With Neptune’s Trident – how to spear fish!
- open until 24th February 2013
The special exhibition “With Neptune’s Trident” is about one of mankind’s oldest and most widespread forms of hunting for fish, namely spearing.
People have been spearing fish for food throughout history in practically all parts of the world. In Denmark we’re most familiar with the eel spear, but the Museum is focusing in this exhibition on diversity and inventiveness in fish spearing. The visitor can experience a wide range of impressive tools from such varied places as Greenland, Alaska, Thailand, Africa, Australia and Polynesia.
An Inuit from Alaska lies on the ice and spears for salmon with a fish carved from a walrus tooth as bait, and a rock wall shows paintings of prehistoric bushmen spearing fish in the Okavango River in southern Africa. The finding of spear heads from the earliest human history in the Sahara is shown together with Hunter Stone Age tools from Denmark. Illustrations and original iron spears show the historical spear fishing from Europe and North America, ancient Egypt and, not least, Australia and Southeast Asia.
Prehistoric hunters and fishermen often found inspiration in the world of birds, and the public will learn how the merganser, the heron and the osprey inspired the construction of the many tools – all with the object of being able to catch fish for food, wherever in the world people were living.
A little cinema in the exhibition shows unique film clips with fish spearing in Greenland, Australia and Denmark, and a personal inspection will show how, with their method of catching, fish-eating birds and mammals paved the way for man’s inventiveness.
The exhibition was produced in a partnership between the Fisheries and Maritime Museum and Dr Günther Spreth from Wasbek in Schleswig-Holstein, who kindly made his extensive collection of fishing tools available to the Museum.
