By Mike Smylie

Disaster struck the Isle of Man in 1787 when much of the fishing fleet was destroyed in a particularly nasty gale at Douglas. These were the older scoute type of vessel, an offshoot of the Viking influence of centuries before. They then briefly adopted the smack in desperation until they encountered the Cornishmen during sojourns to the spring mackerel off Southern Ireland. The Cornish, in their powerful luggers, impressed the Manxmen and when these Cornishmen ventured north for the first time in the 1820s to participate in the Manx summer herring fishery – they were getting more adventurous in their quest for fish – so impressed were the Manx fishers that they decided to adapt their own vessels and dandy-rigged their boats by adding a lug mizzen. One man, Captain Quilliam, is renowned as being in the forefront of the change, he being the man who steered Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. By the 1840s these boats had become known as ‘luggers’.

They noticed that many of the Cornishmen were called Nicholas, and the nickname later passed from fisher folk to fishing boats

Within a generation the Manx were building their own luggers, the first being built by William Qualtrough of Port St Mary in 1869. It was modelled on these Cornish boats and after others had been added, these had begun to be referred as Nickeys, even if it does seem a slightly bizarre name for a type of vessel. One favoured notion is that, when the Manx first encountered the Cornish off the Irish coast, they noticed that many of the Cornish were called Nicholas and thus ‘Nickey’ soon became the nickname for the Cornish fishers. Then, when they arrived off their coast to fish, it simply passed from fisher folk to fishing boat. Others might tell you that the first lugger fishing these waters was itself called Nicholas, but that seems a bit too tenuous and I tend to favour the former.
Like their Cornish counterparts, and indeed those from the east coast of Scotland seen last month, these were powerful luggers, though, unlike the Scots, they set a mizzen topsail and a large staysail between the two masts. These were fast boats, though equally matched by the Cornish, and 10 knots was easily achievable. It is said they sailed from Port St Mary to Kinsale in 28 hours.
The crew consisted of seven men and a boy until steam capstans reduced the crew to six. Accommodation was cramped, as always, and was just abaft the fish hold, accessible from a companionway just forward of the mizzen mast. But they were a popular boat as their numbers prove. In 1879 – just a decade after they were introduced – there were said to be in excess of 300 based on the island. That same year there were over 1,000 boats from Scotland, Ireland and Cornwall, as well as the island, fishing in the Irish Sea between the isle of Man and Ireland. But within another decade they had become too burdensome, and the Manxmen had, once again, turned to another type of boat to rebuild their fishing fleet. Theirs, then, was a short life indeed, coming just in the nickey of time, so to speak, before the Manxmen abandoned them in favour of the later nobbies. But that’s a story for another time.