12 THE HISTORY OF DUTCH SEA FISHERIES. 



visited his tomb at Biervliet in 1556, and there offered 

 up prayers for the benefit of his soul. The sepulchre must 

 have been an apocryphal one, or at best a cenotaph ; for 

 it is tolerably well established that the whole of the town 

 of Biervliet of Beukelsz's time, including the church where 

 he may have been buried, was destroyed by floods between 

 the period of his death and that of the Imperial visit, the 

 place having since then been rebuilt in a safer spot. 

 Whether the Emperor may have been acquainted with the 

 circumstance or not, his act of devotion is an instance of 

 the deep veneration in which Beukelsz's name was held by 

 his countrymen for centuries a circumstance which may 

 have induced Charles V., even after he had surrendered 

 the government of the Low Countries to his son, to perform 

 a demonstrative ceremony highly gratifying to his former 

 subjects of Flanders and Holland, for whom he always had 

 a strong predilection. If so, he succeeded ; for whenever 

 Beukelsz's biography has been entered into, the writer 

 never omits to mention the Emperor's posthumous homage. 

 Whatever may have been Beukelsz's real character or 

 his true merits in the case, it appears that about the time 

 of his invention, his countrymen, the Zealanders, were the 

 greatest herring fishermen of the Netherlands,* although, as 

 shown above, the most ancient evidence of extensive sea 

 fishery is relative to the more northerly provinces as well 

 as to them. The Zealanders appear, however, to have 

 lost their pre-eminence in the business soon afterwards, 

 and writers of later date attribute this falling off to their 

 having taken to the still more lucrative one of privateering. 

 An important change in the annual migrations of the 

 herring shoals, which about this period left the coasts of 

 Denmark and Norway and began to concentrate about 



* Den Koopman, vol. i. p. 237. 



