Salmo Rossii
The salmon not only frequents the streams of Northern Europe but ascends in vast multitudes the giant rivers of Siberia and of North America. It is fished by the Ostjak and the Tunguse, and speared by the Indian of the New World. Ross's Arctic salmon, which is of a more slender form than the common salmon, differently marked and coloured, and with a remarkably long under jaw, is so extremely abundant in the sea near the mouths of the rivers of Boothia Felix that 3,378 were obtained at one haul of a small-sized seine. The rivers of Kamtschatka abound in salmon of various kinds, so that the stream, swelling as it were with living waves, not seldom overflows its banks and casts multitudes ashore. Steller affirms that, in that almost uninhabited peninsula, the bears and dogs and other animals catch more of these fishes with their mouths and feet than man in other countries with all his cunning devices of net and angle.
The salmon of Iceland, which formerly remained undisturbed by the phlegmatic inhabitants, are now caught in large numbers for the British market. A small river, bearing the significant name of Laxaa or Salmon river, has been rented for the trifling sum of 100l. a year by an English company which sends every spring its agents to the spot, well provided with the best fishing apparatus. The captured fish are immediately boiled and hermetically packed in tin boxes, so that they can be eaten in London almost as fresh as if they had just been caught. Other valuable salmon-streams in Iceland and Norway pay us a similar tribute; and as commerce, aided by the steamboat and the railway, extends her empire, rivers more and more distant are made to supply the deficiencies of our native streams. More than 150,000 salmon are annually caught in Aljaska—not a quarter of a century ago a real "ultima Thule"—and after having been well pickled and smoked at the various fishing-stations are chiefly sent from Sitcha to Hamburg.
Nature has denied the salmon to the streams of Australia and New Zealand; but as the eggs of this fish can be preserved for a very long time, they have been transported with perfect success to those far-distant colonies.
Tunny.
If neither the salmon, nor the common herring, nor the cod, dwell in the Mediterranean, the fishermen of that sea rejoice in the capture of the Tunny, the chief of the mackerel or scomberoid family. Its usual length is about two feet, but it sometimes grows to eight or ten; and Pennant saw one killed in 1769, when he was at Inverary, that weighed 460 pounds. The flesh is as firm as that of the sturgeon, but of a finer flavour.
"In May and June," says Mr. Yarrell, "the adult fish rove along the coast of the Mediterranean in large shoals and triangular array. They are extremely timid, and easily induced to take a new and apparently an open course, in order to avoid any suspected danger. But the fishermen take advantage of this peculiarity for their destruction by placing a look-out or sentinel on some elevated spot, who makes the signal that the shoal of tunnies is approaching, and points out the direction in which it will come. Immediately a great number of boats set off, range themselves in a curved line, and, joining their nets, form an enclosure which alarms the fish, while the fishermen, drawing closer and closer, and adding fresh nets, still continue driving the tunnies towards the shore, where they are ultimately killed with poles.
"But the grandest mode of catching the tunny is by means of the French madrague, or, as the Italians call it, tonnaro. Series of long and deep nets, fixed vertically by corks at their upper edges, and with lead and stones at the bottom, are kept in a particular position by anchors, so as to form an enclosure parallel to the coast, sometimes extending an Italian mile in length; this is divided into several chambers by nets placed across, leaving narrow openings on the land side. The tunnies pass between the coast and the tonnaro; when arrived at the end, they are stopped by one of the cross-nets, which closes the passage against them, and obliges them to enter the tonnaro by the opening which is left for them. When once in, they are driven by various means from chamber to chamber to the last, which is called the chamber of death. Here a strong net, placed horizontally, that can be raised at pleasure, brings the tunnies to the surface, and the work of destruction commences. The tonnaro fishery used to be one of the great amusements of rich Sicilians, and, at the same time, one of the most considerable sources of their wealth. When Louis XIII. visited Marseilles, he was invited to a tunny-fishery, at the principal madrague of Morgiou, and found the diversion so much to his taste that he often said it was the pleasantest day he had spent in his whole progress through the south."