3o6 THE HISTORY OF DUTCH SEA FISHERIES. 



serving fish was in use in these parts. Fish, indeed, and 

 herring especially, must have been salted from the very 

 earliest times, or there could have been no possibility of 

 catching them off Yarmouth and in the Baltic and carrying 

 them home, in probably slow sailing vessels, with any 

 chance of finding a market for them. Salted herrings are 

 accordingly mentioned in a charter of Louis VII. of France, 

 dated 1179, and, as regards the Low Countries in particular, 

 a regulation dated 1177, and issued by Margaret of Alsatia, 

 Countess of Flanders, on the manner of salting herring, 

 was preserved in the town of Ostend as late as 1816.* 

 But there is an immense distance between packing or 

 strewing fish with salt so as to preserve them for a short 

 time, and curing them so as to last for years and become 

 an article of foreign trade. 



The man who in any country first found out the latter 

 method, and thereby first opened up the possibility of 

 lucrative sea-fishing on such a scale as considerably to 

 exceed the wants of immediate home consumption, may 

 therefore be truly called the father of such a country's sea 

 fishery. 



The Netherlands' history records the name of such a 

 man, which accordingly is till this day known to every 

 school-boy in the country as that of one of the nation's 

 benefactors. But history unfortunately does not yield 

 much information about him beyond his name, which was 

 William Beukelsz, and his dwelling-place, which was 

 Biervliet, now a village in the southern part of the 

 province of Zealand. 



Volumes of subtle inquiry and learned controversy have 

 been written about this personage, among which the above- 

 quoted paper, read in the Brussels Academy of Science, 



* Raepsaet, Note sur la ddcouverte de caquer le hareng, p. 6. 



