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

The catch of cod and haddock has nearly always been of less
importance than that of herring. It can be divided into the so-called
summer and winter season in the North Sea and a separate branch in the
waters near Iceland. The Icelandic cod-fishery was probably a new
feature from 1655; it reached a peak in the second half of the eighteenth
century (c1770 about 110 vessels), but disappeared in the first half of the
nineteenth century. North Sea cod and haddock were caught by
fluctuating numbers of vessels, but by and large the trend was upwards
from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century.
In this context the coastal trawl and fresh fishery ranks far behind and
does not allow periodisation. The same is true for whaling; its demise is a
late eighteenth-century phenomenon.
Sources for a Quantitative Approach
The fisheries in general formed a regulated industry. The different
branches—whaling included—had their own organizations, called
colleges or collegiums. Some had wider regulating powers than others.
These organizations operated on a provincial scale. Local magistrates
represented their villages, towns or cities. In most cases the
representatives had no, or only minor, bonds with the industry itself. The
colleges, which under different names still exist in 1995, issued all kinds
of regulations and collected information about the fleet, the catch and the
market. Their archives are often rich sources for historians and over time
they have been used for several publications. Statistics for certain
periods or branches figure prominently as appendices in many books and
articles. A systematic collection in one publication would be of great
interest for the history of the fisheries in general and for the Netherlands
in particular.
However, there are more sources, not always in very obvious places.
Salt was an indispensable raw material in most fisheries. Salt was also a
commodity traditionally taxed by local and other authorities. The yield is
sometimes known and can be used for fairly exact estimations of the
herring caught and shipped in, for it was well-known how much salt was,
for instance, required for a raised tun of herring. Another source is the
yield of auctions or church accounts. In some communities shipowners
or skippers made donations to the church in proportion to their catches
and voyages. It is often hard to sort out the prices for which the various
fish were sold. The accounts of orphanages and old people’s homes can
provide local prices paid by consumers. Van Vliet has recently made an
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