The Eel That Survived Its Own Execution

There was no moon above the Eider on the night of 17 to 18 October 1666. A westerly storm drove through the reeds and pressed the high water against the land as Adriaan Focke took his boat downriver from Rendsburg market towards his home in Friedrichstadt. The sea lay west, and the wind came straight from that direction.

Around his boat the water showed one silver body after another, each turning below the surface, vanishing into the black river and appearing again a little farther west. They were silver eels. Adriaan traded in eels, but he had never seen so many travelling together on their night migration, and he still wanted to know where they went and where they were born.

He could scarcely keep pace with them. Every gust checked the boat, while short, steep waves threw water over the side. Then the mainsail tore in the wind. The loose cloth struck the mast and lines until Adriaan brought it down, leaving only the foresail, which he kept close enough to stop the boat turning broadside.

At Grönsfurt the high water lifted the hull once more, and a moment later the boat struck the bottom, slid a little way and settled among the reeds. It lay tilted and would not move. The mainsail was torn, the dark river went on past, and the small foresail still stood above the deck.

Not everyone in Fockbek slept that night. People had stayed awake to watch the high water, and between the gusts they heard timber striking near the ford, where the low ground met the Eider. Following the sound, they found Adriaan in the reeds. Some held the boat steady while others helped him ashore, though the darkness allowed them to see little beyond a tilted hull, torn canvas and the foresail taking the wind.

When they asked what he could be seeking on the river in such weather, Adriaan answered simply that he was following the eels to learn where they were born, since no human being had ever seen it. Someone asked where he himself came from. “Friedrichstadt,” Adriaan said. He never told them anything more about his origins.

The people of Fockbek brought him into the village, gave him dry cloths and a warm place, and allowed him time to recover his breath. Before dawn they told him that a sentence was to be carried out at the lake. Adriaan listened and went with them.

The year before, the people of Fockbek had put salt herrings into the Fockbeker See, yet when they inspected their stock they found no herring and caught only an eel. The village considered the case, concluded that the eel had eaten the lot, found it guilty and sentenced it to death by drowning.

In the morning the village gathered at the lake, where the water looked smaller and greyer than the Eider, though the storm had not passed. The condemned eel twisted in its vessel. It was carried to the deepest place and thrown in. For a moment there was nothing to see; then the eel appeared below the surface, struck with its tail and swam away.

Silence followed while the people watched the water, as if the sentence might still take effect if they waited long enough, and some of them turned towards Adriaan. He knew eels, and a stranger in such circumstances might easily have laughed at them. Adriaan thought instead of his own boat in the reeds and of the eels that had continued on their course around it.

When Adriaan began to laugh, it was not at the people of Fockbek but at the sentence which had chosen water for an eel, and at the shipwrecked man who had hoped those same creatures would show him their road. Then he said, “De Aal swemmt wieder. De geiht blots na Huus.” In English: The eel swims on. It is only going home.

A quiet laugh first answered him, and soon the people of Fockbek were laughing too, with no fool among them and no judgement left to defend. The eel had escaped, but the village was left with a phrase that helped it bear what had happened and tell the tale. Its first sentence later became the motto: “De Aal swemmt wieder.” The eel swims on. What was meant to be drowned lives.

On the Eider the eels continued westwards, and Adriaan watched them go without taking his boat after them again, for it still had to be freed from the reeds and its torn sail dealt with. The ford had shown him where the creatures passed. He said, “Wer weten will, wo de Aal herkümmt, mutt dor blieven, wo he vörbitreckt.” That is: Whoever wishes to know where the eel comes from must remain where it passes by.

Adriaan stayed. He knew the goods, the river and the markets, and from that knowledge he built an eel trade which supplied Rendsburg and Kiel through poor catches and difficult journeys alike. The people who had found him in the reeds came to depend on his deliveries.

The merchants in Rendsburg had heard of the eel trial, and they called the people of Fockbek “Aalversuper”, eel-drowners, including Adriaan in their mockery whenever he came to market. He could sell elsewhere. Even so, he would not turn away from those who had pulled him out of the storm; he stayed and married in the village.

Every autumn, on the first dark storm night, Adriaan returned to Grönsfurt and waited beside the water until the silver backs passed Fockbek on their way downriver to the sea. His boat stayed tied. Those visits became the Aalnacht, the eel night which recalled his decision to stay.

In the spring of 1667, Adriaan had long been known in Fockbek as Aad, and everyone there knew which sail had remained after the night of the storm. The village assembly of farmers gave him the honorary name Aad Fock, “because he came with nothing but the foresail and stayed with everything”.

The name was to be handed on with the three duties Adriaan had shown: to begin when work required doing, to laugh so that others could join, and to remain with people and promises when leaving would be easier. Rank had no part in it; the name carried an obligation.

Adriaan went to the ford on many more autumn nights and watched the eels pass, though he never learnt where they disappeared after they reached the sea. When he died in 1698, his last words were: “Se kaamt vun wiet her.” In English: They come from far away. His meaning remained unknown.