Paul Broca’s dictum[68] that Man hunted before he fished seems, perhaps, despite Dall’s excavation of Eskimo débris,[69] to be borne out by Troglodyte records both positive and negative. The Gorge or bait-holder was employed by the hunter (according to some) even earlier than by the fisher. Gorges have been from time immemorial and still are in vogue in the Untersee for the capture of marine birds, as is the case to-day with the Eskimos of Norton Sound.
From the chronicles of Rau, H. Philips, and others can be built a Table of Generations, or the story of how the Hunting Spear begat the Fishing Spear, which begat the Harpoon unilaterally barbed, which in turn begat the Harpoon bilaterally barbed, until about the tenth or twentieth generation—one is appalled at the amount of Succession Duty which such degrees of descent would now involve!—something begat the Rod.
From this genealogical table I venture to dissent. I claim that the hunting Spear, Protean in possibilities, was either itself the Rod, or was, if “matre pulchra filia pulchrior” do not apply, at least the direct parent of the primitive Rod. In the bigger hunting of our own sorrowful day the same principle manifests itself, for the British soldier in France often angled with his line attached to his bayoneted rifle.
Many writers have attempted, some like de Mortillet with typical French logic, some with none, to set down the sequential development of fishing. As the Censor has not as yet banned free expression of piscatorial opinions, I conclude this chapter with essaying a scheme of reconstruction of my own.
First came fishing with the hand, la pêche à la main, which, according to Abel Hovelacque, “est le mode le plus élémentaire et certainement le moins productif.”[70] This method we may surmise was first exercised on fish left half stranded in small pools by the action of tides or floods, or on fish spawning in the shallow redds.[71]
As la pêche à la main was the first to arrive, so was it the first to cease from the functions of parentage or of fission, for with “tickling,” described by Ælian as even in his day an ancient device, further evolution of this method practically ended.[72]
Second came the hunting Spear, used originally on fish lying in pools, small of size but of depth sufficient to prevent hand fishing, and then, later, on fish elsewhere in a river. On the latter, especially in the case of the salmon—in Pliny’s day still abundant in Aquitania, which comprised the Loire and many Palæolithic cavernes—the weapon, even if as bident or trident it had added unto itself a prong or two, would frequently be found ineffective, owing to lack of prehensility. Hence came about a modification, perhaps due either to the happy chance of a spear on which a point or thorn had inadvertently been left, or to the inventive faculty of some Troglodyte Hardy.
We later reach a Spear Harpoon with barbs on one side only, whence “line upon line,” or rather barb upon barb, we attain unto the later type, which had a barbed head so socketed as to come free from the shaft (when the quarry has been struck) but made fast to the head by a line for retrieving the fish. In due, if differing, gradation we ultimately attain either unto the existing device of the aboriginal Tsuŷ Hwan of Formosa, an arrow shaped like a trident shot from but attached to a bow, or unto le dernier cri, our whaling Harpoon shot from a gun.[73]
Third comes fishing with a line of some sort. This was devised doubtless by some hungry but perforce merely meditative Magdalenian observing how dropped morsels were seized by fish in a pool, whose depth or environment set at naught both his hand and his spear.
The problem how to reach and how to land them was eventually solved by the method—happily christened by Sheringham, “Entanglement by Appetite”—of fastening a gorge through or a thorn holding some kind of bait to an animal sinew, a wythe, or a hardened thong of one of the whip-like algæ. This wythe or what not in the procession of the ages was (according to Pepys) to betaper itself into the first English catgut line of 1667, and (according to The Compleat Fisherman, London, 1724) into the first silkworm line, and eventually into telerana and similar tenuities of our day.