Women seem usually fatal to good catches; as one instance out of many we read in Hollinshed’s Scottish Chronicle, that “if a woman wade through the one fresh river in the Lewis, there shall no salmon be seen there for a twelvemonth after.”
Superstitions of every sort and almost incredible dictate to the ancient and to the modern fisherman what are the good and what the bad days for plying his craft, or setting his sail. Their cousin, imitative magic, plays no small part in deciding his bait.
But enough here of fishing superstitions. Are they not writ large in Pliny, Oppian, Plutarch, in the Folk Lore Records, and larger, geographically, in that masterpiece, The Golden Bough?
The most incredulous, if there were one chance in a hundred of the operation ensuring adeptness in our craft, would willingly sacrifice in conformity with Australian superstition the first joint of his little finger.[120] Nor, again, if only the most moderate success resulted, would any of us utter a belated plaint at his mother imitating her Fijian sister and throwing, when first a-fishing after childbirth, his navel-string into the sea, and thus “ensuring our growing into good fisherfolk.”[121]
GREEK AND ROMAN FISHING
“Noster in arte labor positus, spes omnis in illa.”
