Those fisheries had greatly increased towards the end of the sixteenth and in the early part of the seventeenth century. An official account of the fisheries of Holland, Zealand, and Flanders in 1562 estimated the number of busses and fishing-boats at 700, of which Holland had 400, most of them being “great” busses of about 46 lasts burden.[236] Guiccardini, who visited the Low Countries about the same time, placed the fleet of busses at 700, each of which made three voyages, bringing back on an average 70 lasts of herrings, or a total of 588,000 barrels, valued at £441,000 sterling.[237] Another author of the period gave a list of towns whose prosperity and even existence depended upon the fishery;[238] and a little later Hitchcock, and, following him, Dee, stated that 400 or 500 busses came every year from the Low Countries to fish for herrings on the east coast of this country.[239] Those figures referred to the fisheries of the Netherlands as a whole, including Flanders, but during the war of independence, after the United Provinces threw off the yoke of Spain and secured command of the sea, the Flemish fisheries withered away. At Dunkirk, for example, which sent 500 busses to the herring-fishing in 1532 and 400 in 1550, the fishermen at the beginning of the next century were scarcely able to supply the town with herrings.[240] The industry passed into the hands of the Dutch. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign, so greatly had it prospered that 1500 busses went to the herring-fishing in 1601 from Holland and Zealand alone.[241]