FIG. (A).—PUTCHER FOR CATCHING SALMON.
Salmon fishing was carried on partly by nets from fishing boats, partly by rows of baskets known as “putts” or “putchers.” The boats during the boat fishing lay above the edge of the water on the sloping and slippery frontage of the shore. When the tide served for fishing, the men went down from the village above the cliffs to their boats across the flat and precipitously-edged grass, between the base of the low cliffs and the sloping shore. Each man wriggled with might and main at his boat till he loosened its adhesion to the tenacious mud and started it on its slide with its bows foremost towards the water. Once off, of course the pace accelerated; its owner, running behind, held on and clambered in as best he could, and the two arrived safely and with a great jolt on the water. The boats then formed in line, secured by being tied stern to stern at about a boat’s length from each other, and presumably anchored also, but this I do not remember. The net of each boat was lowered, and nothing further occurred till a fish was captured; then the net was lifted, the fish, shining in all the beauty of its silvery scales, taken out, and the net lowered again. These were the best fish; those that were caught in the putts were “drowned” fish, and unless the fishermen were fairly on the alert to secure them before the falling tide had left the baskets long uncovered, there was a very good chance of the eyes being pecked out or the fish otherwise disfigured by birds.
The putcher or basket fishing was carried on by means of very open extinguisher-shaped baskets each long enough to hold, it can hardly be said accommodate, a good-sized salmon. The frame or stand on which these baskets were fixed was formed of two rows of strong poles or upright pieces of wood, running down the shore, across the narrow of the river, for many yards, firmly fixed between high and low tide level, at such a distance as would allow the baskets to reach from one side to the other. Horizontal poles or pieces of wood connected the upright poles, and to these horizontal supports the baskets were attached, so as to form rows with the open ends of the extinguishers facing up stream and all ranged one storey above the other. The fish were drifted into the basket trap, and of course, though they might injure themselves in their struggles, and to some degree their market value, they were powerless to effect their escape and withdraw backward against the set of the tide.[[19]]
The much larger form of basket described by Mr. Buckland as “putts,” and as being used for catching flat fish, was of a slightly different make—formed only of two instead of three pieces; one large piece, so wide at the opening that I, as a girl, had no difficulty in standing within it, and a very much smaller piece, forming a kind of nose. This little adjunct was, I believe, taken off and searched by the fishermen for what it contained. To my sister Georgiana and myself it was a great pleasure to go down to where the two great eel-putts stood on clean shore at very low tide below the longest row of salmon-putchers, and search for anything that was to be found. My sister was a good conchologist. We searched for seaweed, &c., &c., and thereby got a deal of pleasant amusement. The fishermen, who knew us well, made no objection to our investigations, though, as one of the men remarked on one occasion, “It was not everybody they liked to see near the putts.”
In our immediate neighbourhood the fishermen were quiet—at least I never heard of their getting into very objectionable difficulties—but about eight miles higher up the river, near Lydney, things in this respect were by no means all that could be wished. On one occasion they captured the Fishery Inspector himself—whose duty it was to ascertain that the meshes were not below a certain measurement—and secured him in the nets. Another time somebody (who, unluckily for him, bore some resemblance to the obnoxious inspector) got nearly sloughed up in one of the great marsh ditches, and would have been left to live or die as might chance—probably the latter—but for the arrival of timely help. My father being one of the acting magistrates of the district, we used to hear from time to time of these and other “mauvaises plaisanteries” in the neighbourhood of the Forest of Dean.
On reference to the portion of the Ordnance Map (plate [IX].) it will be seen that there is a broad band marked “mud,” of about a sixth of a mile in width at the widest part and extending for about a mile and a half by the side of the deep channel of the Severn, between it and the cliffs of the Beachley and Sedbury Bay.
The most remarkable capture of which I have any recollection as taking place in the waters, or rather in the mud of the Severn, was said to be a “Bottle-nosed whale,” or Dolphin, Delphinus tursio, Fabr., but it was so many decades of years ago, that I have no means now of turning to any record for verification of the species. The capture itself excited a deal of local interest. It was on a summer morning that one of my brothers, enlivening his vacation studies, as was his custom, by watching through his telescope anything of interest that might be going on amongst the shipping or elsewhere, saw something like an enormous fish struggling and “flopping” on the Beachley pier of the old Passage Ferry. As a matter of course, we young folks set off after luncheon to have our share of the sight, and found the creature had been captured when lying helpless, or half dead, in the mud at the Aust side of the Ferry, and had been towed across behind a boat. At this distance of time I only remember the whale- or dolphin-like shape of the animal, its great size, and that it was apparently of a greyish colour; but this item might very likely be from its being coated with Severn mud. In Bell’s “British Quadrupeds” the greatest length recorded of various specimens found in England is 12 feet. The colour of the back is black, with a purplish tinge, becoming dusky on the sides, and dirty white on the belly. This species is considered rare in England and it is of some interest, in referring to the locality of what may be called our own capture, that “The first account which we have of its appearance on our own shores is that of John Hunter,” and it was taken with its young one “on the sea coast near Berkeley”; that is about two or three miles higher up the left bank of the Severn than the Aust Cliffs. Another specimen was found in the river Dart in Devonshire, and, it was stated, “was killed with difficulty, the poor animal having suffered for four hours the attacks of eight men armed with spears and two guns, and assisted by dogs. When wounded it made a noise like the bellowing of a bull.”[[20]] In the case of the Old Passage specimen the poor creature was also most barbarously treated, chiefly by being attacked by the running of hay forks, pitch forks, and the like, into its body, and I remember a good deal of chopping with hatchets or axes, but it was quite quiet and, it was to be hoped, was past feeling pain. Immense popular interest, of course, was excited as to the precise nature of the unusual “take,” as to whether it was a Leviathan, or possibly the kind of fish that swallowed Jonah—but the affair ended by the creature being shipped off to Bristol to be turned into a little money for the boatmen who secured it, and no other cetacean was taken during the remainder of the years in which Sedbury was my home.