The Customs Dispute of 1749

In 1749 Wiebke Aad Fock was stopped on the Eider with a cargo of eels, and a Danish customs officer demanded more than the old fish duty. Before him lay a list of goods and charges. Fish paid the lower rate, but he declared that this would no longer suffice for Wiebke’s eels.

Wiebke left the barrels where they stood and accepted that duty had to be paid by anyone who used the river to carry goods past the customary places of payment. Her exact objection was that eels had always gone through as fish, while the officer now wished to treat them differently.

The officer pointed out that an eel had neither the shape of a herring nor the look of other fish brought for sale, since its body was long and it moved like a snake. In his view, such a creature could not simply be admitted at the old fish rate.

Others were waiting. Water moved against the bank, the ropes tightened and one piece of timber touched another with a small knock, while a man behind the barrels sighed so plainly that the officer looked up. Wiebke asked the man to be patient. The goods were hers, and she meant to conduct the dispute herself.

She stepped towards the open list and asked where the new duty for eels had been entered, so the officer ran one finger down the lines and found no separate entry. This absence, he said, required him to decide what kind of goods they were.

Wiebke received this gravely and asked him to decide with care, since a fish must pay the old, lower fish duty, while a snake could be charged only if the list provided a duty for snakes. An eel, according to his reasoning, had to be one or the other.

The officer bent over the sheet, searched the list of goods and then tried another column. No snake was listed. Wiebke waited until his finger left the page. Her question was doing very well without assistance.

At last he said that she could not seriously expect him to treat the barrels as a cargo of snakes. Wiebke replied that she had brought the eels as fish; the doubt was his, and any doubt capable of turning a fish into a snake ought to complete the change.

The people behind Wiebke were now looking towards the list, and the officer, seeing them, closed one hand around the table edge. His face tightened. Wiebke knew that making one person look foolish before the others would only worsen the quarrel, so she turned the joke on herself and wondered aloud whether she had dealt for years in a very curious cargo.

She laughed first at the thought that she had believed herself a fish trader while sending barrels full of snakes along the Eider, and she looked at her own goods as if one might hiss. Her laughter was quiet and aimed at no one. The people waiting understood, and so did the officer.

He asked whether Wiebke would open a lid and show him her snakes. She readily agreed, adding that if an eel came out to meet him, he need only decide whether it swam or crawled. Should it swim away, the direction of his judgement would at least be plain.

Then he laughed. The others joined him without mockery, since his list had raised a question which it could not answer and Wiebke had included herself in the joke. The officer opened the list again and put his finger on the entry for fish.

Wiebke paid the old, lower fish duty in full, after which the officer allowed the barrels to pass and said that eels which swam in water could be treated as fish that day. She had never asked to avoid payment altogether.

Wiebke thanked him without announcing a victory, for a man who had joined the laughter did not need instruction in front of those who had waited. The ropes were released and the journey along the Eider resumed. No one lost face. The list remained behind with its empty place for a duty on snakes.

The dispute was remembered because anger and scorn had been unnecessary: Wiebke had given the officer the choice required by his own reasoning, with the fish rate on one side and no snake rate on the other. Their shared laughter returned the business to a sensible order.

That distinction mattered in the telling. Wiebke’s question exposed the fault in the demand while allowing the officer to laugh, change his decision and keep his dignity, which is how wit differs from ridicule.