Since Maui, the Maori hero, invented barbs for hooks, angling has been
essentially one and the same thing. South Sea islanders spin for fish
with a mother-of-pearl lure which is also a hook, and answers to our
spoon. We have hooks of stone, and hooks of bone; and a bronze hook,
found in Ireland, has the familiar Limerick bend. What Homer meant by
making anglers throw 'the horn of an ox of the stall' into the sea, we
can only guess; perhaps a horn minnow is meant, or a little sheath of
horn to protect the line. Dead bait, live bait, and imitations of bait
have all been employed, and AElian mentions artificial Mayflies used,
with a very short line, by the Illyrians.
But, while the same in essence, angling has been improved by human
ingenuity. The Waltonian angler, and still more his English
predecessors, dealt much in the home-made. The _Treatise_ of the
fifteenth century bids you make your 'Rodde' of a fair staff even of a
six foot long or more, as ye list, of hazel, willow, or 'aspe' (ash?),
and 'beke hym in an ovyn when ye bake, and let him cool and dry a four
weeks or more.' The pith is taken out of him with a hot iron, and a yard
of white hazel is similarly treated, also a fair shoot of blackthorn or
crabtree for a top. The butt is bound with hoops of iron, the top is
accommodated with a noose, a hair line is looped in the noose, and the
angler is equipped. Splicing is not used, but the joints have holes to
receive each other, and with this instrument 'ye may walk, and there is
no man shall wit whereabout ye go.' Recipes are given for colouring and
plaiting hair lines, and directions for forging hooks. 'The smallest
quarell needles' are used for the tiniest hooks.
Barker (1651) makes the rod 'of a hasel of one piece, or of two pieces
set together in the most convenient manner, light and gentle.' He
recommends the use of a single hair next the fly,--'you shall have more
rises,' which is true, 'and kill more fish,' which is not so likely. The
most delicate striking is required with fine gut, and with a single hair
there must be many breakages. For salmon, Barker uses a rod ten feet in
the butt, 'that will carry a top of six foot pretty stiffe and strong.'
The 'winder,' or reel, Barker illustrates with a totally unintelligible
design. His salmon fly 'carries six wings'; perhaps he only means wings
composed of six kinds of feathers, but here Franck is a better authority,
his flies being sensible and sober in colour. Not many old salmon flies
are in existence, nor have I seen more ancient specimens than a few,
chiefly of peacocks' feathers, in the fly-leaf of a book at Abbotsford;
they were used in Ireland by Sir Walter Scott's eldest son. The
controversy as to whether fish can distinguish colours was unknown to our
ancestors. I am inclined to believe that, for salmon, size, and perhaps
shade, light or dark, with more or less of tinsel, are the only important
points. Izaak stumbled on the idea of Mr. Stewart (author of _The
Practical Angler_) saying, 'for the generality, three or four flies,
neat, and rightly made, and not too big, serve for a trout in most
rivers, all the summer.' Our ancestors, though they did not fish with
the dry fly, were intent on imitating the insect on the water. As far as
my own experience goes, if trout are feeding on duns, one dun will take
them as well as another, if it be properly presented. But my friend Mr.
Charles Longman tells me that, after failing with two trout, he examined
the fly on the water, an olive dun, and found in his book a fly which
exactly matched the natural insect in colour. With this he captured his
brace.
Such incidents look as if trout were particular to a shade, but we can
never be certain that the angler did not make an especially artful and
delicate cast when he succeeded. Sir Herbert Maxwell intends to make the
experiment of using duns of impossible and unnatural colours; if he
succeeds with these, on several occasions, as well as with orthodox
flies, perhaps we may decide that trout do not distinguish hues. On a
Sutherland loch, an angler found that trout would take flies of any
colour, except that of a light-green leaf of a tree. This rejection
decidedly looked as if even Sutherland loch trout exercised some
discrimination. Often, on a loch, out of three flies they will favour
one, and that, perhaps, not the trail fly. The best rule is: when you
find a favourite fly on a salmon river, use it: its special favouritism
may be a superstition, but, at all events, salmon do take it. We cannot
afford to be always making experiments, but Mr. Herbert Spencer, busking
his flies the reverse way, used certainly to be at least as successful
with sea trout as his less speculative neighbours in Argyllshire.
In making rods, Walton is most concerned with painting them; 'I think a
good top is worth preserving, or I had not taken care to keep a top above
twenty years.' Cotton prefers rods 'made in Yorkshire,' having advanced
from the home-made stage. His were spliced, and kept up all through the
season, as he had his water at his own door, while Walton trudged to the
Lee and other streams near London, when he was not fishing the Itchen, or
Shawford Brook. _The Angler's Vade Mecum_ recommends eighteen-feet rods:
preferring a fir butt, fashioned by the arrow-maker, a hazel top, and a
tip of whalebone. This authority, even more than Walton, deals in
mysterious 'Oyntments' of gum ivy, horse-leek, asafoetida, man's fat,
cat's fat, powdered skulls, and grave earth. A ghoulish body is the
angler of the _Vade Mecum_. He recommends up-stream fishing, with worm,
in a clear water, and so is a predecessor of Mr. Stewart. 'When you have
hooked a good fish, have an especial care to keep the rod bent, lest he
run to the end of the line' (he means, as does Walton, lest he pull the
rod horizontal) 'and break either hook or hold.' An old owner of my copy
adds, in manuscript, 'And hale him not to near ye top of the water, lest
in flaskering he break ye line.'
This is a favourite device of sea trout, which are very apt to 'flasker'
on the top of the water. The _Vade Mecum_, in advance of Walton on this
point, recommends a swivel in minnow-fishing: but has no idea of an
artificial minnow of silk. I have known an ingenious lady who, when the
bodies of her phantom minnows gave out, in Norway, supplied their place
successfully with bed-quilting artfully sewn. In fact, anything bright
and spinning will allure fish, though in the upper Ettrick, where large
trout exist, they will take the natural, but perhaps never the phantom or
angel minnow. I once tried a spinning Alexandra fly over some large pond
trout. They followed it eagerly, but never took hold, on the first day;
afterwards they would not look at it at all. The _Vade Mecum_ man, like
Dr. Hamilton, recommends a light fly for a light day, a dark fly for a
dark day and dark weather; others hold the converse opinion. Every one
agrees that the smallness of the flies should be in proportion to the
lowness of the water and the advance of summer. {7}
Our ancestors, apparently, used only one fly at a time; in rapid rivers,
with wet fly, two, three, or, in lochs like Loch Leven, even four are
employed. To my mind more than two only cause entanglements of the
tackle. The old English anglers knew, of course, little or nothing of
loch fishing, using bait in lakes. The great length of their rods made
reels less necessary, and they do not seem to have waded much. A modern
angler, casting upwards, from the middle of the stream, with a nine-foot
rod, would have astonished Walton. They dealt with trout less educated
than ours, and tooled with much coarser and heavier implements. They had
no fine scruples about bait of every kind, any more than the Scots have,
and Barker loved a lob-worm, fished on the surface, in a dark night. He
was a pot-fisher, and had been a cook. He could catch a huge basket of
trout, and dress them in many different ways,--broyled, calvored hot with
antchovaes sauce, boyled, soused, stewed, fried, battered with eggs,
roasted, baked, calvored cold, and marilled, or potted, also marrionated.
Barker instructs my Lord Montague to fish with salmon roe, a thing
prohibited and very popular in Scotland. 'If I had known it but twenty
years agoe, I would have gained a hundred pounds onely with that bait. I
am bound in duty to divulge it to your Honour, and not to carry it to my
grave with me. I do desire that men of quality should have it that
delight in that pleasure: the greedy angler will murmur at me, but for
that I care not.' Barker calls salmon roe 'an experience I have found of
late: the best bait for a trout that I have seen in all my time,' and it
is the most deadly, in the eddy of a turbid water. Perhaps trout would
take caviare, which is not forbidden by the law of the land. Any
unscrupulous person may make the experiment, and argue the matter out
with the water-bailie. But, in my country, it is more usual to duck that
official, and go on netting, sniggling, salmon-roeing, and destroying
sport in the sacred name of Liberty.
Scots wha fish wi' salmon roe,
Scots wha sniggle as ye go,
Wull ye stand the Bailie? No!
Let the limmer die!
Now's the day and now's the time,
Poison a' the burns wi' lime,
Fishing fair's a dastard crime,
We're for fishing _free_!
'Ydle persones sholde have but lyttyl mesure in the sayd disporte of
fysshyng,' says our old _Treatise_, but in southern Scotland they have
left few fish to dysporte with, and the trout is like to become an
extinct animal. Izaak would especially have disliked Fishing
Competitions, which, by dint of the multitude of anglers, turn the
contemplative man's recreation into a crowded skirmish; and we would
repeat his remark, 'the rabble herd themselves together' (a dozen in one
pool, often), 'and endeavour to govern and act in spite of authority.'
For my part, had I a river, I would gladly let all honest anglers that
use the fly cast line in it, but, where there is no protection, then
nets, poison, dynamite, slaughter of fingerlings, and unholy baits
devastate the fish, so that 'Free Fishing' spells no fishing at all. This
presses most hardly on the artisan who fishes fair, a member of a large
class with whose pastime only a churl would wish to interfere. We are
now compelled, if we would catch fish, to seek Tarpon in Florida, Mahseer
in India: it does not suffice to 'stretch our legs up Tottenham Hill.'