308 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. 



