Visserij aan Brabantse grenzen

Samenvatting

Fisheries on the Frontiers of Brabant

The Dutch province of North-Brabant is, especially from an historical point of view, usually associated with sandy soil and small farms. However, in the north and west, where the province is bordered by water, there have been in the past, places where large-scale fisheries existed. This article proposes to give an overview of these fishing activities.

Since the sixteenth century there have been weervisserijen or weir fisheries (triangular shaped structures made of small trees and brushwood, with one big fyke at the end to catch anchovy) in the salt waters of the Oosterschelde near the town of Bergen op Zoom. This town is still famous for this product, but in relation to the total population it never was a large industry.

Further to the north, in places like Willemstad and Moerdijk there were fishermen working the brackish and fresh waters of Haringvliet and Hollands Diep with large stownets (and equally large boats). They caught eel, smelt and whatever came into their nets. The stownetfishermen also provided the bootvissers with bait. Bootvissers were small-scale fishermen who worked from open boats with baskets and hoop nets to catch eel.

From the early fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the town of Geertruidenberg, situated on the southern border of what is now the Biesbosch National Park, was an important centre for the catching and trading of salmon in the southern part of the Netherlands. Great sturgeons were also caught and during the spring, large amounts of shad (a big herring-like fish, now extinct in this region) were brought to the market. A large part of the catch was sold in southern towns like Antwerp, Brussels and even Paris. The fish were caught by means of so-called zalmsteken (fences consisting of long rows of wooden poles, connected with wickered willow-twigs, forming a coarse net and fykes were placed on both sides of the fence). In those days the Biesbosch was called Verdronken Waard (meaning ‘Flooded Polder’). When the Verdronken Waard started silting up at the end of the eight- eenth century, it became necessary to build dykes and dig the Nieuwe Merwede so that enough water could be carried to the sea. This meant that the salmon could not travel through the Verdronken Waard any longer, so the large seine-net fisheries in the Nieuwe Merwede were constructed. These big nets were often hauled by horses and later, even with the help of steam engines. Many salmon were caught this way in the closing years of the nineteenth century. After World War One however, there was such a serious decline of salmon that these fisheries had to be closed.

Woudrichem was a town with many fishermen but only a small area of water to be fished. This sometimes led to large-scale poaching by the fishermen. In the last stages of the fisheries, salmon was caught with a so-called galg, a big raft, towed by a steam-tug, from which a slip could be lowered to the bottom of the river. In this way the slip was used as an artificial beach to haul in the seine-net. Woudrichem is proud of her fishing past. There is a fisheries museum and a harbour with museum ships and a replica of a galg.

In the early sixteenth century all inhabitants of Werkendam were fishermen. In later days the town became a home for river-craft; big barges that sailed the inland waters of Europe. There have always been activities connected with fishing; fishermen from Werkendam caught lamprey, which was sold as bait for cod fishing on the North Sea. They also provided the local market with eel and other fresh-water fish. People from Werkendam were famous for manufacturing wooden baskets for the eel-fisheries in the southern rivers and estuaries of the Netherlands.