[71] “Apes know how to get oysters thrown up on the shore, but man has been endowed with the knowledge how to get them in and out of the sea.” The sentiment, if not the style, of this sentence—to prove the superior design and creation of man over the animal creation—seems not quite unworthy of Izaak Walton’s pages.
[72] His pleasant description of “tickling” and his “viro Britanno” must be my excuse for introducing a writer in Latin so late after my limit of 500 a.d. as Parthenius, better known as Giannettasi, the author of Halieutica, published at Naples in 1689:
“Paulatim digitis piscator molliter alvum Defricat, et sensim palpando repit in ipsas Cæruleas branchas, subituque apprendit: et illa Blanditiis decepta viro fit præda Britanno.”
[73] For a similar use of bow and harpoon arrow by the Bororo tribes in the Amazon valley, see W. A. Cork, Through the Wilderness of Brazil, p. 380. Our gaff, a descendant, possibly, of the unilaterally one-barbed spear, seems possessed of perpetual youth. The first description of its use in Angling in England occurs, according to Mr. Marston (Walton and the Earlier Fishing Writers (1898), p. 97), in T. Barker’s Art of Angling (1651), but according to Dr. Turrell, op. cit., pp. 85 and 91, only in Barker’s 2nd of 1657, “a good large landing hook.” From the definition, however, by Blount, Glossage, in 1657, “Gaffe, an iron wherewith seamen pull great Fishes into their ships,” its previous existence and employment at sea can be deduced.
[74] There is no hook; only a piece of whalebone or a stem of seaweed, with a feather stuck at the end, attached to which is a running knot, which holds the bait. As soon as the fish has swallowed feather and bait, the women, for the men disdain fishing, draw it to the surface and quickly seize it. Cf. Darwin, Jour. of Researches, etc., during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (London, 1860), ch. x, p. 213.
[75] “The principall sport to take a Pike is to take a Goose or Gander or Duck, take one of the Pike Lines as I have showed you before; tye the line under the left wing and over the right wing, and about the bodie as a man weareth his belt; turne the Goose off into a Pond where Pikes are; there is no doubt of sport with much pleasure betwixt the Goose and the Pike. It is the greatest pleasure that a noble Gentleman in Shropshire doth give his friends for entertainment. There is no question among all this fishing but we shall take a brace of good Pikes.”
[76] For a full description of this method, see Sport on Land and Water, by F. G. Griswold, privately printed (New York, 1916), and The Game Fishes of the World, by C. F. Holder (London, 1913). To the kite, which is of the ordinary 28-inch type, is allowed 700 feet of old fishing line from off a reel; the fisherman’s line is tied to the kite about 20 feet from the bait with a piece of cotton twine. When a Tuna fish takes the bait the cotton line breaks, and the kite is either reeled in or falls into the sea. The Santa Catalina fishing, with its records of enormous Tuna, of Sword fish (the largest 463 lbs.), sometimes fighting for 14 hours, sounding 48 times, and leading the launch for a distance of 29 miles, and of Giant Bass weighing 493 lbs., fills a British angler with envious despair, a despair which is heightened when one reads that the regulation tackle prescribed by the Tuna Club is, or was not long ago, a sixteen ounce Rod and a line not over No. 24! In Mr. Zane Grey’s enthralling volume (Tales of Fishes (London, 1919), p. 39) we read of a swordfish, that “when he sounded, he had pulled thirteen hundred feet off my reel, although we were chasing him (in a motor boat) full speed all the time”!
[77] See the excellent monograph on “Kite-Fishing,” by Henry Balfour, in Essays and Studies, presented to Wm. Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913), p. 23, where he regards the invention as ancient and probably proto-Malayan. This hook was usually made of wood and the claw of a bird. Cf. Man, 1912, Art. 4, and case 42 in Ethnographical Collection at the British Museum.
[78] De Mortillet, pp. 245, 249: “De tous les engins la ligne est le plus simple, et celui qui a du être le premier employé.” He sums up his surview of the world from China to Peru, by “La pêche à la ligne est la pêche la plus repandue parmi les nations sauvages.”
[79] Op. cit., “The Net is known to almost all men as far as history can tell.” But Darwin, in The Cruise of the Beagle, found the Fuegians without Nets or traps of any kind. Their only methods of fishing were with Spears, and a baited hair line without any hook.