But the device, which the Ching chih ch’i wu lei describes and gravely explains, must act as the limit at once of our wonder and of our space. “Fishermen (we are told) used to put the hair of small monkeys on the four corners of their nets, by which means they succeeded in taking large numbers. It is said that the fish seeing the hair were attracted towards it, as a man to embroidery!”[1136]
The infrequent mention of what was probably the oldest fishing implement of Palæolithic man, the Spear, admits of no satisfactory explanation. For some reason the Chinese seem to have employed the Spear-harpoon but rarely.
Pictures of fishing in T’u shu Encyclopædia (extracted from a work of the sixteenth century a.d.) confirm this view. If numbers be any test, the Spear found least favour—it is represented but once—while the Rod appears four, and the Net seventeen times.
Lu Kuei-mêng, the Izaak Walton of China, in his book of the ninth century a.d., does, it is true, include spearing (ch’ai yü) with a four-pronged weapon among other fishing methods, such as shooting with bow and arrow (shê ch’ien) and driving into shallow water with the aid of a wooden rattle (ming lang) for stockade work. A curious variation of the spear-harpoon (hsien) was an iron instrument having at the end of a bamboo a cock’s spur, which was used for iguanas.[1137]
The Chinese were evidently familiar with our Otter, i.e. a line carrying hooks at short intervals, and fastened at either end. The Yo Yang fêng t’u chi, a work of the Han Dynasty (about the time of the Christian era) expressly states that this method, with the line made fast across a river between two boats at anchor, accounted for many big fish.
But enough evidence has, I believe, been adduced to prove that the Sinitic piscator had little to learn of his craft.
He apparently lacked Oppian’s pantomimic but scarcely aromatic method of clothing himself in the skin of a she-goat, probably because he lacked its victim, the salacious Sargus. If he knew not Ælian’s pneumatic device of capturing the eel by the aid of a sheep’s bowels, he was no ignoramus of the habits of the Murænidæ, for he watched carefully and waited patiently for air-bubbles, like a destroyer hunting German U-boats, to rise to the surface and betray the fishes’ lair in the mud, and then plunged home his depth-charge, or rather his bident.
Fishing by cormorant was unique and peculiar to China alone, according to Mr. Yen, who adds that “in our country it was confined to one family, the Liu.[1138] The fishes thus caught, however, are limited to those of small streams, unpalatable, and eaten only by very poor people.”
Few realise how great is the patience necessary for the training of an expert cormorant, or how good is the reward. These seemingly altruistic piscatores are taught to fish an area in flocks, and at a given signal return to their master with their prey, made unswallowable by means of a neck-ring. One boatman watches twelve to twenty of the birds, each one of whom, although hundreds may similarly be hunting the same water, knows its own master. If one seize a fish too heavy for him, another comes to its aid, and together they fetch it to the boat. More generally the ally (not unlike certain nations in history) hustles the weaker and despoils him of his catch, and of his titbit reward.
The barndoor fowl, whose hospitable warmth and credulity all the world abuses, usually hatches out the young birds, whose piscatorial propensities increase and accentuate on a diet of fish hash and eel’s blood.