Buss

A herring buss is a Dutch herring-drifter of roughly the 15th to 19th centuries, the workhorse of the North Sea herring fishery. A bluff-bowed, two- or three-masted vessel of about 60 to 100 tons, it shot long drift nets at dusk, gutted and salted the catch aboard, and stayed at sea for weeks. The buss fleet underpinned Dutch commercial sea power; estimates put it in the hundreds of sail through the 17th-century Golden Age before the trade declined.