Note 440 — Chapter VI · CHARLES I. FISHERIES AND RESERVED WATERS.

Simon Smith, who was latterly Secretary to Pembroke’s association, afterwards stated that the Society had attained to the proper cure of herrings, and was likely to have been ultimately successful. This opinion was not shared by Dutch writers. The author of The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland, published under the name of De Witt, says the herrings the Society sent to Dantzic in 1637 and 1638, though caught at the same time and place as the Hollanders’ herrings, were “esteemed naught to the very last barrel”; and a contemporary author, Meynert Semeyns, a skipper of Enkhuisen, in a work written in 1639 (Een corte beschryvinge over de Haring-visscherye in Hollandt), says the same thing. “The Dutch,” he boasted, “catch more herrings and prepare them better than any other nation ever will; and the Lord has, by means of the herring, made Holland an exchange and staple-market for the whole of Europe.” No other nation, he added, ever tried the industry but to their loss, and the example adduced was the Society’s herrings sent to Dantzic.