A Guide to the Study of Fishes, Volume 1 (of 2)

by David Starr Jordan

Fisheries.—With the multiplicity of apparatus for fishing, there is the greatest variety in the boats which may be used. The fishing-fleet of any port of the world is a most interesting object, as are also the fishermen with their quaint garb, plain speech, and their strange songs and calls with the hauling in of the net.

Fig. 223.—Fishing for Ayu in the Tanagawa, Japan. Emptying the pouch of the cormorant. (Photograph by J. O. Snyder.)

For much information on the fishing apparatus in use in America the reader is referred to the Reports of the Fisheries in the Tenth Census, in 1880, under the editorship of Dr. George Brown Goode. In these reports Goode, Stearns, Earle, Gilbert, Bean, and the present writer have treated very fully of all economic relations of the American fishes. In an admirable work entitled "American Fishes," Dr. Goode, with the fine literary touch of which he was master, has fully discoursed of the game- and food-fishes of America with especial reference to the habits and methods of capture of each. To these sources, to Jordan and Evermann's "Food and Game Fishes of North America," and to many other works of similar purport in other lands, the reader is referred for an account of the economic and the human side of fish and fisheries.

Angling.—It is no part of the purpose of this work to describe the methods or materials of angling, still less to sing its praises as a means of physical or moral regeneration. We may perhaps find room for a first and a last word on the subject; the one the classic from the pen of the angler of the brooks of Staffordshire, and the other the fresh expression of a Stanford student setting out for streams such as Walton never knew, the Purissima, the Stanislaus, or perchance his home streams, the Provo or the Bear.

"And let me tell you, this kind of fishing with a dead rod, and laying night-hooks, are like putting money to use; for they both work for the owners when they do nothing but sleep, or eat, or rejoice, as you know we have done this last hour, and sat as quietly and as free from cares under this sycamore as Virgil's Tityrus and his Melibœus did under their broad beech-tree. No life, my honest scholar,—no life so happy and so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler; for when the lawyer is swallowed up with business and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on the cowslip-banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silent silver streams which we now see glide so quietly by us. Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, 'Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did'; and so, if I might be judge, 'God never made a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.'

"I'll tell you, scholar, when I sat last on this primrose-bank, and looked down these meadows, I thought of them as Charles the Emperor did of Florence, 'That they were too pleasant to be looked on but only on holidays.'

"Gentle Izaak! He has been dead these many years, but his disciples are still faithful. When the cares of business lie heavy and the sound of wheels jarring on cobbled streets grows painful, one's fingers itch for the rod; one would away to the quiet brook among the pines, where one has fished so often. Every man who has ever got the love of the stream in his blood feels often this longing.

"It comes to me each year with the first breath of spring. There is something in the sweetness of the air, the growing things, the 'robin in the greening grass' that voices it. Duties that have before held in their performance something of pleasure become irksome, and practical thoughts of the day's work are replaced by dreamy pictures of a tent by the side of a mountain stream—close enough to hear the water's singing in the night. Two light bamboo rods rest against the tent-pole, and a little column of smoke rising straight up through the branches marks the supper fire. Jack is preparing the evening meal, and, as I dream, there comes to me the odor of crisply browned trout and sputtering bacon—was ever odor more delicious? I dare say that had the good Charles Lamb smelled it as I have, his 'Dissertation on Roast Pig' would never have been written. But then Charles Lamb never went a-fishing as we do here in the west—we who have the mountains and the fresh air so boundlessly.

"And neither did Izaak Walton for that matter. He who is sponsor for all that is gentle in angling missed much that is best in the sport by living too early. He did not experience the exquisite pleasure of wading down mountain streams in supposedly water-proof boots and feeling the water trickling in coolingly; nor did he know the joy of casting a gaudy fly far ahead with a four-ounce rod, letting it drift, insect-like, over that black hole by the tree stump, and then feeling the seaweed line slip through his fingers to the whirr of the reel. And, at the end of the day, supper over, he did not squat around a big camp-fire and light his pipe, the silent darkness of the mountains gathering round, and a basketful of willow-packed trout hung in the clump of pines by the tent. Izaak's idea of fishing did not comprehend such joy. With a can of worms and a crude hook, he passed the day by quiet streams, threading the worms on his hook and thinking kindly of all things. The day's meditations over, he went back to the village, and, mayhap, joined a few kindred souls over a tankard of ale at the sign of the Red Lobster. But he missed the mountains, the water rushing past his tent, the bacon and trout, the camp-fire—the physical exaltation of it all. His kind of fishing was angling purely, while modern Waltons, as a rule, eschew the worm.