FECUNDITY.
Five minutes after midnight of St. John's—24th to 25th of June, commences the great Herring Fishery, in the North Seas. Phosphoric lights gleam and flash upon the waters, and from deck to deck is heard the hearty hail, "Look out, there! The Herring lightning!" And a real, and a vast lightning that is, as from the depths that vast mass of life springs upward in eager quest of heat, light, and dalliance. The soft, pale, silvery light of the Moon is well pleasing to that timorous host; a beacon to guide them to their great banquet of Love. Upward they spring, one and all; not one idler or straggler remains behind. Gregariousness is the fixed rule, the indefeasible law of that race; you never see them but in shoals. In shoals they lie buried in the vast dark depths, and in shoals they come to the surface to take their summer part in the universal joy, to see the light, to revel—and to die. Packed, squeezed, crushed, layer on layer, it seems that they never can be close enough, they swim in such compact masses that the Dutch fishermen compare them to their own Dykes—afloat! Between Scotland, Holland and Norway, one might fancy that an immense island had suddenly risen, and that a whole continent was about to arise. One division detaches itself eastward, and chokes up the Baltic sound. In some of the narrower straits you actually cannot row, so dense and solid is the mass of fish. Millions, tens of millions, tens of thousands of millions;—who can even guess at the number of those hosts upon hosts? It is on record that on one occasion, near Havre, one fisherman, on one morning, found in his nets no fewer than eight hundred thousand; and in Scotland, the mighty mass of eleven thousand barrels was taken in a single night!
They come as a blinded and doomed prey; no amount of destruction can discourage them. Constantly preyed upon alike by fish and by men, they still come on in myriad shoals. And no marvel either; for they love and multiply, even as they move. Kill them as fast as we may, they just as fast reproduce; their vast, deep columns, even as they float along, give themselves wholly up to the great work of reproduction. The wave of the sea and the electric wave impel that whole vast mass at every instant. No weariness, no satiety, no weakness, not even a pause, take one where you will and it either has just propagated, is propagating, or is about to propagate. In that vast polygamous host, pleasure is an adventure and love a navigation. Over every league of its passage it pours out its torrents of fecundity.
At some two or three fathoms deep the water is completely discolored by the incredible abundance of the Herring-spawn; and at sunrise, far as the eye can reach, you may see the water whitened with the marvellous abundance of the thick, fat, viscuous billows in which life is fermenting into new life. Over hundreds of square leagues it seems as though a volcano of teeming and fecund milk had burst forth and overwhelmed the sea.
Full of life as it is at the surface, the Sea would be actually choked up with it but for the fierce and eager union of all sorts of destructions. Let us remember that each Herring has forty, fifty, or even seventy thousand eggs. But for the thinning process, each of them giving the average increase of fifty thousand, and as each of these in its turn giving the same average increase, a very few generations would suffice to solidify the Ocean into a stagnant and putrid mass, and make our whole globe a desert. Here we see the imperative necessity to Life, of life's twin sister, Death; in their immense strife there is harmony; destruction is the handmaiden of preservation.
In the universal war carried on against the doomed race, it is the fierce giants of the deep that prevent the mass from dispersing, and drive it in dense shoals to our shores. The whale, and the other cetaceæ, plunge into the living mass, swallow down whole tons, and drive shoreward the still vast, the seemingly undiminished, host. And at the shore commences quite another and more vast destruction. In the first place, the smallest of fish devour the spawn of the Herring, swallowing, like any human spendthrift, the great future for the small present. And for the present, for the full-grown Herring, nature has provided a very efficiently gluttonous foe, dull-eyed, huge appetited, eager, insatiable,—the whole tribe of fish-devouring fish, Cod, Whiting, &c. The Whiting gloats, devours, crams itself so with Herring that it becomes one luscious mass of fat. The Cod similarly stuffs itself with Whitings, and becomes fat, fecund, overflowing with fecundity—with a really threatening superabundance of fecundity. Just consider! What we have seen of the fecundity of the Herring is a mere nothing when compared to the fecundity of the Cod, which not seldom has nine millions of eggs! A cod weighing fifty pounds has fourteen pounds of eggs; and its breeding season is nine months of every year. This is the creature that, unchecked, would soon solidify the Ocean and destroy the world. And accordingly we cry "Help! To arms! Launch ships and away, to check this too vigorous fecundity." England alone sends some twenty or thirty thousand seamen to the Cod Fisheries. And how many are sent from America, from France, from Holland—from everywhere? The Cod alone has caused the foundation of whole towns—of whole colonies! The catching and curing of the Cod form an art, and that art has its own idiom—the patois of the Cod fishery.
But what could man do against the enormous fecundity of the cod? Nature knows well that our petty efforts of fleets and fisheries would be insufficient and that the Cod would conquer us; and nature evokes another and a more efficient destroyer of the superfluous life that would produce universal death. Down from its spawning bed in the river, thin, famishing, eager, fierce with hunger, comes the Sturgeon, that great devourer. Real rapture it is to the famishing glutton to find, on his return to the sea, ready fattened for him, the succulent and unctuous Cod, the concentrated substance of whole shoals of Herrings! This great devourer of the cod, though less fecund than its prey, is fecund, producing fifteen hundred thousand eggs. The danger reappears. The Herring threatened with its terrible fecundity, the Cod threatened, the sturgeon threatens still. Nature, therefore, produced a creature superb in destroying, almost powerless to reproduce, a monster at once terrible and serviceable that could cut through this otherwise invincible and ruinous fecundity, an omnivorous monster, huge of jaw and constant in appetite, ready for all prey, living or dead, the great, the perfectionated, the matchless devourer—the Shark.
But these furious devourers are anticipatively kept down; mighty in destroying, they are very slow in reproducing. The Sturgeon, as we have seen is less prolific than the Cod, and the Shark is actually sterile, if compared to any other fish. Not like them does it overspread and discolor the sea. Viviparous, it sends forth its rare youngling, fierce, fully armed, savage and terrible.