One of our sailors, musically inclined, paraphrased very neatly the old song, “The Campbells are Coming! huzza! huzza!” and achieved fame by portraying the emotions nightly under the lee of the forecastle.
So good an outlook has been kept by the keen-eyed Indians, and the Creole boy in the belfry of the Greek church, that when first the glad tidings are announced, the fish are many miles away, and no signs of their advent visible to the unpracticed eye. Ear away to the southward, there hangs all winter a dense black bank, the accumulation of the constant uprising of vapor from the warm surface of the Kuro-siwo, or Japanese Gulf Stream, which washes the shores of this archipelago; condensed by the cold winds sweeping over the snow-clad mountains to the northward, it is swept by them, and piled up as far as the eye can reach, covering and hiding the southern horizon as with a pall.
Presently our glasses reveal bright flashes upon the face of this curtain; and soon, to the naked eye, it appears as though the whole horizon had been encircled with a coral reef, against which the dashing waves were being shattered into foamy breakers. The breakers advance, and soon among them we discern black, rapidly-moving forms, and here our previous nautical experience comes into play, and, “Holymither, d’ye mind the say pigs!” as shouted by Paddy Sullivan, the captain of the afterguard, explains most graphically the phenomenon.
The salmon are coming, and with them, among, and after them, a host of porpoises; an army so great, that an attempt to estimate in numbers would be futile.
The Bay and Sound of Sitka are dotted with many beautiful, well-wooded islands; between them, the channels are deep and blue, and these are soon thronged by the fleeing salmon and their pursuers; the harbor is soon reached; but it does not prove one of safety, for although there are immense flats covered only at half to whole tide, where the salmon could, and the porpoises could not go, the former avoid them, and, clinging to the deep water, seek vainly the protection of our ship and boats, which do not deter the porpoises in the slightest degree. For two or three days, our eyes, and at night, our ears, tell us that the warfare, or rather massacre, is unceasing; then there comes an interval of several days, during which there are no salmon nor porpoises.
I had formed an idea, a wrong one, that the presence of salmon would be made manifest by the leaping of the fish; on the contrary, were we to judge by this sign alone, but very few had visited us.
The first school had hardly gotten fairly into the harbor, before I, with others, was in pursuit.
The cannery boats, and Indians, with their seines, and I with a trolling line and fly-rod.
A single fish apparently, was at intervals of perhaps a minute, leaping near a point. Indian Dick, one of my staff, excitedly pointed that way, and urged me to go. “There! there! sawmo sugataheen” (plenty). I was inclined to look elsewhere, or wait for a larger school; but Dick remonstrated, “Man see one fish jump, sir, may be got thousand don’t jump, be under.” And Dick was right; but a very small percentage leap from the water, of which I became more fully convinced when I went with Tom McCauley, head fisherman of the cannery, on seining trips, or rather on a seining trip, for the affair disgusted me; and, as with my experience of Spanish bull-fighting, one trial was enough. Imagine so many fish that tons were the units used in estimating, penned up by the walls of the seines, into an enclosure, massed so solidly that five Indians, striking rapidly at random into the mass, with short-handled gaff hooks, at such rate that, upon one day’s fishing, this boat, manned by eight Indians and one white man, secured thirteen tons of marketable fish. It was bloody, nasty butchery, and sickened me. Not a fish attempted to leap out of the net.
McCauley supplied me with some data, from his point of view.