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

this contest. The book was published two years later. Beaujon, for the
first time, wrote a broad survey of the different fisheries, culminating in a
laudation of liberal legislation in recent decades. Muller’s book
described the first decades of Dutch whaling in the early seventeenth
century. This author’s doctoral thesis (Mare Clausum, 1872) dealt with
the political entanglements between the Dutch Republic and England in
the seventeenth century, mainly regarding the herring fishery.
This scholarly attention to the fisheries was soon to be followed by a
guide to the practices of the herring, long-line and trawl fisheries and
their historic background. This very informative book was written and
illustrated by a well-known fishing shipowner at Vlaardingen, A.
Hoogendijk Jz. It was published in 1895. 179 A local schoolteacher at
Scheveningen, J.C. Vermaas, put his many notes on the history of his
village, and of its coastal fishery in particular, together in essays, which
were posthumously published in 1926 (reprinted in 1968).
Academic interest resumed in 1935 when M. Simon Thomas
defended her substantial thesis on the relations with Iceland in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which the cod fishery received a
good deal of attention. By far the most important book on the history of
the Dutch deep sea fisheries of the early modern period was the work of
an economist, H.A.H. Kranenburg (he later called himself Boelmans
Kranenburg). His dissertation (1946) analyzed and revised the available
information, and, from an economic point of view, created a well
balanced picture of the scale and importance of the herring, cod and
haddock fisheries. During a life-long association with the world of sea
fisheries, Boelmans Kranenburg later wrote a rich number of books and
articles on all kinds of aspects of the early and modern fisheries. He was
the leading scholar in the field until his untimely death in 1980. He has
not yet been replaced in this respect.
This does not imply that others have not paid attention to the subject.
In 1962 two Ph.D. studies were published on the history of the fisheries
in the Zuyder Zee and in the IJsselmeer. 180 In the 1970s J.P. van de Voort
of the Fishery Museum wrote on a vast scale about the North Sea
fisheries, often from a folklore point of view. Quite recently, three other
Ph.D. studies have appeared. A.P.van Vliet has analyzed the deep sea
and coastal fisheries settled in the Meuse estuary during the Eighty
179 See also Mulder Bosgoed, Bibliotheca.
180 Ypma, Geschiedenis and A. Schaper, De IJsselmeervisserij.
108