This paper centres on the oeuvre of Marcus Élieser Bloch (1723–1799), a Jewish physician living in Berlin. Bloch authored the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische, a natural historical series on fishes consisting of twelve volumes published between 1782 and 1794. These books are lavishly illustrated and each image has been coloured in by hand.
The series is based on Bloch’s extensive collection of fish specimens. This assemblage consisted of fishes from the German regions and a large amount of “foreign” fishes. Although these foreign fishes came from places all over the globe, a significant share of them originated in Malabar, India. This was due to the presence of German missionaries in this area. The letters of these missionaries, and mostly that of Father John (1747-1813) held by the mission’s archives in Halle, Germany offer some interesting insights in the process of collecting fishes, in which local fishing communities played a considerable role. Once caught, the fishes were dispatched to Bloch in Berlin, who in turn converted them into text and illustration with the help of artists and engravers. This paper studies the process in which fishes were swept up from the seas, preserved, collected, classified and represented in word and image. In doing so, it elucidates how the various steps in this process affected the knowledge that the book presented of the submarine world.
