The Herring 



herring. Yet it was a small fish. Jan began counting vaguely and 

 came to the conclusion that it would take nearly half a million of 

 the fish in front of him to equal a single female blue whale. And 

 still, the weight of herring caught in a year exceeded twice the 

 total slaughter done by the whaling fleets, blue whales, fin whales 

 and cachalots all included. 



Numbers did it. And accessibility. A single herring boat ofip 

 East Anglia might land three hundred crans offish, three hundred 

 and fifty thousand individuals, fifty tons deadweight, the equiva- 

 lent of a smallish blue whale, eight or nine elephants, all in a single 

 night. There was no need for the long journey round the world 

 to the Antarctic, no need for a fleet of catchers and an army of 

 scientists and technicians : nine men and a small boat were enough. 

 Nine men and a single night, one thousand five hundred pounds if 

 prices were good, compared to the one thousand five hundred 

 pounds that a similar weight of whale would fetch at the end of 

 seven months hunting with a fleet of twenty larger ships. Figures 

 like that made Jan understand why whaling had always been the 

 privilege of a few courageous eccentrics while herring fisheries 

 had shaped the character of whole populations. 



From Normandy to Bergen, from the Shetlands to Schleswig- 

 Holstein, and after that more vaguely down the western coast of 

 Ireland and up north past the Faroes to the Westmann Islands 

 the melodramatic skyline of Iceland, the imagination of Olaf 

 Skottskonig had flung itself. And under Knut that vision almost 

 triumphed. After the Viking Empire had reached its peak, the 

 herring hordes returned, in the tenth century, to their Norwegian 

 grounds and the armour of Thor moved with them into home 

 waters. The Viking invasions stopped abruptly leaving behind 

 them a few scattered Nordic fishermen and splinters of their native 

 speech imbedded in the tongue of the Saxon. 



After the North Sea came the turn of the Baltic, the three her- 

 rings on the Lubeck coat of arms, their small fins making them 

 look naked when compared with the huge and frilly sacred cod 

 that still hung in Massachusetts State House. For the herring had 



i8^ 



