CHAPTER V.
OF THE FISH.
§ 21. As for fish, both of fresh and salt water, of shell fish, and others, no country can boast of more variety, greater plenty, or of better in their several kinds.
In the spring of the year herrings come up in such abundance into their brooks and fords to spawn, that it is almost impossible to ride through without treading on them. Thus do those poor creatures expose their own lives to some hazard, out of their care to find a more convenient reception for their young, which are not yet alive. Thence it is that at this time of the year the freshes of the rivers, like that of the Broadruck, stink of fish.
Besides these herrings, there come up likewise into the freshes from the sea multitudes of shad, rock, sturgeon, and some few lampreys, which fasten themselves to the shad, as the remora of Imperatus is said to do to the shark of Tiburone. They continue their stay there about three months. The shads at their first coming up are fat and fleshy; but they waste so extremely in milting and spawning, that at their going down they are poor, and seem fuller of bones, only because they have less flesh. It is upon this account (I suppose) that those in the Severn, which in Gloucester they call twaits, are said at first to want those intermusculary bones, which afterwards they abound with. As these are in the freshes, so the salts afford at certain times of the year many other kinds of fish in infinite shoals, such as the old-wife, a fish not much unlike an herring, and the sheep's-head, a sort of fish, which they esteem in the number of their best.
§ 22. There is likewise great plenty of other fish all the summer long; and almost in every part of the rivers and brooks, there are found of different kinds. Wherefore I shall not pretend to give a detail of them, but venture to mention the names only of such as I have eaten and seen myself, and so leave the rest to those that are better skilled in natural history. However, I may add, that besides all those that I have met with myself, I have heard of a great many very good sorts, both in the salts and freshes; and such people, too, as have not always spent their time in that country, have commended them to me beyond any they had ever eaten before.
Those which I know of myself I remember by the names of herring, rock, sturgeon, shad, old-wife, sheep's-head, black and red drum, trout, taylor, green-fish, sun-fish, bass, chub, place, flounder, whiting, fatback, maid, wife, small-turtle, crab, oyster, mussel, cockle, shrimp, needle-fish, breme, carp, pike, jack, mullet, eel, conger-eel, perch, and cat, &c.
Those which I remember to have seen there, of the kinds that are not eaten, are the whale, porpus, shark, dog-fish, garr, stingray, thornback, saw-fish, toad-fish, frog-fish, land-crab, fiddler, and periwinckle. One day as I was hauling a sein upon the salts, I caught a small fish about two inches and an half long, in shape something resembling a scorpion, but of a dirty, dark color. I was a little shy of handling it, though I believe there was no hurt in it. This I judge to be that fish which Mr. Purchase in his Pilgrims, and Captain Smith in his General History, page 125, affirm to be extremely like St. George's Dragon, except only that it wants feet and wings. Governor Spotswood has one of them dried in full shape.
§ 23. Before the arrival of the English there the Indians had fish in such vast plenty, that the boys and girls would take a pointed stick and strike the lesser sort as they swam upon the flats. The larger fish, that kept in deeper water, they were put to a little more difficulty to take. But for these they made weirs, that is, a hedge of small riv'd sticks, or reeds, of the thickness of a man's finger. These they wove together in a row, with straps of green oak, or other tough wood, so close that the small fish could not pass through. Upon high water mark they pitched one end of this hedge, and the other they extended into the river, to the depth of eight or ten feet, fastening it with stakes, making cods out from the hedge on one side almost at the end, and leaving a gap for the fish to go into them, which were contrived so that the fish could easily find their passage into those cods when they were at the gap, but not see their way out again when they were in. Thus, if they offered to pass through, they were taken.