first free trade period in the Faroes developed as normal commercial
capitalism. The productive effort of the merchants themselves was
limited. The fishermen owned the boats, while the merchants purchased
the fish, but, as stated earlier, in time the merchants began to invest in
boats themselves. The development came about partly through financing
provided by the merchants themselves and partly by a variant of the
“truck system”, which often arose in weakly developed capitalist
societies. The system worked simply, the fishermen and workers getting
their pay in kind, while the employer was very cautious about paying out
wages. In this way he increased his own liquidity.
In the Faroes the system started with the merchants giving interest to
those fishermen who allowed their assets to remain on the merchant’s
books. This interest was at one time so high that it would pay to take
86 Sider 1986.
87 The truck system in the Faroe Islands is treated in Joensen 1982, 85 og 87. Joensen
1995 treats the truck system in English from a comparative perspective.
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