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fishing nations like the UK, Germany, and other European nations that had established
industrialized fishing fleets, focused on fishing grounds not too far away from their respective
landing ports and areas of consumption. Arctic and Antarctic waters and even the high latitudes of
the North Atlantic remained outside of their interests for two main reasons: on the one hand it
simply made no economic sense for them to send their fishing vessels to high latitudes as long as
desired species were available in short distance from the landing ports; and on the other hand as
long as the main preservation method for the catch was storage on ice, the durability of the catch
remained limited to a period of up to only 20 days after the first haul (Walter, 1999). Consequently
the fishing grounds of the high latitudes could not be harvested by industrialized fishing nations as
the fish caught in these areas would have been no longer suitable for human consumption, due to
the sheer distance between the Arctic and Antarctic waters and the main consumption centers in the
dense populated areas of Europe, the Americas or Australasia. Up to a certain degree this situation
was different when it comes to the fisheries of the Iberian Peninsula, France, and Northwest-
Atlantic nations like Canada and the US, as the fisheries of these areas continued with traditional
fishing methods and the production of salt-fish and consequently had no need to worry about the
quick decay of their catch. Anyhow it needs to be stated that these fisheries were not industrialized
fisheries and had little effect on the developments discussed in this article.
Despite the technological difficulties and in particular the issue of preservation of catch, some
European fishing nations that had introduced mechanized and up to a certain degree industrialized
fisheries began, as early as the 1890s, to explore Arctic regions. In particular Germany was interested
in exploring new fishing grounds after the first signs of stock depletion have been observed in the
North Sea region, while other European nations that had introduced steam-trawlers, most notably
the UK, intensified their fishing effort within the North Sea as a reaction to decreasing catch per
unit efforts, a.k.a. relative over-fishing. The main target areas for the German fishery‘s expeditions
into the Arctic were Spitsbergen and most notably Bear Island. Bear Island was not only widely
considered as Terra Nullius, but also offered with the coal deposits on the island at least a theoretical
chance to establish coaling stations for the trawlers, without which re-coaling would not have been
able to return to their respective landing ports. Although three expeditions of the German Sea-
Fisheries Association (
Deutscher Seefischerei-Verein
), partially supported by the German Imperial Navy,
in the years 1898, 1899, and 1900 to Bear Island proved the possibility of fisheries and coal mining
(Henking, 1901), the project was not continued for two main reasons: 1) there was the still unsolved
issue of preservation of catches caught far from the German landing ports; and 2) the German
Empire no longer supported the efforts which were, from the point of view of the government,
largely a cover for a colonial expansion into the Arctic (Barthelmess, 2000). Consequently the whole
Bear Island project needs to be considered much more as being part of the history of Arctic
colonialism than of fisheries history of the high latitudes.
After the end of the Bear Island project, the situation remained structurally largely unchanged for
several decades. The nations interested in the development of industrialized fisheries gradually
expanded their operational range to the North, but even with new technologies available, like for
example the Bauer-Wach exhaust turbine system or the Maierform bow-design for fishing vessels,
the high latitudes of the Atlantic remained outside the operational range of the trawlers of nations