The Herring 



haddock or motionless under sand like the plaice. So the herring 

 was probably a fish of the open and upper waters, a free-swimming 

 fast-moving fish. And these reflections explained to Jan why it 

 had not traditionally been hunted by trawlers. It was not on the 

 bottom. Only drift nets and ring nets, that floated where the her- 

 ring swam, in the upper waters, only they could catch herring. 

 And they were fished at night when the herring rose to catch its 

 food, the animal plankton of the surface. 



At times it was difficult for Jan to dissociate the little fish be- 

 fore his eyes from the big names in the history books. At others 

 it was almost impossible to see any connection between the two. 

 In itself so ordinary, so much on a par with the rest of the world, 

 there was a colossal inconsistency between its everyday appearance 

 and the figure it cut in history. Even its name, the herring, Clupea 

 harenguSj had a dishwater taste to the tongue, not the kind of asso- 

 ciations that the purple King Knut implied. 



Yet the empire of the Viking Knut had been brought into being 

 by the search for this one fish and, had it been maintained, it 

 would have prevented the numerous herring wars that swept 

 Europe through the better part of four centuries . For the herring 

 kept shifting its grounds and the men who depended on it for their 

 livelihood were forced to follow, often losing track of the fish as 

 they did so and being thus forced into a career of piracy. There 

 may have been other reasons for the Viking influx from Norway 

 to France, England and Ireland, but the sea roads of marauders 

 followed so closely the glint of the herring that there could be no 

 doubt that the fish was a chief factor. 



So it went through much of European history. All kinds of ex- 

 planations could be suggested for the rise of the Hanseatic League 

 or the Dutch Republic or the British Commonwealth but among 

 these the intransigence of the herring was omnipresent. Jan be- 

 gan to feel that if Karl Marx could explain all history in terms of 

 the class struggle then a fishery historian could probably explain 

 the class struggle in terms of the drive after the herring. Certainly 

 it would work for marine history since the great naval powers 



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