Three fishhooks

Fishing with hooked implements has been known for a long time in almost all cultures of the world. The simplest hooking tools are rods consisting of a stick, a string and a hook. Traditional fishing also used so-called floating rods, without a stick. A long string ended with a hook was wound around a piece of wood or bundle of rushes. The fishermen used these tools by spreading them on the water where they swam freely or put them in the ice-holes in winter. In Pomerania, they were commonly used, and the people called them pupy from German. The most common hooked tools in Pomerania in the early 20th century were ordinary ropes with hooks at the ends. They were used both on inland waters as well as at sea to catch various species of fish, including flounder, cod and eel. As the name suggests, they consisted of a long rope and shorter strings tied to it ending in hooks. Depending on the type of fish to be caught, the ropes were submerged at an appropriate depth, regulated by the placement of float and weights. At the ends of the strings attached to the main ropes there were baited hooks in different sizes. Whole families were involved in fishing with these ropes. The fishermen’s wives, mothers and children searched for the bait, put it on the hooks and untangled and cleaned the lines after finishing. In the collection of the Department of Ethnography of the Pomerania of the National Museum in Szczecin there are three brass hooks from the first half of the 20th century. They are factory-made products. The name of the plant which manufactured them is not known. Each of them has a barb and a snell, which is an element connecting the hook with a fishing line. Before the war, the hooks belonged to the collection of the Pommersches Landesmuseum Stettin.

Agnieszka Słowińska