About a hundred years ago, as near as the oldest inhabitants can remember, a few men of Weymouth went down to Taunton with their ox-teams, and caught several barrels of herring as they came up the Taunton River to spawn. These fish they brought alive to Weymouth and liberated in Whitman's Pond; and these became the ancestors of the herring which have been returning to Whitman's Pond for the last century of Aprils.
As soon as the weather warms in the spring the herring make their appearance in the Run. A south wind along in April is sure to fetch them; and from the first day of their arrival, for about a month, they continue to come, on their way to the pond. But they may be delayed for weeks by cold or storms. Their sensitiveness to changes of temperature is quite as delicate as a thermometer's. On a favorable day—clear and sunny with a soft south wind—they can be seen stemming up-stream by hundreds. Suddenly the wind shifts, blowing up cold from the east, and long before the nicest instrument registers a fraction of change in the temperature of the Run, the herring have turned tail to and scurried off down-stream to the salt water.
They seem to mind nothing so much as this particular change of the wind and the cold that follows. It may blow or cloud over, and even rain, without affecting them, if only the storms are from the right quarter and it stays warm. A cold east wind always hurries them back to deep water, where they remain until the weather warms up again. Late in May, however, when they must lay their eggs, they ascend the stream, and nothing short of a four-foot dam will effectually stop their progress to the pond.
They are great swimmers. It is a live fish indeed that makes Whitman's Pond. There are flying-fish and climbing-fish, fish that walk over land and fish that burrow through the mud; but in an obstacle race, with a swift stream to stem, with rocks, logs, shallows, and dams to get over, you may look for a winner in the herring.
He will get up somehow—right side up or bottom side up, on his head or on his tail, swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes! A herring can almost walk on his tail. I have watched them swim up Herring Run with their backs half out of water; and when it became too shallow to swim at all, they would keel over on their sides and flop for yards across stones so bare and dry that a mud-minnow might easily have drowned upon them for lack of water.
"Swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes!"