The Mackerel (Scomber scombrus) is too well known to require minute description. Who has not admired these fishes, with their steel-blue back, and changing iridescent sides of gold and purple and green, relieved by fine waving lines of deeper black, as they appear on the market-stalls, or as they are emptied in the early morning from the fishing-boat? The head is blue above, with black markings, the rest of the body being heightened with iridescent shades of gold and purple.
There are two species of mackerel—that of the Atlantic and of the Channel, which has no swimming-bladder, Scomber scombrus (Fig. 391), and the mackerel of the Mediterranean, Scomber colias, which has the swimming-bladder, and which is a very rare fish in our seas.
Fig. 391. The Mackerel (Scomber scombrus).
The mackerel is common to all European seas: being the Veirat of the Bay of Languedoc; the Aurion of Provence; the Bretal in some parts of Brittany; the Macarello of the modern Romans; the Scombro of the Venetians; the Lacesto of the Neapolitans; the Cavallo of the Spaniards; the well-known Mackerel of our own shores, and the Makril of the Swedes; it is found on the coast of North America, and as far south as the Canary Islands. It is a wandering, unsettled fish, supposed to be migratory, but individuals are always found on our coast. They are supposed to remain during the winter in the North Sea, and afterwards on the coast of Scotland and Ireland in January and February, on their way to the Atlantic. Here their great army is divided into two: one branch passes along the Spanish and Portuguese coasts, while the other enters the Channel. In May they appear on the coasts of England and France. In June they reach Holland. In July one portion of them returns to the Baltic, while another skirts the coast of Norway on its way to winter quarters.
Lacepede estimated that this migration, which is so regular, and its stages so rigorously indicated, was irreconcilable with a great number of very precise observations; and he arrived at the conclusion that the mackerel passes the winter at the bottom of the sea, more or less remote from the coast, which they again approach in the spring. At the commencement of the fine season they advance towards the shore which best agreed with them, showing themselves often on the surface, like the tunny, traversing the sea in courses more or less direct or sinuous, but never following the periodical circle which has been so ingeniously traced out for them.
Mr. Milne Edwards also remarks that, if these legions of fishes ascended from the Polar seas, they ought to visit the Orkneys before they appeared in the Channel, and enter the Mediterranean later in the season; but he is assured that they appear at the Orkneys late in the season. It appears, in short, that there are different varieties which haunt the several neighbourhoods in which they abound.
The largest mackerel are taken at the entrance of the Channel, but they are considered less delicate than the smaller fishes. The shoals of mackerel, it appears, never enter the Gulf of Gascony, but they abound along the shores of Brittany up to the North Sea. It is about the month of April that they begin to be met with, but they are still small and without milt or roe. In the months of June and July the fish is in its most perfect state. Towards the end of September and October mackerel of the same year's birth are taken; finally, in November and December, the fishermen still fish them, and send them to market, but this is an irregularity, and the fishermen of Lowestoft and Yarmouth take their great harvest in May and June; in the Firth of Forth, and on the north coast of Scotland, at a few weeks later.
Plate XXXII.—Fishing for Mackerel off the Cornwall Coast.