68 THE HERRING IN HISTORY 



merchant ships sailing the seas. Out of the 

 Dutch mercantile marine sprang Cromwell's 

 Navigation laws of 1651 ; out of Cromwell's 

 Navigation laws grew the British mercantile 

 marine, the nursery of the Navy ; out of the 

 repeal of the British Navigation laws in 1849 

 sprang the German mercantile marine, from 

 which grew the German navy, and, eventually, 

 the German submarine, with the result that we 

 are now short of bread and meat and so must 

 turn again to fish. And this brings us back to 

 the herring, the point from which we started. 



The placing of herrings in barrels changed 

 the destinies of Holland, and with them those of 

 the whole world, in the sixteenth and seven- 

 teenth centuries. Well might Lacepede say: 

 " Le hareng est une de ces productions dont 

 I'emploi decide de la destinee des empires ; " 

 well might that wise old monarch, King 

 James I. of England and VI. of Scotland, who 

 saw what the herring had done for the " Easter- 

 lings," as the Hansards were called in Eng- 

 land,^ beg his friends to eat fish, and exclaim 

 when the Puritans gave fishing as one of the 

 inducements for their emigration to New 

 England, " Od's fish, my soul, 'tis an honest 

 trade. 'Twas the Apostles' own calling." This 

 story may have been in Marvell's mind when 

 he wrote in his satire on Holland (c. 1653) : — 



1 The London warehouse of these Easterlings (whence, some say, 

 our word " sterling"), called the Steelyard, still existed in the life- 

 time of James I. on the exact spot where Cannon Street Station now 

 stands. 



