Fishing from the Earliest Times

“Except to politicians, a decent definition is a help and a delight.”

Acting on this American dictum I start with two definitions, one of Fishing and Angling, the other of Angling. The first we owe to that past master of the art, Plato. Whether it come within the category of “delight or help,” or whether he can endorse the verdict of Theætetus as to its “satisfactory conclusion,” each reader must decide.

Plato, using the method of elimination and incidentally more than three pages of print, eventually arrives at the following definition of Fishing and Angling:[82] “Then, now you and I have come to an understanding, not only about the name of the Angler’s art, but about the definition of the thing itself. One half of all Art was acquisitive: one half of the acquisitive Art was conquest or taking by force: half of this again was hunting, and half of hunting was hunting animals: of this again the under half was fishing, and half of fishing was striking: a part of striking was fishing with a barb, and one half of this again (being the kind which strikes with a hook and draws the fish from below upwards) is the Art we have been seeking, and which from the nature of the operation is denoted Angling or drawing up.”

Theætetus: “The result has been quite satisfactorily brought out.”

In search of a more helpful definition I turn to the English Dictionaries. The N.E.D. (New English Dictionary, Oxford) gives Fishing—“to catch, or try to catch fish”—wide enough for all our purpose and for most of our performances! In their definitions of Angling, Angle, etc., the majority of dictionaries disagree, but unite in deriving Angle from the Aryan root, ANK = to bend, and establishing the fishing term as the cousin of the awkward angles of Euclid and of our youth. The N.E.D. in its definitions of ‘Angle’ (sb.), of ‘Angle’ (vb.), of ‘Angler,’ or of ‘Angling,’ does not even agree with itself.

Thus we find:

If A, B, C, which all differ, are accurate, D can hardly be so. Further from A, B, C, we can deduce no correct definition of D.

Under D the N.E.D. imports as a necessary component part of angling the presence of a rod, but I venture to think on insufficient grounds. In the first quotation cited in support, “Fysshynge, callyd Anglynge with a rodde,” the word “rodde,” if D hold good, must be redundant or unnecessary. “Rodde” I hold to be an added word of limitation, or description, as in “Fysshynge with an Angle.”

But since the dictionaries do hardly help—to some, indeed, they smack of “the heinous crime of word-splitting”—and since the importance (apart from etymological reasons) of possessing an accurate and adequate definition presses, let us prostrate ourselves before another oracle, the Law. But here too success scarcely crowns our quest. The leading case, Barnard v. Roberts and Williams, yields, Delphic-like, little light or leading.[84]

The facts, briefly stated, were: Roberts and Williams laid in a private river two fishing lines; one end of the lines attached to two pieces of wood driven into the ground made fast the lines, the other end held hooks baited with worms, and a stone to keep the lines under water. “The lines were left by the men, who subsequently were found taking two fish off the hooks, and resetting the lines, of which the keepers deprived them. The charge (under s. 24 of the Larceny Act of 1861) ran of unlawfully, etc., taking fish otherwise than by angling. The Justices of Bangor refused to commit, on the ground that they were angling, and thus under the Act were protected from damages or penalty for such angling.”

On appeal both sides cited Izaak Walton and other authors; both quoted the N.E.D.—the appellant its definition of ‘Angling,’ i.e. fishing with a rod, and the respondent that of ‘Angle’ (vb.), i.e. to fish with hook and bait.

The three Judges, judge-like, disagreed in their reasons but agreed in allowing the appeal, and disagreeing in their conceptions of angling agreed in abstaining from any definition.

“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king.” Mr. Justice Phillimore was the least non-positive. He even committed himself to the following: “He did not think that a rod must necessarily be part of an angler’s outfit, but only a hook and line. He thought the human element must be present, and that it was not sufficient when the tackle was set once and for all, and then left.”

It is obvious from the above that, while the dictionaries are but blind guides, the Law (if on this occasion not exactly “a hass”) fails to elucidate what exactly constitutes Angling.

Dr. Henry van Dyke, the author of Little Rivers and other fascinating books connected with fishing, suggests to me “Angling, the art of fishing by hand with a hook and line, with or without a rod.” I much prefer this to that of N.E.D., because of its greater accuracy and of its inclusion of that really skilful method, hand-lining. But for general convenience I adopt as the definition of Angling “The action, or art, of fishing with a Rod.”

My Fishing from the Earliest Times treats of the Old Stone Men, Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Jews, Greeks, and Romans. The amount of space allotted to the last two, compared with that occupied by some of the other nations, may suggest the immortal even if apocryphal chapter of “Snakes in Ireland.” “There are none.”

To any such criticisms I make answer that for nearly all our knowledge as to the methods and tackle of fishing and varieties of fish we are indebted to the Greeks and Romans, and in a smaller degree to the Egyptians and Chinese.

Reasons of date, data, and dearth of paper prevent my using in this book the material which I had collected on Indian, Persian, and Japanese Fishing.

As regards India, while fishing by net falls well within my adopted date (500 a.d.), that by hook and line—not necessarily Angling—gains entrance by a short head, or a mere century.

Fish (matsya, apparently derived from the root mad and signifying the inebriated) is down to c. 1000 b.c. only mentioned once[85] in the Rigveda, X. 68, 8. In the next period—that of the later Vedas and Brāhmanas—fish, but not methods of capture, find frequent mention.

The Net (jāla) is first referred to in the Atharvaveda (not later than 800 b.c.) but not in connection with fishing, while in the Yajurveda (c. 800 b.c.) names for fishermen and a hook—baḍiša—occur. The 139th Jātaka (c. 400 a.d.) contains the first allusion to fishing with a line and hook.

References in Sanskrit poetry to the iron hook and bait probably imply, though they fail to mention, the Rod. Passages in the epic Mahābhārata, V. 1106 (c. 200 a.d.), in Kāmandaki’s aphoristic poetry (c. 300-400 a.d.), in the Pancatantra, I. 208, “when women see a man caught in the bonds of love, they draw him like a fish that has followed the bait,” all suggest Angling.[86]

Fish legends, similes, stories—not always redounding to ichthyic wisdom—meet us fairly frequently. Manu[87] is saved from the Flood by a fish. Buddha[88] answers questions as to abstention from fish. Wondrous fish occur: e.g. the Kar, “which knows to the scratch of a needle’s point by how much the water in the Ocean shall increase, by how much it is diminishing.”[89]

Stories, such as the recovery by a fish of Šakuntalā’s ring and the consequent marriage of King Dushyanta; of Indra, the fearless slayer of the serpent, whose death for defiling the bed of Ahalyâ was compassed by fish;[90] of Adrikâ’s transformation into a fish and her conception in that form of a child by King Uparicaras;[91] of The Stupid and Two Clever Fishes;[92] of The Frog and The Two Fish,[93] all these make pleasant if varied reading. But when we come to methods of fishing, all variety vanishes. We are confronted with a damnable monotony, a toujours perdrix. It is almost Net, or Nothing.

This holds true of the piscine tales even in the Arabian Nights, e.g. The Fisherman and the Jinn, and The Fisherman and the ’Efreet. The latter, however, possesses an unique interest: the fisherman here, unlike his Greek and Roman poverty-stricken brethren, became by means of his miraculous fish, “the wealthiest of the people of his age, and his daughters continued to be the wives of princes”!

Evidence that fishing in India was of old and is now (the fishing caste, I am told, ranks low) not highly regarded can be deduced (inter alia) from its total omission in the Fourteen Sciences and the Sixty-four Arts, which the Vātsyặyana Kāma Sūtra (not later than the third century a.d.) promulgates for the education of children from five to sixteen. Among the requisite Sciences gymnastics, dancing, the playing of musical glasses, sword-stick, cock quail and ram fighting, teaching parrots and starlings to sing, all these find commendation, but fishing none!

As with India, so with Persia ancient and modern, toujours le filet! Very many of the earliest prose works in modern Persian came through the Pahlavi from the Sanskrit. Thus the three or four stories—occasionally but wrongly regarded as of Persian origin—about fish and fishing which are contained in the Anwār-i-Suhaili[94] can be traced to The Fables of Bidpai, or The Pancatantra,[95] translated from the Arabic version into Persian about 550 a.d.

In modern Persian (c. 1000 a.d.) poetry, lines allusive to fishing dot themselves sparsely:[96] even in them the Net bulks biggest. Hafiz (fourteenth century), however, gives us

A passage in Arabic furnished hope of finding Angling oases in the desert, but when in

I found the word (saffūd) rendered gaff given by Richardson’s Persian-Arabic Dictionary as “a roasting spit, a poker for the fire,” my hope fled, for I quickly realised here an instance of anachronistic translation, or the employment of fishing terms appropriate to modern but inapplicable to ancient methods.[97]

I have come to the sad conclusion that the Persians ancient and modern care not in general for fishing or angling, although the Gulf, from which the ancient Sumerians garnered such splendid “harvest of the sea,” washes their shores, and from their mountains descend “fishful” streams. I have reached my conclusion for the following reasons:—

The former:[99] “’Though I have lived in Persia for many years and have travelled through it from Sea to Sea, from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian, I have never seen a fish-hook in a Persian’s hands. In the districts I know best, the Net is the only weapon.”

The second, when our Minister at Teheran, on his first holiday went a-fishing. Having caught on a likely stream before supper three or four half-pound trout (I think), he anticipated next day pleasant sport. With the very early morning came not Remorse, but the local Sheikh to do his reverence and to make the customary present. “As I have heard that His Great Excellency worked hard for a few fish last night, my tribesmen have netted the river for the length of a parasang, and I bring you plenty of fish.” Tableau! Hasty flight of Sir Frank to another river, with like results!

Reasons both of date and data prevent my including the Japanese, perhaps the most alert and adaptive sea-fishers in the world. As their history before 500 a.d. must apparently be classed as legendary, this nation eludes my chronological Net. Data on ancient fishing, if existing, are either unknown[100] or as being derived from China find place postea.[101]

I set the time limit of my book at roughly 500 a.d., so as to include the last classical or quasi-classical piscatory poems viz. those of Ausonius—notably ad Mosellam—in the fourth and of Sidonius in the fifth century.

This date seems, indeed, a pre-ordained halting-place for three reasons. First, the tackle of our day (though improved almost beyond recognition in rod, winch, artificial bait, etc.) is merely the lineal descendant of the Macedonian described by Ælian in the third century a.d. Second, between Ælian and Dame Juliana’s Boke no record, with two possible exceptions, of fishing with a fly exists. Third, and more important, we possess no real continuous link between the Angling literature of Rome down to the fifth century and that which sprang up after the invention of printing some thousand years later.

In the intervening centuries, it is true, books and manuscripts were written (mainly by monks) which treated more or less of fishing, but of Angling only incidentally.[102] They illustrate the customs of fishermen, the natural history of fish, the making and maintaining of vivaria or fish-ponds, rather than instruct or inform on practical Fishing.

The most notable would, could we trace it, be “an old MS. treatise on fishing, found among the remains of the valuable library belonging to the Abbey of St. Bertin, at St. Omer. A paper on this was read, a few years before 1855, at a society of antiquaries at Arras. From its style, the MS. was supposed to have been written about 1000 a.d., and to have been divided into twenty-two chapters. The author’s main object was to prove that fishers had been singularly favoured by Divine approbation; but appended to the MS. was a full list of all river fish, the baits used for taking them, and the suitable seasons for angling for each sort of fish.”

For the existence of this work, vanished now for over sixty years, we have only the authority of Robert Blakey.[103] But this, if it do pass muster with Dr. Turrell, fails to satisfy Westwood and Satchell, who describe his book on Angling as “a slipshod and negligent work, devoid of all utility, a farrago of quotations incorrectly given, and of so-called original passages, the vagueness and uncertainty of which rob them of all weight and value. Mr. Blakey’s volume, it is but fair to add, is redeemed from utter worthlessness by the excellent bibliographical catalogue appended to it by the publisher!”[104]

The Geoponika, whether written or redacted by Cassianus Bassus or Cassius Dionysius, or merely translated from a treatise by an ancient Carthaginian author, treats generally of agriculture. The twentieth book, however, deals with fish-ponds, fishing, and baits: unlike the Roman writers on vivaria, who tell us nothing as to the capture of the fish in them, the writer gives us instructive tips on baits.

One infallible recipe in chap. xviii. for collecting the fish—on the lines of Baiting the Swim—from its superstitious naïveté compels quotation: “Get three limpets, and having taken out the fish therein, inscribe on the shell the words, Ἰαώ Σαβαώθ, or ‘Jehovah, Lord of Hosts’; you will immediately see the fish come to the same place in a surprising manner.”[105] The two Greek words formed the so-called Gnostic formula and occur frequently on amulets, etc. The Geoponika adds immediately, “this name the Ichthyophagi use.”

About the fourteenth century a poem entitled De Vetula, attributed to R. de Fournival, got translated or imitated by Jean Lefevre. The fishing portion (68 lines) awakes our interest, as it shows that “more than six hundred years ago, and probably two hundred years before the date of The Boke of St. Albans, most of the modern modes of fishing were practised; for instance, the worm, the fly, the torch and spear, the night line, the eel-basket and fork,” etc.

This quotation from Westwood and Satchell might cause a casual reader to suppose that (α) from De Vetula, written only some two centuries before The Boke of St. Albans, we gain our first information “of these modes of fishing,” and (β) that these were “modern,” whereas Oppian had described them all, some thirteen hundred years before The Boke of St. Albans saw light.

With the exception of de Fournival and the elusive MS. of Dom Pichon,[106] which (written about 1420 but only rediscovered about 1853) probably stamps this monk as the first to practise artificial hatching, the Continent produced practically nothing till the appearance at Antwerp in 1492 of the first printed original book on Fishing, which as regards printing precedes The Boke of St. Albans.

This little Flemish work by an unknown author contains twenty-six chapters of a few lines, gives recipes for artificial baits, unguents, and pastes, and in the last two pages notes the periods when certain fish eat best. As its title sets out, it teaches “how one may catch birds and fish with one’s hands, and also otherwise.”[107]

The earliest description of fishing in the English language meets us in The Colloquy of Aelfric, a.d. 995, which Skeat first brought to notice and first “Englished” in The Oldest English Treatise on Fishing.[108] This takes the form of a short dialogue introduced into the Colloquy written by Aelfric, Archbishop of Canterbury, for the purpose of teaching his pupils Latin, and therefore written in Anglo-Saxon with a Latin translation beneath. “It is arranged as a conversation between the master and his pupil; the latter in turns figuring as huntsman, fisherman, falconer.”

The length of the Colloquy, even of the fishing portion, prevents inclusion here, but the pupil’s objection to fishing in the sea, “because rowing is troublesome to me,” and to going a-whaling, “because I had rather catch a fish I can kill than one that can, with one stroke, kill both me and my comrades,” strikes me as well taken and pertinent.

A poem by Piers of Fulham, written about 1420 (the original MS. of which can be seen at Trinity College, Cambridge) claims next our notice. The author, judging from Hartshorne’s rendering, fully justifies the description of him as a somewhat pessimistic angler. He seems to have anticipated De Quincey’s “fishing is an unceasing expectation and a perpetual disappointment.” He fully appreciated its difficulties and disappointments, but clearly possessed some sportsmanlike instincts, as the following, among other, verses show[109]:—

A Latin book Dialogus creaturarum optime moralizatus was published in 1480; a translation about 1520 styles it The Dialogues of Creatures Moralysed. This very rare work, which I have found fully dealt with from an Angler’s point of view only by Dr. Turrell, furnishes the earliest known illustration of an angler fishing with a float.

Next in date, and last to be noticed here, comes the famous Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle, printed at Westminster by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 as part of the second edition of The Boke of St. Albans. Whether, as has been commonly supposed, Dame Juliana Berners wrote it, or whether any such lady ever existed, are points of controversy, but that The Treatyse was not an immaculate conception, without parents or ancestors, can be reasonably proved by its reference to earlier writers on fishing, and to its “these ben the xii flies ye shall use” being introduced as a precept of practice rather than a revelation of invention.

If few the forbears of what some term “not only the first angling manual in England, but also the first practical work written in any language,” its vitality and its prolific progeny admit of no doubt. According to Mr. A. Lang (who accounts for the startling fact by the increased number of people able to read owing to the spread of education) no less than ten editions of The Boke were issued within four years of publication, while Dr. Turrell limits himself to fourteen undated editions between 1500 and 1596.

Whatever the number of the editions, the need for and the vitality of The Treatyse is demonstrated by the fact that for over a hundred years no new work on Angling was printed in England, and between it and The Compleat Angler—a space of over one hundred and fifty years—there occur but four books on the subject.[110] To its prolific progeny, the Bibliotheca Piscatoria bears witness[111] in its catalogue of some fifteen hundred authors and of countless books, MSS. etc.

We owe, it is said, this voluminous literature to the geographical position of England, which lends itself very favourably to the pursuit of all kinds of fishing. Can we, also, flatteringly add the other factor of Lacépède’s dictum, “Il y a cette différence entre la chasse et la pêche, que cette dernière convient aux peuples les plus civilisés?”

But the pursuit of fishing did not prevail in early England or Scotland. A passage in Bede (probably used by Henry of Huntingdon), which has, I think, escaped the many-eyed net of our fishing authors, testifies to its absence in the former.

St. Wilfrid (born 634) on his return from Friesland, where fishing yielded the staple of food, met with such success in his mission to the South Saxons that he not only converted them, “with all the priests of the Idols,” but also—“which was a great relief unto them”—taught them the craft of fishing, of which, save eeling, they wotted naught. Collecting under the Saint’s order eel-nets where they could, the first adventurers meritis sui patris Divina largitate adjuti[112] enmeshed three hundred fishes, which they equally divided between the poor, the net-owners, and themselves.

The Celtæ, with some exceptions such as the scomber-catching Celtiberi, eschewed fish, probably from religious prejudices, which owing to their adoration of the springs, rivers, and waters prevented the eating of their denizens.

Whatever the cause, Dion Cassius expressly comments on the abstinence of the Caledonians, although their seas and rivers abounded with food.[113] In time the example of the clergy and the ordinance of fast days gradually overcame—save in the case of Eels, which still remain to the Highlander an abomination—their obstinate antipathy. Across St. George’s Channel the Irish two centuries ago “had little skill in catching fish.”[114]

But when the Western Highlanders did go a-fishing, their prayers and promises—prompted by the same principle of gratitude being a sense of favours to come—echo the prayers and promises, Dis mutatis, of the Anthologia Palatina.

The seas differ, but the gods precated are the same. If in the following verses you substitute for “Christ, King of the Elements” Poseidon, King of the Waters, for “brave Peter” ruseful Hermes, and for “Mary fair” Aphrodite, you have the tutelary deities of fishing. The spirit of the prayer and promise of the firstling remain unchanged.

For century after century the fishermen of the Isles have handed down orally to generation after generation the Gaelic prayer with which they set out to sea.[115]

The rarity—I have not met its mention—and curious nature of a volume published at Frankfort in 1611, even if more than a century after The Boke of St. Albans, compels some reference.

Conjecturæ Halieuticæ by Raphael Eglinus consists of a long dissertation based on the strange markings of three fishes (pictured on its title-page), two caught in Scandinavia on the same day, November 21, 1587, and the third in Pomerania on May 21, 1596. These markings, supposedly chronological, provide their author with a basis for various prophecies and warnings of the evils to come in Central Europe, especially in Germany.

As neither text nor type peculiarly tempt to perusal, I have not found it easy to disentangle the disasters or allot to each country its individual woe. Deductions from Daniel, the patriarch Joseph, and of course the Apocalypse enable Eglinus to establish definitely to his own satisfaction the future advent, in one or other of the Central Kingdoms, of Antichrist.

Nor, again, is it easy to gather whether a time-limit is set for his appearance, or whether the prophecies apply to twentieth-century events. Alas! also, the data do not enable me with certainty from the very promising entries from Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria to single out the precise potentate who best fills the bill, or closest answers to the author’s Antichrist.[116]

Space debars from one fascinating branch of my subject—the superstitions of Fishing. Their far-flung web enclosed the ancient piscator more firmly than his brother venator, or, indeed, any class save only the “medicine men” of Rome.

Nor could their successors disentangle themselves, as witness the recipe given above by Bassus for inscribing on the limpets’ shell the Gnostic formula, and Mr. Westwood’s words, “There is, in fact, more quaint and many-coloured superstition in a single page of Old Izaak than in all the forty-five chapters of the twentieth Book of the Geoponika. Silent are they touching mummies’ dust and dead men’s feet—silent on the fifty other weird and ghastly imaginations of the later anglers.”[117]

And even the modern angler, if he thoroughly examine himself, must confess that some shred of gossamer still adheres. Does he not at times forgo, even if he boast himself incredulous of consequence, some act, such as stepping across a rod, lest it bring bad luck? If particular individuals rise superior, the ordinary fisherman in our present day still avows and still clings to superstitions or omens. Let him in the South of Ireland be asked whither he goes, meet a woman, or see one magpie, and all luck vanishes.[118] A dead hare (manken) regarded as a devil or witch a century ago brought piscator nigh unto swooning.[119]

Women seem usually fatal to good catches; as one instance out of many we read in Hollinshed’s Scottish Chronicle, that “if a woman wade through the one fresh river in the Lewis, there shall no salmon be seen there for a twelvemonth after.”

Superstitions of every sort and almost incredible dictate to the ancient and to the modern fisherman what are the good and what the bad days for plying his craft, or setting his sail. Their cousin, imitative magic, plays no small part in deciding his bait.

But enough here of fishing superstitions. Are they not writ large in Pliny, Oppian, Plutarch, in the Folk Lore Records, and larger, geographically, in that masterpiece, The Golden Bough?

The most incredulous, if there were one chance in a hundred of the operation ensuring adeptness in our craft, would willingly sacrifice in conformity with Australian superstition the first joint of his little finger.[120] Nor, again, if only the most moderate success resulted, would any of us utter a belated plaint at his mother imitating her Fijian sister and throwing, when first a-fishing after childbirth, his navel-string into the sea, and thus “ensuring our growing into good fisherfolk.”[121]

GREEK AND ROMAN FISHING

“Noster in arte labor positus, spes omnis in illa.”