Comb

Thrusting tools, found throughout Pomerania are one the oldest and most commonly used in traditional fishing. These include the comb-like spears - large tools shaped like combs, that were commonly used by German fishermen to catch fish feeding at the bottom, eels in particular. They were fished from a boat - a fisherman sitting close to the stern would lower the comb mounted on a long pole (handle) into the water and press it down to the bottom, scooping up the fish and catching it with the sharp prongs. Thrusting tools, including the comb spears were detrimental to the fishing stock. Used during the spawning, they disrupted the fish population. It happened that a fish caught with a spear managed to escape, but then but as a result of the wounds it got ill and died. For these reasons, legal regulations prohibiting fishing with spears were quite early introduced, in Prussia it was banned already in the second half of the 19th century, and in Poland at the beginning of the 1930s. The presented spear was made in the Western Pomerania, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is one of six objects from the pre-war collection of fishing tools and equipment, which after the war found their way to the Maritime Museum, later the Maritime Department of the West Pomeranian Museum (now the National Museum in Szczecin), which also included an ethnographic exhibition. In 1972, the exhibition was transformed into an independent department, known today as the Department of the Ethnography of the Pomerania. The comb-like spear is made of iron using a forging technique. It is equipped with twenty-six prongs of uneven length, and an opening through which a safety line was pulled. The handle on which the spear was mounted has not survived to our times. It is one of the eighteen spears in the collection of the Department of the Ethnography of the Pomerania of the National Museum in Szczecin.

Agnieszka Słowińska