Trout Flies of Devon and Cornwall, and When and How to Use Them

by G. W. Soltau

Isaac Walton, was born at Stafford, in August, 1593. He settled in London as a shopkeeper, in the Royal Exchange; and, as in the year 1624, he was fixed in a different part of the city, it is supposed, he was one of the first inhabitants of that building; and being then but twenty-three years, was perhaps one of those industrious young men whom, as we are told, the munificent founder himself, Sir Thomas Gresham, placed in the shops erected over that edifice. We next hear of him in Chancery Lane, where he carried on the trade of a linen draper. About 1643, he left London with a fortune, very far short of what would now be called a competency; we are told he subsequently “lived at Stafford and elsewhere, but mostly in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, of whom he was much beloved.” He employed his time in writing several biographical works, and at the advanced age of eighty-three, (which, to use his own words) “might have procured him a writ of ease, and secured him from all further trouble in that kind,” he undertook to write the life of Dr. Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, which was published in 1677. In 1683, when he was ninety years old, he published “Thealma and Clearchus,” a pastoral history, in smooth and easy verse. He lived but a short time after the publication of this poem; for, as Wood says, “he ended his days on the fifteenth day of December, 1683,—in the great frost at Winchester, at the house of Dr. William Hawkins, a prebendary of the church there, where he lies buried.”

The “Complete Angler” has passed through several editions; and, although the art has greatly improved since Walton’s day, its perusal will afford much information and amusement, as well to the sportsman as the general reader; for, in the words of one of the editors, “let no man imagine, that a work on such a subject, must necessarily be unentertaining, or trifling, or even uninstructive; for the contrary will most evidently appear, from a perusal of this excellent piece, which, whether we consider the elegant simplicity of the style; the ease, and unaffected humour of the dialogue; the lovely scenes which it delineates; the enchanting pastoral poetry which it contains; or, the fine morality it so sweetly inculcates; has hardly its fellow in any of the modern languages.”

These remarks are very applicable to other treatises which have appeared on the same subject, more especially those of Shaw, Scrope, and Sir H. Davie; indeed, there are few works more beautifully written than “Salmonia,” wherein the talented author thus alludes to his favorite recreation.

“The search after food, is an instinct belonging to our nature; and from the savage in his rudest and most primitive state, who destroys a piece of game, or a fish, with a club or spear—to man in the most cultivated state of society, who employs artifice, machinery, and the resources of various other animals to secure his object, the origin of the pleasure is similar, and its object the same; but that kind of it requiring most art, may be said to characterise man in his highest or intellectual state; and the fisher for salmon or trout with the fly, employs not only machinery to assist his physical powers, but applies sagacity to conquer difficulties; and the pleasure derived from ingenious resources and devices, as well as from active pursuit, belongs to this amusement. Then as to his philosophical tendency; it is a pursuit of moral discipline—requiring patience, forbearance and command of temper. As connected with natural science, it may be vaunted as demanding a knowledge of the habits of a considerable tribe of created beings—fishes, and the animals that they prey upon; and an acquaintance with the signs and tokens of the weather and its changes, the nature of waters and of the atmosphere. As to its poetical relations, it carries us into the most wild and beautiful scenery of nature; amongst the mountain lakes, and the clear and lovely streams that gush from the higher ranges of elevated hills—or that make their way through the cavities of calcareous strata.

“How delightful in the early spring, after the dull and tedious time of winter, when the frosts disappear, and the sunshine warms the earth and waters, to wander forth by some clear stream, to see the leaf bursting from the purple bud, or scent the odours of the bank perfumed by the violet, and enamelled, as it were, with the primrose and the daisy;—to wander upon the fresh turf below the shade of trees, whose bright blossoms are filled with the music of the bee,—and on the surface of the waters to view the gaudy flies sparkling like animated gems in the sunbeams, whilst the bright and beautiful trout is watching them from below;—to hear the twittering of the water-birds, who, alarmed at your approach, rapidly hide themselves beneath the flowers and leaves of the water-lily;—and as the season advances, to find all these objects changed for others of the same kind, but better and brighter, till the swallow and the trout contend as it were for the gaudy May fly, and till, in pursuing your amusement in the calm and balmy evening, you are serenaded by the songs of the cheerful thrush and the melodious nightingale, performing the offices of maternal love, in thickets ornamented with the rose and the woodbine.”

Sir H. Davie’s researches in natural history, are exhibited in many parts of this interesting work, and his suggestions with reference to the migration of animals, will account for those phenomena, which direct the operations of the sportsman whether armed with gun or rod. He is of opinion that the two great causes of the change of place of animals is the providing of food for themselves and resting places and food for their young. The great supposed migrations of herrings from the poles to the temperate zone, he considers to be only the approach of successive shoals from deep to shallow water, for the purpose of spawning.

The migrations of salmon and trout are evidently for the purpose of depositing their ova—or of finding food after they have spawned.

Swallows and bee-eaters, decidedly pursue flies half the globe over; the snipe tribe in like manner, search for worms and larvæ—flying from those countries where either frost or dryness prevents them from boring—making generally small flights at a time, and resting on their travels where they find food. A journey from England to Africa is no more for an animal that can fly with the wind one hundred miles in an hour, than a journey for a Londoner to his seat in a distant province.

The migration of smaller fishes or birds always occasions the migration of larger ones, that prey on them:—thus, the seal follows the salmon in summer, to the mouths of rivers—the hake follows the herring and pilchard—hawks are seen in great quantities in the month of May, coming into the east of Europe after quails and landrails—and locusts are followed by numerous birds, that fortunately for the agriculturists, make them their prey.