DEMORALIZED STATE OF THE FISHERMEN. 579 



able to settle down to their old occupations. It is true 

 that whilst matters went on prosperously they gained 

 with ease a great deal of money ; but, as usually happens 

 in similar cases, it was as quickly spent. They lived, so 

 to say, only for the day, leaving the morrow to take care 

 of itself. Many, therefore, owing to their dissipated 

 manner of living, were necessitated to borrow, and that 

 not only on the security of the fish then in the Skargard, 

 but on the anticipated " Land-stotning " of the following 

 year ! The consequence was, that if the herrings did not 

 then make their appearance, houses, boats, nets, clothes, 

 in short, all they were possessed of were sold to 

 satisfy their creditors, and the last days of these men 

 were therefore worse than the first. 



Then again, when the fish deserted the coast for years 

 together, which, as shown, was not of unfrequent occur- 

 rence, the great mass of people in the Skargard were left 

 without occupation or profitable employment of any 

 kind, and consequently suffered much. It is said, indeed 

 that, though some sixty years have now elapsed since the 

 herrings took their departure, many families have not yet 

 fully recovered from the want and misery to which they 

 were then reduced. 



But the worst of all was the very demoralized state of 

 the dwellers in the Skargard during the continuance of 

 the fishery. Peder Clausen, when speaking of the great 

 glut of 1556 to 1587, says : " None led such ungodly 

 lives as these ' Strandsittare,' or squatters, for drunken- 

 ness and brawls, as well as other great wickednesses, were 

 of constant occurrence amongst them." And in another 

 place : " The great thanklessness shown by the people to 

 God, and the way in which they have abused His many 

 bounteous gifts, as also their ungodly and dissolute lives, 

 were no doubt the cause of the disappearance of the 

 herrings." The author of " Den Norske So," or the 



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