They are also said to have worked mines. Possibly the monks were the first people to wash gold in the rivers in the interior of Lapland. Their most important means of support were, however, the fisheries, both the sea and the fresh-water fisheries, involving the exportation of fish. They understood how to make good use of the deed of gift, which they had obtained from the Czar Ivan Wasilievitsch. According to it, everything that was found in land or water belonged to the monks, and the inhabitants were compelled either to deliver up or sell to the monks what they did not themselves use, of course at the price which the monks saw fit to arrange. The fisheries were carried on by their own numerous servants or the lay-brothers of the monastery. Some of these lived at the monastery itself, others at the Warehouse Inlet, at the mill, or in Kjörvaag, or West Bumand Fjord. By these fisheries the monks obtained such an immense quantity of fish, that they not only exported it to Vardö and Archangel, but also entered into mercantile connection with foreign towns, principally with Antwerp and Amsterdam. Information as to this is obtained from a Dutchman named Simon van Salingen, who for several years made business journeys in Finmark and Russian Lapland. He records that in the years (1562–1564) when Eric Munck was bailiff of Vardöhus, ‘the monks from the monastery in Munkfjord were in the habit of coming with their fish, train-oil, and other local produce, which they collected during the summer and winter, that they might sell them. In Munck’s service there was a youth named Philip Winterkonig, a Dutchman from Oltgensplaet, in Zeeland; but either voluntarily or otherwise, he left his master, and entered into partnership with John van Reide, Cornelius de Meyer Simonsen, of Malines, and in 1564 he came in a large vessel from Antwerp to Vardö, under the impression that Munck was still bailiff there.’ He must have sailed direct to Vardö without touching at Bergen, and so he had not heard that this town had recently obtained the monopoly of the trade of Finmark. ‘When he arrived at Vardö, he found that Munck was no longer bailiff there, and that a certain James Hansen held the office in his stead. Hansen made Winterkonig and his crew prisoners, seized the ship and its cargo, and maintained that Winterkonig had forfeited his life, because he had acted in opposition to the privileges of the citizens of Bergen.’ While these people were detained in custody, God vouchsafed such a rich harvest of fish that the Lapps, the Norsemen, and the monks at Munkfjord, caught so large a quantity that there were not ships, or yachts sufficient in draught, to carry the fish to Bergen.