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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the commercial scale and organization of the Danish pulse seine eel fishery in the Limfjord before the advent of modern offshore fisheries. A fishery for the impoverished few, we profile the typical fishermen and suggests the overall conditions for eel to be in decline

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents the Danish pulse seine eel fishery in the Limfjord as another European fishery operating on a commercial scale and organisation before the advent of modern offshore fisheries. Although not previously recognised in the international literature, the Limfjord eel fishery has a Danish language historiography with a prominent narrative: Every summer hundreds of fishermen from the adjacent North Sea coast migrated to the Limfjord to catch eels.

Partly, for environmental concerns, the pulse seine fishery was tightly regulated, with every seine having to be checked and certified by the local district bailiff at the shores where the fisheries set off each night. Here we present the first in-depth analysis of all preserved certificates for the 18th-19th century pulse seines, totalling over 2,100. This allows for a substantial revision: Over a 100-year period of study, we find a gradual shift towards pulse seine fisheries by resident Limfjord fishermen and farmers. Consequently, the presence of migrant fishermen diminished accordingly.

Combining the fishing licenses with a demographic database and a GIS-based database for the migrant fishermen’s home parishes we find that the migrant fishermen came from only a select few impoverished settlements in the dunes next to the North Sea. In the other coastal settlements of the parishes, most household had access to some farmland as well as seasonal fishing and did not fish for eel. Finally, judging from the counterintuitive waning interest from fishermen we suggest that the overall fishing conditions for eel were in decline, 1740-1860.