According to the New Bedford Standard, the American whalers numbered 722, measuring 230,218 tons, in 1846. On the 31st December, 1872, the number was reduced to 204, with a tonnage of 47,787 tons, and the importation of whale and sperm oil amounted in that year to 79,000 barrels. Svend Foyn, an energetic Norwegian, now carries on the whale fishery in the Arctic Ocean in a steamer of 20 horse-power, accompanied by freight-ships for the oil. The whales are killed by explosive shells fired from a small cannon. The number usually killed by Foyn is from 35 to 45 per year.—The Commerce in the Products of the Sea, a report by Col. R. D. Cutts, communicated to the U. S. Senate. Washington, 1872.] The mere bulk of the whales destroyed in a single year by the American and the European vessels engaged in this fishery would form an island of no inconsiderable dimensions, and each one of those taken must have consumed, in the course of his growth, many times his own weight of mollusks. The destruction of the whales must have been followed by a proportional increase of the organisms they feed upon, and if we had the means of comparing the statistics of these humble forms of life, for even so short a period as that between the years 1760 and 1860, we should find a difference possibly sufficient to suggest an explanation of some phenomena at present unaccounted for. For instance, as I have observed in another work, [Footnote: The Origin and History of the English Language, &c., pp. 423, 424.] the phosphorescence of the sea was unknown to ancient writers, or at least scarcely noticed by them, and even Homer—who, blind as tradition makes him when he composed his epics, had seen, and marked, in earlier life, all that the glorious nature of the Mediterranean and its coasts discloses to unscientific observation—nowhere alludes to this most beautiful and striking of maritime wonders. In the passage just referred to, I have endeavored to explain the silence of ancient writers with respect to this as well as other remarkable phenomena on psychological grounds; but is it not possible that, in modern times, the animalculae which produce it may have immensely multiplied, from the destruction of their natural enemies by man, and hence that the gleam shot forth by their decomposition, or by their living processes, is both more frequent and more brilliant than in the days of classic antiquity?
Although the whale does not prey upon smaller creatures resembling himself in form and habits, yet true fishes are extremely voracious, and almost every tribe devours unsparingly the feebler species, and even the spawn and young of its own. [Footnote: Two young pickerel, Gystes fasciatus, five inches long, ate 128 minnows, an inch long, the first day they were fed, 132 the second, and 150 the third.—Fifth Report of Commissioners of Massachusetts for Introduction of Fish. 1871. p. 17.] The enormous destruction of the shark [Footnote: The shark is pursued in all the tropical and subtropical seas for its fins—for which there is a great demand in China as an article of diet—its oil and other products. About 40,000 are taken annually in the Indian Ocean and the contiguous seas. In the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean large numbers are annually caught. See MERK. Waarenlexikon—a work of great accuracy and value (Leipzig, 1870), article Haifisch.] the pike, the trout family, and other ravenous fish, as well as of the fishing birds, the seal, and the otter, by man, would naturally have occasioned a great increase in the weaker and more defenceless fish on which they feed, had he not been as hostile to them also as to their persecutors.
Destruction of Aquatic Animals.
It does not seem probable that man, with all his rapacity and all his enginery, will succeed in totally extirpating any salt-water fish, but he has already exterminated at least one marine warm-blooded animal—Steller's sea cow—and the walrus, the sea lion, and other large amphibia, as well as the principal fishing quadrupeds, are in imminent danger of extinction. Steller's sea cow, Rhytina Stelleri, was first seen by Europeans in the year 1741, on Bering's Island. It was a huge amphibious mammal, weighing not less than eight thousand pounds, and appears to have been confined exclusively to the islands and coasts in the neighborhood of Bering's Strait. Its flesh was very palatable, and the localities it frequented were easily accessible from the Russian establishments in Kamtschatka. As soon as its existence and character, and the abundance of fur animals in the same waters, were made known to the occupants of those posts by the return of the survivors of Bering's expedition, so active a chase was commenced against the amphibia of that region, that, in the course of twenty-seven years, the sea cow, described by Steller as extremely numerous in 1741, is believed to have been completely extirpated, not a single individual having been seen since the year 1768. The various tribes of seals [Footnote: The most valuable variety of fur seal, formerly abundant in all cold latitudes, is stated to have been completely exterminated in the Southern hemisphere, and to be now found only on one or two small islands of the Aleutian group. In 1867 more than 700,000 seal skins were imported into Great Britain, and at least 600,000 seals are estimated to have been taken in 1870. These numbers do not include the seals killed by the Esquimaux and other rude tribes.] in the Northern and Southern Pacific, the walrus [Footnote: In 1868, a few American ships engaged in the North Pacific whale fishery turned their attention to the walrus, and took from 200 to 600 each. In 1869 other whalers engaged in the same pursuit, and in 1870 the American fleet is believed to have destroyed not less than fifty thousand of these animals. They yield about twenty gallons of oil and four or five pounds of ivory each.] and the sea otter, are already so reduced in numbers that they seem destined soon to follow the sea cow, unless protected by legislation stringent enough, and a police energetic enough, to repress the ardent cupidity of their pursuers. The seals, the otter tribe, and many other amphibia which feed almost exclusively upon fish, are extremely voracious, and of course their destruction or numerical reduction must have favored the multiplication of the species of fish principally preyed upon by them. I have been assured by the keeper of several young seals that, if supplied at frequent intervals, each seal would devour not less than fourteen pounds of fish, or about a quarter of his own weight, in a day. A very intelligent and observing hunter, who has passed a great part of his life in the forest, after carefully watching the habits of the fresh-water otter of the North American States, estimates their consumption of fish at about four pounds per day. Man has promoted the multiplication of fish by making war on their brute enemies, but he has by no means thereby compensated his own greater destructiveness. [Footnote: According to Hartwig, the United Provinces of Holland had, in 1618, three thousand herring busses, and nine thousand vessels engaged in the transport of these fish to market. The whole number of persons employed in the Dutch herring fishery was computed at 200,000.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, this fishery was most successfully prosecuted by the Swedes, and in 1781, the town of Gottenburg alone exported 136,649 barrels, each containing 1,200 herrings, making a total of about 164,000,000; but so rapid was the exhaustion of the fish, from this keen pursuit, that in 1799 it was found necessary to prohibit the exportation of them altogether.—Das Leben des Meeres, p. 182.
In 1855, the British fisheries produced 900,000 barrels, or almost enough to supply a fish to every human inhabitant of the globe.
On the shores of Long Island Sound, the white fish, a species of herring too bony to be easily eaten, is used as manure in very great quantities. Ten thousand are employed as a dressing for an acre, and a single net has sometimes taken 200,000 in a day.—Dwight's Travels, ii. pp. 512, 515. The London Times of May 11, 1872, informs us that 1,100 tons of mackerel estimated to weigh one pound each had recently been taken in a single night at a fishing station on the British coast.
About ten million eels are sold annually in Billingsgate market, but vastly greater numbers of the young fry, when but three or four inches long, are taken. So abundant are they at the mouths of many French and English rivers, that they are carried into the country by cart-loads, and not only eaten, but given to swine or used as manure.] The bird and beast of prey, whether on land or in the water, hunt only as long as they feel the stimulus of hunger, their ravages are limited by the demands of present appetite, and they do not wastefully destroy what they cannot consume. Man, on the contrary, angles to-day that he may dine to-morrow; he takes and dries millions of fish on the banks of Newfoundland and the coast of Norway, that the fervent Catholic of the shores of the Mediterranean may have wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of the stomach during next year's Lent, without violating the discipline of the papal church; [Footnote: The fisheries of Sicily alone are said to yield 20,000 tons of tunny a year. The tunny is principally consumed in Italy during Lent, and a large proportion of the twenty millions of codfish taken annually at the Lofoden fishery on the coast of Norway is exported to the Mediterranean.] and all the arrangements of his fisheries are so organized as to involve the destruction of many more fish than are secured for human use, and the loss of a large proportion of the annual harvest of the sea in the process of curing, or in transportation to the places of its consumption. [Footnote According to Berthelote, in the Gulf of Lyons, between Marseilles and the easternmost spur of the Pyrenees, about 5,000,000 small fish ate taken annually with the drag-net, and not lees than twice as many more, not to spekak of spawn, are destroyed by the use of this act.
Between 1861 and 1865 France imported from Norway, for use as bait in the Sardine fishery, cod-roes to the value of three million francs.—Cutts, Report on Commerce in the Products of the Sea, 1872, p. 82.
The most reckless waste of aquatic life I remember to have seen noticed, if we except the destruction of herring and other fish with upawn, is that of the eggs of the turtle in the Amazon for the sake of the oil extracted from then. Bates estimates the eggs thus annually sacrificed at 48,000,000.-Naturalits inthe Amazon, 2d edition, 1864, p. 805.] Fish are more affected than quadrupeds by slight and even imperceptible differences in their breeding places and feeding grounds. Every river, every brook, every lake stamps a special character upon its salmon, its shad, and its trout, which is at once recognized by those who deal in or consume them. No skill can give the fish fattened by food selected and prepared by man the flavor of those which are nourished at the table of nature, and the trout of the artificial pouds in Germany and Switzerland are so inferior to the brook-fish of the same species and climate, that it is hard to believe them identical. The superior sapidity of the American trout and other fresh-water fishes to the most nearly corresponding European species, which is familiar to every one acquainted with both continents, is probably due less to specific difference than to the fact that, even in the parts of the New World which have been longest cultivated, wild nature is not yet tamed down to the character it has assumed in the Old, and which it will acquire in America also when her civilization shall be as ancient as is now that of Europe. [Footnote: It is possible that time may modify the habits of the fresh-water fish the North American States, and accommodate them to the new physical conditions of their native waters. Hence it may be hoped that nature, even unaided by art, will do something towards restoring the ancient plenty of our lakes and rivers. The decrease of our fresh-water fish cannot be alone to exhaustion by fishing, for in the waters of the valleys and flanks of the Alps, which have been inhabited and fished ten times as long by a denser population, fish are still very abundant, and they thrive and multiply under circumstances where no American species could live at all. On the southern slope of those mountains, trout are caught in great numbers, in the swift streams which rush from the glaciers, and where the water is of icy coldness, and so turbid with particles of fine-ground rock, that you cannot see an inch below the surface. The glacier streams of Switzerland, however, are less abundant in fish.]