Introduction

“I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.”

French historian, Fernand Braudel was not necessarily thinking about fisheries when he coined the above analogy of fireflies and historic events. But the fleeting apparitions of fireflies against a background of darkness perfectly illustrate the starting point for this chapter. The movement and fishing patterns of the Dutch North Sea herring fisheries appear only in glimpses in an age before modern statistics. Nevertheless, this chapter offers a series of snapshots of the monthly fishing pattern from June – January through the use of contemporary accounts, historical maps, mid-19th century scientific surveys as well as logbook material from hospital ships and convoy ships from the 17th – 19th centuries. The chapter argues that the fishing patterns observed thus can be regareded as indicators of the best fishing areas in the North Sea at given points in time within these three hundred years. The spatial distribution of an offshore fishery has never before been documented this far back in time.

On a methodological level, this reconstruction of the spatial dimensions of a past marine resource exploitation combines historical research techniques and modern marine science. The findings highlight the historical aspects of natural stock variability, while the reconstructed fishing patterns allow us to further investigate the context of current theories on the behaviour of both the autumn spawning herring in the North Sea as well as the fishermen hunting them.

Fishing ground historiography

Present distribution of North Sea herring

The spatial distribution of North Sea herring has been the focus of much marine research in the past 50 years. The population of herring in the North Sea consists of both spring spawning and autumn spawning herring. The autumn spawning stocks are the most prolific and since these were the targets of Dutch fishermen, they will be the focus here. In the 1950s and 1960s, marine biologists Cushing and Bridger investigated the lengths and growth rates of different North Sea herring, discovering that the autumn spawning herring consist of three sub-populations or stocks, primarily set apart by different spawning behaviour patterns and characteristics.