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

The Limfjord herring was reported to be caught in large quantities in 1808, exactly
the year when the Bohuslen fishery collapsed. The following years to 1832 saw a renewed
rise of the Limfjord herring fishery. The towns of Aalborg and Nibe experienced tremendous
wealth at a time when the rest of the country suffered the consequences of Denmark’s
misfortune in the Napoleonic wars. Extant records of the catches per day through one year of
a typical fishing weir reveals a very high productivity. In 1825, however, the sand dunes
which blocked the inflow of salt water from the North Sea to the Limfjord were breached by a
flood, and the fiord turned salty after 800 years of brackish conditions. The consequences to
the herring stock seemed beneficial at first. The catches rose to an all time high over the next
three years but then catches dwindled dramatically. By 1832 the fishery was considered
extinct.
The Bohuslen fishery
The Aalborg and Buhuslen fish merchants seem to have experienced alternating fates through
the sixteenth to early nineteenth century. The bleak 1660s of Aalborg were good years for
Bohuslen, and again the decline of Aalborg in the 1750s was matched by an unprecedented
growth of the Bohuslen fishery. For this paper, which is concerned only with the Danish
sources, we shall restrict ourselves to the sixteenth-century evidence. Bohuslen was then a
Norwegian province and therefore under Danish administration.
The main source of information for the fishery is the Sound Toll Tables which are
registers of ships entering the Danish Sound and paying a due according to the nationality of
the owner of goods on board. As Danish, Norwegian, Lübeck and indeed for most of the time
Swedish ships were exempt from the tax the records are less than perfect. However, they do
provide us with minimum figures of the transit trade and treated cautiously may provide us
with important information. The source is available annually from 1557 and Figure 8