Note 105 — Chapter II
Reading edition
According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in 1618, three thousand herring busses and nine thousand vessels engaged in the transport of these fish to market. The whole number of persons employed in the Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most successfully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of Gottenburg alone exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200 herrings, making a total of about 164,000,000; but so rapid was the exhaustion of the fish, from this keen pursuit, that in 1799 it was found necessary to prohibit the exportation of them altogether.—Das Leben des Meeres, p. 182.
In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or enough to supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe.
On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring too bony to be easily eaten, is used as manure in very great quantities. Ten thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has sometimes taken 200,000 in a day.—Dwight's Travels, ii, pp. 512, 515.