Fishing from the Earliest Times

The tackle, implements, and some curious modes of fishing apparently peculiar to, or handed down to us only from, Greek and Roman sources call for consideration and comment.

Nets, we have seen, were of all sorts and kinds in shape, make, and size. Their number and nature as disclosed by Julius Pollux, Plutarch, and Ælian indicate that the art of netting was well nigh perfected. Oppian, after enumerating many varieties and telling how the enormous

excuses himself from further amplification:

Confirmation comes from Alciphron’s[560] statement that scarce a fathom of the harbour of Ephesus but held a Net: on one occasion the sole haul, after much moiling and toiling, was the putrid carcase of a camel![561]

What and whence the Rod? It was certainly short: only from 6 to 8 feet (Ælian, XV. 1)—a length which is in the main confirmed, if assuming the height of some of the fishermen represented on vases, etc., in the Greek and Roman rooms of the British Museum to be as high as six feet, you then measure the rod. On the other hand, the sitting youth in the Agathemeros relief (Brit. Mus. Cat. Sculpture, I. 317, No. 648) measures 24 cm., the Rod 8 cm., the line 15 cm.[562]

As we do not possess any relic of the Homeric rod, the length of the only one mentioned in either the Iliad or the Odyssey must be a matter of conjecture, especially as this is styled περιμήκης, or “very long” one.[563]

The ordinary Rods were made of cane, hence Harundo and Calamus, which was imported usually from Abaris in Lower Egypt, or of some light elastic wood. For large and powerful fish, where something stronger was required, Ælian tells us that Tuncus Marinus and Ferula were preferred.

If the Rod were tapered, it was tapered probably by Nature not by art, at least so the Agathemeros relief, all the pictures of Venus and Cupid angling, and of many Amorini from Herculaneum would suggest. The question whether the Rods were jointed has been discussed in my chapter on the crescens harundo of Martial.

The line, ὁρμιά, or Linea, made from the strong bristly hairs of animals (seta) but most generally of horse-hair,[564] of flax, of sparton out of the genista, perhaps of byssus, but never of gut, was very finely twisted, as the epithet εὐπλόκαμος shows. It was usually as long as the rod itself, although in the Agathemeros relief we find it nearly double the length. The colours of the line were grey, black, brown—sometimes red or purple. It was made tight to the top of the Rod and not let down to the butt, or running.[565]

Plutarch prescribes that the hairs next to the hook should for deception’s sake be taken from a white horse, and adds advice, as pertinent now as then, that there “should not be too many knots in the line!”[566]

To the line was fastened the hook (hamus) which was of one or two sharp barbs.[567] From Herculaneum,[568] Pompeii, and elsewhere have been collected hooks which vary extremely in form, size, and method of adjustment.[569] Although sometimes of bone, they are mostly manufactured from iron or bronze. Cf. Oppian, III. 285: χαλκοῦ μὲν σκληροῑο τετυγμένον ἠὲ σιδήρου.

It strikes us moderns as strange to have the epithet hard applied to bronze and not to iron, till we are informed that the ancient bronze was made of tin and copper, not zinc and copper, as is our softer alloy, and was so hard that, Pliny tells us, it could be worked to represent the finest hair of a woman’s head.

The Pompeian hooks were almost exclusively adapted for sea fishing, and are thus generally large in size, long in shank, and flattened at the top to facilitate attachment to the line.

The Reel on a fishing Rod was certainly unknown to Ancient Nations. Wilkinson figures something resembling a Reel being employed when spearing hippopotami.[570]

The Amia (mentioned by Pliny, IX. 19, alone of all the Latin writers) is according to Oppian[571] a little smaller than the tunny, which reaches large proportions. Later,[572] he recounts how the Amia furnishes sad labour and trouble to the fishermen from his habit, the moment he feels the hook, of instantly rising, of swallowing more line, and then of biting through the middle, “or even the topmost hairs of it.”

But successful cunning to avoid capture was no monopoly of the Amia. Ovid, Oppian, Pliny, Plutarch, Ælian, recount numerous devices which certain fish employ to nullify net or hook. I subjoin three of the chief tricks used to defeat the hamus.

The Mugil, whose greed is only saved by its guile, despite his foreknowledge of danger has madly grabbed the bait, but keeps thrashing it with his tail, till at last he shakes it free of the hook. “At mugil cauda pendentem everberat escam Excussamque legit.”[573]

The Anthias on the first prick of the hook turns over on to his back and quickly severs the line with his dorsal fin, or spike, “of the shape and keenness of a knife.”[574]

The Scolopendra, according to Aristotle, “after swallowing the hook, turns itself inside out until it ejects it, and then it again turns itself outside in,” and (in Pliny’s words) vomits up everything inside him till he has ejected the hook, and “deinde resorbet!”[575]

Lines with floating corks and lead attached close to the hooks, partly to facilitate the throwing of the line, and partly, combined with a sliding cork, to regulate the position of the bait, were in regular use. Ground fishing, when the lure is leaded and thrown with or without rod, was well known and widely exercised.

Pastes and scents were also employed, either like myrrh dissolved in wine to intoxicate (see the accompanying drawing, which is, I believe, unique),[576] or, like the cyclamen, or sowbread, to poison the fish.[577] From Oppian’s description of the workings of the poison, IV. 658 ff., we take the lines:

In the simile—inevitable in Oppian—which ends the passage our author may indicate, though he does not name, the Germanic tribes (for over Rome in his day as over Europe in ours hung the barbarian menace) when he condemned the abhorred habit practised by the enemy of poisoning the springs and wells:

In the number of methods, in the variety of devices, the fishermen of Oppian and Ælian are not behind their modern successors; it is indeed the reverse of

We moderns are, in fact, merely the heirs to a piscatorial estate, which by scientific improvement or intensive culture we have rendered more serviceable and better adapted to the requirements of fish more harried, and consequently more highly educated.

The old devices, the old recipes were never entirely lost.[579] They continued to be handed down through the Middle Ages, and may be found in most of the collections of household recipes, such as those of Baptista Porta, Conrad Heresbach, and others. They naturally in the course of some thousand years got rather split up, or fell into abeyance; it was not, in fact, till the seventeenth century that fairly full collections of them began to reappear.

But except just to mention “tickling,” an ancient device in both Oppian and Ælian, we have room here only for four methods, all very quaint, either unknown or uncommon among twentieth-century fishers.

The first, that by which the goat-herd annexes the Sargus, according to Oppian.[580]

In hot weather it was, and still is, in Sicily the wont of the goat-herds to drive their flocks to some cool shallow of the sea. “Once upon a time” one of them noticed that the sargi came round the goats in vast shoals. The reason for this—whether grasped in a moment by one great brain, or evolved by two or three generations of speculating herdsmen—was discovered to be the attraction of the male sargus by the smell of the female goat.

So the reasoning goat-herd slays his nanny, puts himself inside her skin, and to perfect, I presume, the resemblance of the deception, “adjusts on his brows the horns!” Then he gently glides into the shallow, “scatters the food full shower” among the sargi hot on their amorous mission and, well! for the number that were slain by “The Sturdy Rod his latent Hand extends” I refer you to the fourth book of the Halieutica!

Ichthyologists declare that the male sargus is very uxorious, and has at least one hundred wives always in close-herded attendance on him. As the words “unhappy lovers” indicate that the sargi were present not a few, these multiplied by one hundred must have yielded quite a decent creel.[581]

The second method owes its success to the love for music and for watching the dance, which Aristotle and Ælian assert to be characteristic of several fishes, but especially of the skate. The recipe of this method, far pleasanter, certainly less odoriferous than that of the last, demands 1 Boat, 1 Violin, 1 big Net, 2 Men, one of whom fiddles, while the other dances as he unwinds the net. Attracted to the spot, and, like Wagner-devotees, so entirely absorbed by the melody as to be unconscious of all else, the skates fall easy and numerous victims to the slowly drawn net.

This method seems “the limit.” It certainly trenched on even Badham’s credulity. He states that he would not have cited this statement of Ælian’s, unless it had been “singularly countenanced and confirmed by no less a person than the great French ichthyologist, Rondolet,” whose mere name in this musical context must presumably carry conviction, for (as is not unusual with Badham) no reference is given.[582]

The third method, employed by the Mysians for capturing the Silurus in big rivers like the Danube and the Volga, is set forth by Ælian (XIV. 25) in words which describe with such charming naïveté the perfection of the Silurian palate, eye, and possibly nose, enabling it to discriminate instantly between “the lungs of a wild” and other “bull,”[583] that we may venture upon quoting the whole passage:

“An Istrian fisherman drives a pair of oxen near the river-bank, not, however, for the purpose of ploughing.... If a pair of horses are at hand, the fisherman makes use of horses; and with the yoke on his shoulders, down he goes and takes his station at a spot which he thinks will make a convenient seat for himself, and be a good place for sport. He fastens one end of the fishing-rope, which is stout and capable of standing a good tug, to the middle of the yoke, and supplies the oxen, or the horses, as the case may be, with sufficient food, and the animals take their fill.

“To the other end of the rope he fastens a strong and terribly sharp hook, baited with the lungs of a wild bull; this he throws into the water as a lure—a very sweet lure—to the Istrian silurus, having previously fastened a piece of lead of sufficient size to the rope above the place where the hook is bound on, to serve as a support for the pull.[584]

“When the fish perceives the bait of bull’s-flesh, he immediately rushes at the prey, and, meeting with that he so dearly loves, opens wide his great jaws and greedily swallows the dreadful bait; then the glutton, at first turning himself round with pleasure, soon finds that he has been pierced unawares with the aforesaid hook, and being eager to escape from the calamity shakes the rope with the greatest violence.

“The fisherman observes this, and is filled with delight; he jumps from his seat, and, now in the character of a fisherman, now in that of a ploughman, like an actor who changes his mask in a play, he urges on his oxen or horses, and a mighty contest takes place between the monster and the yoked animals; for the creature, foster-child of the Ister, draws downward with all his might, while the yoked animals pull the rope in an opposite direction. The fish can make no headway. Beaten by the united efforts of the team, he gives in, and is hauled on to the bank.”

Siluri, according to common report, have been caught weighing over 400 lbs. and of more than twelve feet in length.

There is good ground for us moderns patting ourselves on the back, when we realise that owing to the many improvements effected in our tackle, and not least in the Rod, an angler off Catalina has often landed a heavier fish than a yoke of oxen on the banks of the Ister, e.g. Mr. A. N. Howard (in 1916) caught the record Black Sea Bass in Californian waters, weighing 493 lbs.

Even this big fellow is quite a dwarf beside the Tuna of 710 lbs. taken in Canadian waters by Mr. Laurence Mitchell,[585] which still holds, I believe, the record of the world as the very largest fish ever taken on a rod.

I myself have seen a sword fish of over 300 lbs. killed on a rod off Santa Catalina. When in 1909 out for Tarpon in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, I had the good luck to secure after a fight of two and a half hours, and after being towed almost down to Port Royal and back, a distance of some five miles, a shark weighing 116 lbs., with a rod only 8 foot long, with a light salmon line, with a No. 4 hook, and with a bit of piano wire, faute de mieux, attached to prevent erosion.[586]

From the time of the earliest authors the identification of the Silurus has been a vexed question.

Aristotle writing of the Glanis, a large fresh-water fish (his only account of actual fishing, it may be remembered, is a fight with a Glanis),[587] attributes to it characteristics and habits, which Pliny totidem sententiis, if not verbis, transfers to the Silurus, although he thrice mentions the Glanis. Ælian, in addition to XIV. 25, declares in XII. 14, that the Glanis a species of, and very like, the Silurus, while Athenæus treats them as separate fish.

As late as the time of Scaliger, the problem gave rise to discussion which led to no elucidation of what fish exactly corresponds to the classical Silurus. Perhaps the sentence of Albertus Magnus,[588] “a river fish which was called by the Greeks Glanis, but by us Silurus,” seemed, although only a conjectural compromise, as near as we could get to the identity.

Agassiz, however, reluctant to accept Cuvier’s identification of the Glanis with the Silurus glanis, came to the conclusion (after examining six specimens of a Siluroid new to Ichthyologists, which he obtained from the Acheloüs in Western Greece) that from agreement in the form of the anal fin, the position of the gall bladder, the connected spawn, etc., they were the same as Aristotle’s Glanis. To this Siluroid Agassiz gave the name Glanis aristotelis: it is, perhaps, better known as Parasilurus aristotelis.[589]

If the Silurus be the Scheid of Germany, his strength, habits, and ferocity, as set forth in our authors are indeed very credible. From Aristotle we learn that this “river fish” is easy to hook (as we should suspect from its rapacity, which has been tersely summarised in “pisces pisci præda at huic omnes”), but from its huge powers and hard teeth very hard to hold.

The passage in Pliny, IX. 75, which he extracts from Aristotle[590] —“Silurus mas solus omnium edita custodit ova, sæpe et quinquagenis diebus, ne absumantur ab aliis”—has by a wrong rendering accorded to the male Silurus the proud distinction of being the only male fish that guards its eggs. This is absurd, for other instances, e.g. Chromis simonis, exist.

Where fish, however, pay any regard whatever to their ova, it is usually, but not always, on the father that the duty falls. “Omnium” in Pliny is to be read not with “solus” but with “edita ova.” This reading advances the quite different claim that the Silurus is the only male that includes in its watch and ward not merely its own but promiscuously also the eggs of other fish. Perhaps the same start of surprise awaits him, on the pentecostal and last day of his vigil, as that of the hen when she first beholds a mixed brood of chickens and ducklings emerging from under her breast.

Pliny reveals some fabulous uses of the Silurus. In XXXII. 28, fresh caught Siluri are an excellent tonic for the voice. In 46, by the smoke and scent of a burnt Silurus, especially one hailing from Africa (!), the pangs of childbirth are said to be greatly eased. In 40, for curing “ignes sacros” or the malady of St. Anthony’s fire, the application of the bellies of living frogs, or of ashes from a Silurus, were two of the nostrums recommended.

The fourth and last method, for the capture of Eels, given by Ælian,[591] although almost certainly cribbed from Oppian,[592] but with a local habitation and a name carefully thrown in to suggest originality, reads much as follows:

The eeler from a high bank of the “river Eretaenus, where the eels are the largest and by far the fattest of all eels,” lets down at a turn of the stream some cubits’ length of the intestines of a sheep. An eel, seizing a bit of it at the nether end, tries to drag the whole away, on which the fisher applies the other end (which is fixed to a long tubular reed serving the place of a fishing rod) to his mouth, and blows into the sheep’s gut. This presently swells; the fish receiving the air in his mouth swells too, and unable to extricate his teeth is lugged out, adhering to the inflated intestines.[593]

“Gin these be joys of artful eeling, oh! gie me Essex Flats,” with their “sniggling for eels with a needle,” or “banding“ for fish with whitethorn hooks!

In addition to this pneumatic method of Ælian others were employed for taking eels. Stirring up the mud, in which they were wont to lurk was a common device; hence the proverb ἐγχέλεις θηρᾶσθαι, to fish in muddy waters. Thus Aristophanes[594] makes the sausage seller, whom the Whigs of Athens had hired to outbawl the demagogue Cleon, shout, “Yes, it is with you as with the eel-catchers; when the lake is still, they do not take anything, but if they stir up the mud, they do; so it is with you, when you disturb the State.”[595]

Even at the risk of being likened to Mr. Bouncer of Oxford fame, who in every answer of his Divinity paper dragged in his sole and cuff-attached bit of Old Testament knowledge with “and here it may not seem inappropriate to subjoin a list of the Kings of Israel and Judah,” I venture some comments on the Eel.

The frequent allusions in our authors to the Eel, (A) as a sacred fish, (B) as the delight of the epicure, and (C) as a propagator of its species in a variety of surprisingly erroneous ways, must be my excuse.

(A) It was held as a god, or at least as a sacred creature, by the Egyptians,[596] as sacred to Artemis in the spring of Arethusa,[597] and semi-sacred by the Bœotians.[598]

Antiphanes[599] ridicules the Egyptians for the sacred honour paid to the fish, wrongly termed by the Greeks the Eel. Contrasting the value of the gods with the high prices paid for the fish at Athens he gibes; “they say that the Egyptians are clever in that they rank the Eel equal to a god, but in reality it is held in esteem and value far higher than gods, for them we can propitiate with a prayer or two, while to get even a smell of an Eel at Athens we have to spend twelve drachmæ or more!” Anaxandrides’[600] makes a Greek say to an Egyptian:

Juvenal in Satire XV. (written probably after his return from semi-exile in Egypt) lashes with ridicule the compatriots of his butt Crispinus. The enumeration of their animal and vegetable gods is a fine specimen of dignified humour. By piscem in line 7, may be indicated the Oxyrhynchus, the Lepidotus, or the Phagrus, the so-called Eel—three sacred fishes of the Nile.

(B) As a delicacy, the Eel by the Greeks was rated very high. But the reverse held good at Rome. Unlike its cousin the Muræna it gets little commendation by the Latin comedians—Terence’s in Adelphi, 377-381, is the solitary exception I can recall—and by the gourmets. Apicius deemed it worthy of but one recipe.[601]

“Vos anguillæ manet longæ cognata colubræ” (Juvenal, V. 103) is often quoted as stamping the low position of the Eel at Rome, but in reality, as the whole context bears out, this particular “cousin of the snake” was condemned not because of its kinship, but because it was Cloaca-bred and drain-fed.[602]

The passage in Menander’s,[603] Drunkenness which makes one of the characters declaim that, were he a god, he would never allow a loin of beef to load his altars, unless an Eel were also sacrificed, testifies to the preference for the Eel to meat. Numerous are the pæans of praise rendered by Greek writers to the superlative excellence of the fish.

The Eel is dight “the King of fish”[604]; he, or rather she, was “the white-skinned Nymph”[605]; was “chief of the fifty Virgins of Lake Copaïs”[606]; was a very “Goddess,”

(with which, or majoram, on beech leaves, Aristophanes[608] tells us they were often served); and, the very last word in laudation, was “the Helen of the Feast.”[609]

Whether this was applied because the fish was the personification of all delicate dainties, as Helen was the fairest of all the fair, or because every guest strove like Paris to supplant his neighbour and keep her all to himself, the reader must choose. Athenæus certainly leans to the latter view.[610]

Philetærus[611] would seem to have no doubt in identifying what is the sting of death and what is the victory of the grave,

To the sense of smell as well as that of taste the Murænidæ appealed strongly, to judge by the eulogy that their bodies when being cooked exhaled an odour fragrant enough to restore the sense of smell in the nose of a dead man! while, if boiled in fine brine, they “changed the human nature into the divine!”[612]

The luxurious and lazy Sybarites, who felt they had broken their bones if they but saw another digging, and suffered not a cock in the whole country, lest he should mar their slumber, were so passionately addicted to Eels that all persons catching or selling them were exempt from taxes and tribute.[613]

(C) The propagation of Eels: This has given birth to more theories—all of them till some twenty years ago quite erroneous—than any other ichthyic question. From Aristotle downwards nearly every zoologist, nearly every writer on fish, has advanced his view as to how and whence eels are bred.[614]

Only a few of them, and they all divergent, can find space here. Aristotle held that Eels had never been found with milt or roe, that when opened they did not seem to possess generative organs, and that apparently they came from the so-called entrails of the earth, seemingly referring to certain worms formed spontaneously in mud and the like.[615]

Oppian (I. 513 ff.)—

Pliny, after making the assertion (taken, as usual, from Aristotle) that among fish the females are larger, and often the more numerous, goes on, an echo once more of “His Master’s Voice,” to deny to the Eel sex, either masculine or feminine: according to him, Eels when they had lived their day, rubbed themselves against the rocks, and their scrapings came to life: “they have no other mode of procreation.”[616]

Von Helmont attributed the birth of Eels to the dews of May mornings! other authors deduced their parentage from the hairs of horses! others again from the gills of fish! while the great Izaak Walton insisted on spontaneous generation![617]

To solve the insoluble, recourse was, as usual, had to the gods: thus Jupiter and a white-armed goddess yclept Anguilla[618] (the Latin for Eel) were accounted parents of the countless “cousins to the snake.”

Theory was piled upon theory, false conclusions were drawn from falser data. Even as late as 1862 appeared an author, not one whit less certain of the truth of his discovery based “on a series of observations extending over sixty years,” or one whit less active in asserting it, than any of his numerous predecessors.

In The Origin of the Silver Eel, Mr. D. Cairncross propounded the following assertion: “The progenitor of the silver Eel is a small beetle: of this I feel fully satisfied in my own mind, from a rigid and extensive comparison of its structure and habits with those of other insects.”[619] “The beetle in the act of parturition” is represented on the frontispiece!

The fact that this beetle is evidently a dead one would not, as the Bibliotheca Piscatoria rather wickedly puts it, even if known to the writer, cause him to alter his opinion one jot!

It was only in 1896—strange, indeed, that a problem which so many keen intellects had attacked should remain unelucidated for over two thousand years!—that the mode of reproduction and development of the Eel was first surmised, and then for the most part ascertained by Professor Grassi and Dr. Galandruccio. But not till 1904 were most of the surmises of the Italian investigators placed beyond question, and the mode of reproduction, etc., established beyond doubt by Johann Schmidt of Copenhagen.

The now accepted view (stated shortly) is as follows: fresh-water Eels approach maturity when about six years old, and then change their colour from browny-yellow to silver, whence “Silver Eels.” In this bridal attire and with eyes enlarged, they find their way from the rivers to the sea, and far out into deep waters of the ocean. The pace at which they travel on their way to the sea cannot be computed exactly, but two marked Eels have been caught whose record was nineteen kilometres in two days. Meek[620] states that neither the exact locality nor the approximate depth of the spawning is as yet known, but that there can be no doubt that the spawning region lies deep and far out in the Atlantic beyond the Continental shelf.

The Times, Sept. 25, 1920, announces that Dr. J. Schmidt has just discovered the spawning place of fresh-water Eels to be not far S. of Bermuda, or about 27 deg. N. and 60 deg. W., much farther W. than he anticipated. Of the many marvels of the ichthyic world this is, perhaps, the greatest. It taxes, it transcends, our powers adequately to conceive the hereditary instinct or gauge the enduring strength which impels fish—as yet sexually undeveloped—of only moderate size to traverse 3000 or 4000 miles of an ocean full of foes, and to seek, especially to find, the only area which contains the requisite depth, temperature, and currents favouring the procreation and the return home of their minute but parentless progeny.

The conclusion is now clear that the Eels of Europe at any rate have a spawning area in common; the two Italian doctors were wrong in supposing that Eels spawned in the Mediterranean. In such ocean depths certainly below, probably far below, the one hundred fathoms[621] line the generative organs of the Eels develope, and in due though protracted time the females spawn.[622]

Their eggs float for a time; the young, when hatched out, pass through a metamorphosis and are known in one stage as Leptocephalus brevirostris. This larval form, which is flat and transparent and has a very small head, drifts with the ocean currents towards the coasts of Europe, where it passes through a series of metamorphoses into the Elver or young Eel, which in March and April swims up English rivers. The fecundity of the Eel, were it not for the system of check and countercheck devised by Nature, would in time become a danger; for the ovary of a female thirty-two inches in length has been estimated to contain no fewer than 10,700,000 eggs![623]

But however legitimate or illegitimate their methods may seem, all praise should be rendered to our ancient anglers. Especially so, when we call to mind that, as they possessed not running lines, reels, gut, nor probably landing nets, the playing of large fish must have required more delicate manipulation and the landing presented far greater difficulties than to us, armed as we are with all these and many other appliances.