Long-Line Fishing--Scarcity of Fish--Their Fecundity--Large
Specimen of the Raia Chagrinea--The Wolf-Fish--The Devil-Fish.
For several years past [March 1870] the spring fishing with "long
lines" in our western lochs has been so unsuccessful as to be hardly
worth the while engaging in it. At our very doors, where with the
hand-line during the summer and autumn months, some ten or twelve
years ago, we could almost always depend on a large basketful of
the finest rock cod, gurnard, haddock, and flounder, as the result
of a couple of hours fishing, more recently very few, and sometimes
none at all, could be caught, with the cunningest exercise of all
the patience and piscatorial skill at our command, while in winter
and spring the long-line fishing of grey cod, skate, and ling, and
eel has been equally disappointing. Why it should be so no one would
venture to say; the utmost you could get out of the oldest fisherman
on the coast was an admission of the fact, with a shake of the head
and a shrug of the shoulders, that if so disposed you could very
readily interpret into the line, albeit unknown to him, that--
"'Twas true 'twas pity, pity 'twas 'twas true,"
a cautious reticence on the point that was altogether praiseworthy,
for really and truly nobody did know or could say anything satisfactory
in explanation of the mystery. Was it owing to the multiplication of
the number of steamers, screw and paddle, constantly coming and going,
and like Tennyson's "years" at their unamiable meeting, "roaring and
blowing," keeping the waters in perpetual turmoil, and scaring the
fish from their usual haunts? Such an hypothesis could be seriously
entertained for a moment only to be rejected. Could it be owing to
any cyclical meteorological changes, or to anything anomalous in the
order of the seasons? Admitting that something of this kind has been
going on for some time, and is still going on, it was readily seen,
nevertheless, that it was all too inappreciable and remote to have
had the result complained of--to cause that in the waters of "the
great deep" which it had failed to effect in any noticeable way on
the dry land. Or, was it that the fish themselves, by reason of their
numberless enemies, afloat and ashore, were actually diminishing in
numbers, and so necessarily becoming scarcer from year to year? No one,
however, knowing anything of the economy of the fish in question,
could for a moment entertain such an idea. The fecundity of these
fish is something incredible. We once had the roe of a female cod,
that weighed (the fish) six lbs., first boiled hard, and then divided
with tolerable exactness into so many ounces, and counting the number
of eggs in one ounce, and multiplying by the number of ounces in the
entire roe, we found, at a rough calculation, that in that single
fish, of no great size, there were upwards of a million and a half
of eggs--each egg destined to become a fish, and, barring accidents,
to attain to the average age and size of its kind. But however we
may try to account for the scarcity of these fish in our lochs for
several years back, it is an agreeable duty to have to record that
during the past winter and spring there has been a marked improvement
alike in the quantity and quality of the fish caught all along the
western seaboard. Not only have the common fish of our own coasts
been taken in considerable numbers, but several kinds of fish formerly
known only as occasional visitors to our shores have this season been
plentiful in all our lochs, and have well repaid the diligence of their
captors. The long-nosed skate, for example, formerly a rare fish with
us, has this season been common. It is known to ichthyologists as the
Raia chagrinea, and is not only excellent eating, but from its enormous
liver supplies a large quantity of very fine oil, that burns with a
clearer and steadier light than that of any other fish with which we
are acquainted. We are convinced, by the way, that, used medicinally,
it would be found equally efficacious with cod liver oil in all cases
where the latter is recommended, whilst its rather agreeable taste and
flavour would render it a tolerably palatable dose in its purest and
strongest state, which cod oil never becomes, manufacture, and decoct,
and clarify it as you may. A very fine specimen of the Chagrinea
was caught here about ten days ago. It was cut up and disembowelled
before we saw it, but we should guess that its weight when taken off
the hook could not have been less than 70 lbs. All the skates are ugly
brutes, and the long-nosed Chagrinea is at once perhaps the ugliest
and the best of its tribe. Some people don't eat skate, nor can we
say that we are partial to it ourselves, though we once heard a noted
gourmand declare that the "wing of a skate was equal to a shoulder of
a salmon." We should, for our own part, rather have the salmon. While
in Oban about a month ago, an extremely fierce-looking and ugly fish,
the name and character whereof not a little puzzled its captors, was
brought for our inspection. Luckily for our credit as a naturalist,
we had previously seen more than one specimen of the same fish with
the St. Andrews fishermen, it being by no means a rare visitor to
the eastern and north-eastern shores of Scotland. It was the wolf or
cat-fish, closely related to the family of the Gobies (Gobioidæ),
the Anarrhicas lupus of ichthyologists. The head of this curious
and most repulsive-looking fish has some peculiar markings, which,
with the fierce glaring eyes and their position in the face, and the
formidable array of long, sharp-pointed, recurved teeth, give it much
of the expression of an enraged cat, and hence doubtless its common
name. For the same reasons, and on account probably of its character as
a fierce, relentless tyrant among more amiable and less powerful fish,
it is known among the Channel Islands and along the coasts of England
as the wolf-fish. The only fish at all approaching it in ugliness and
repulsiveness of features is the better-known angler or fishing-frog
(Lophius piscatorius), which also, by the way, is not so common of
late years on our western coasts as it used to be.