The Danish fisheries c.1450-1800. Medieval and early modern ...

around 50,000 barrels, peaking at 60,000 barrels in 1586. The trade then rapidly declined and
virtually ceased by 1589, although a couple of years in the 1590s did see herring coming from
Bohuslen. The Dutch had a superior product and the Bohuslen fish merchants were no match
to them.
The appearance and ultimate disappearance of the Bohuslen herring was probably
caused by the natural periodicity of the stock, which seems to have been linked with the North
Atlantic Oscillation. 5 However, the background importance of the disappearance of the Dutch
on the market and their reappearance in the 1590s cannot be neglected when considering the
scale and duration of the Bohuslen fishery. While the beginning of the fishery was slow and
conceivably reflected increased abundance, the collapse of the fishery and the lingering
presence of catches in the 1590s indicates the force of suddenly changed market
circumstances. By analogy to the Aalborg evidence of the Baltic and Norway markets, the
Bohuslen fishery may have continued to a degree in spite of the loss of the Baltic market as
reflected in the Sound Toll Records. A combination of natural and economic causes seem to
have contributed to the specific development of the sixteenth-century Bohuslen herring
period.
The Sound fishery
Another background to the Bohuslen fishery was the decline of the largest Danish fishery, the
Sound fishery for herring, in the second half of the sixteenth century. The exact timing of the
decline is yet unknown, but signs of a crisis were recorded in 1547. An estate meeting of 1558
still stipulated the free access to the herring market of the Sound as the first privilege of the
nobleman. By the 1580s the herring town of Stege was in a slump due to the crisis of the
5Brian R. MacKenzie (1), Jürgen Alheit (2), Daniel J. Conley (3), Poul Holm (4), Carl
Christian Kinze, Ecological Hypotheses for a Historical Reconstruction of Upper Trophic
Level Biomass in the Baltic Sea. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquaculture Science