The History of Esculent Fish

by Roger North

Now, as for your great and principal waters, it is hard to assign a certain proportion for the stock; but perusing the methods I propose, you will soon come to the knowledge what stock the waters will carry; for laying a pond dry every year, you will see the fish well fed, or else thin and lean; and accordingly you judge whether the stock was too little or too much for the water. Thus, by the thickness or fatness of cattle, you judge if your ground will carry more or not; and both as to species and number of fish, experience must be your guide in the stocking of waters.

However, to save loss of time, which you must sustain by making your own experience, I will give the best directions I can, for the first entry upon your business, and not leave the matter wholly in the dark.

If the pond be supplied with a white fat water upon great rains, you may put into it at first three hundred carps per acre, in case there be three or four acres, else not so many. And it will be expedient to put in forty or fifty tenches for a trial, because this sort of water is most proper for carp; but being laid dry, sometimes may prove well for tenches also, which, when thriven, are a very good fish; but this proof by trial must determine.

You may add perches to any number, and not hurt the water: I propose six hundred; for though they are great breeders, being also fishes of prey, they devour their own species as much, if not more than any other; and by destroying the fry of bred fish, they preserve the food for the maintenance of their feeders, which the fry would intercept; so do good rather than harm. I took once out of a perch’s belly of ten inches, ten other perches. This is esteemed one of the best sorts of fresh-water fish, and therefore deservedly to be encouraged.

Have a great care of putting bream in this sort of waters; for they will grow up very slowly, though at last they will be great; but in the mean time they breed so infinitely, and such a slimy nasty fry, as both robs and fouls the water, making it unfit for the other fish. But when a water is ten or twelve acres, and fed with some brook, winter and summer, they will do very well; otherwise not to be made use of.

As for pike, which are inferior to no fresh-water fish, and now more esteemed than ever, being less plentiful upon draining the fens, and so harm more; they are dangerous guests in the great waters; for if grown large, they will devour and destroy the best fish, and depopulate the water. But thus far you may trust them; if you can procure one hundred jacks once in two years not exceeding nine inches, you may put them with the carps into your great waters, so as your carps are not under nine or ten inches; but take care that they stay not above two years, and then send them to their peculiar ponds, and feed them as I shall hereafter discourse, and so they will grow to be very large and fine fish, which you would not want.

I cannot advise the stocking great standing waters with eels, for they grow slow, and being of an indifferent size, will be lean and dry; but in moats, which have the sinks of an house drain into it, is proper enough for them, and they will thrive in it. It is a sort of fish, as I noted, that belongs to a springy water.

These directions belong to the first stocking of new-made ponds, which, as to feeding, lie under a disadvantage; the reason I have touched, and is from the dead earth in the pan from whence you raised the bank, and that at first, which is about an acre, is almost unprofitable. But afterwards, when that dead ground hath contracted a little new soil from the settling of the water, especially after land-floods, and lain dry a summer, whereby it will begin to graze, it will become like the rest of the pond, and put forth as good feed for fish as any other part. This may seem strange and new, but is a great truth, known to me from indubitable experience.

Then after one, two, or three years (for longer the pond must not stand full), when you come to restock, and so on in all like occasions, you may put four hundred carp, or three hundred carp, and eight hundred tench (if the water feeds them) into an acre, besides perches. It is incredible to those who have not seen it, as I have done, how carps thus ordered, by transplanting them every year or two, will grow. I affirm, that from six, they will grow to twelve and better the first, and to fifteen or sixteen the next year; and then they are most fit for a gentleman’s table ordinarily; for though greater are more ostentatious, yet these are the most sweet and best meat, as young flesh is commonly preferred to old.

It is to be noted, that if the fish wherewith you stock the waters, were kept so close together, and come from over-stocked waters, which renders them lean and poor, you must double the stock at first; else the two sudden plenty of food at first will surfeit them, and they will die of overmuch blood, as I have found to my great loss.