Fishing From the Earliest Times

PART I

“And first for the Antiquity of Angling, I shall not say much; but onely this: Some say, it is as ancient as Deucalion’s Floud: and others (which I like better) say that Belus (who was the inventer of godly and vertuous Recreations) was the Inventer of it: and some others say (for former times have had their Disquisitions about it) that Seth, one of the sons of Adam, taught it to his sons, and that by them it was derived to Posterity. Others say, that he left it engraven on those Pillars, which hee erected to preserve the knowledge of Mathematicks, Musick, and the rest of those precious Arts, which by God’s appointment or allowance, and his noble industry were thereby preserved from perishing in Noah’s Floud.”—ISAAK WALTON, The Compleat Angler.

“You see the way the Fisherman doth take To catch the Fish; what Engins doth he make? Behold how he ingageth all his wits, Also his Snares, Lines, Angles, Hooks, and Nets. Yet fish there be, that neither Hook, nor Line, Nor Snare, nor Net, nor Engin can make thine; They must be grop’t for, and be tickled too, Or they will not be catch’t, whate’er you do.”

JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress. (The Author’s Apology for his book.)

“Elle extend ses filets, elle invente de nouveaux moyens de succès, elle s’attache un plus grand nombre d’hommes. Elle pénètre dans les profondeurs des abîmes, elle arrache aux angles les plus secrets, elle poursuit jusqu’aux extrémités du globe les objets de sa constante recherche.”—G. E. LACÈPÉDE, Hist. Nat. des poissons.

“What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed, when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all Conjecture.”—SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Urne-Buriall.

* * * * *

The craft of Fishing possesses an ancestry so ancient, or according to a Polynesian legend so literally abysmal, that for those who have their business on the waters, deep or shallow, it is but seemly, it is certainly of interest, to essay the tracing of its pedigree, and the linking of the generations of its far-flung lineage.

What were, and whence came its first forbears, and of what manner and of what matter were the original parents of its devices are questions which should appeal to the large majority of its followers. The sansculottes, however stalwart, who does not in his heart of hearts rejoice in owning, or claiming, some genealogical garments, wherein to hide his nakedness, is rare and abnormal.

The pedigree is like and unlike its celebrated Urquhart brother. Like in the gaps in generations, which in his endeavour directly to deduce his family from Adam even Sir Thomas’s ingenuity failed to bridge, despite the prolongation when necessary of the lives of his ancestors to ten times the allotted span. Unlike in antiquity, since it stretches far, very far beyond “Deucalion’s Floud” and Adam’s Paradise.

Angling, despite wide ramifications, has perhaps stamped its stock more vividly and has bred truer to original type than its elder brother Hunting. The variance of a repeating rifle from what some hold to be their common first sire, a sharpened pole, is larger and more marked than that of our most up-to-date Rod.

The riddle, as in other cases of disputed succession, of identifying the first real head of the family or the earliest begetter of the race is rendered more complex by wide geographical dispersion. It is possibly insoluble.

Nevertheless to this labour of love I now address myself.

The question of priority of the implement used for catching fish has been often moot, sometimes acute, for, in Walton’s words, “former times have had their Disquisitions about it.”

How did the earliest fisherman secure his prey? Was it by means of the Spear, under which term I include harpoons and barbed fishing spears of any kind, the Net, or the Line? None of these has lacked its champions, of whom the Line has attracted the fewest, the Spear the most.

Uncertainty as to the order of precedence was not really remarkable. We lacked even as late as the beginning of the last century both the data as to Egyptian and Assyrian fishing, which the discovery of the key to the hieroglyphs by Champollion and to the cuneiform by Rawlinson has laid bare, and the data as to the fishing of the Troglodytes which scientific examination of the caves of France and Spain has revealed.

The outlook of our forefathers was necessarily limited, indeed monotopical. No big maps of the archæological world widened their vision. Some sectional sketches, and these badly charted, obscured their perspective.

The priority of the Net at one time probably enrolled the majority of adherents. Nor can we wonder, when we realise that in the case of a country so ancient as India we light on no method of fishing other than Netting—and even that till the post-Vedic literature after 200 B.C. most rarely—in Sanskrit or Pāli literature before 400 A.D. Hence came the deduction, not unnatural but illogical, since it stresses too strongly the argument of silence or omission—i.e. because no specimen or representation of a thing exists the thing itself never existed—that the Net must have been the first implement.

And even now after many years of exploration in Mesopotamia a champion of the Net or of the Line, if he similarly disregarded logic and all save Assyrian remains, might not unreasonably proclaim their antecedence to the Spear, of which no mention or representation as a method of fishing has yet been unearthed.

In the case of Egypt the advocate either of the Spear or Net has not as strong, certainly not so clear, a case. Although examples of the first have been discovered in prehistoric graves, the Net finds representation earlier than the Spear. Be this how it may, the Spear, Net, Line, Rod flourish synchronously in the XIIth Dynasty c. 2000, or according to Petrie’s chronology about 3500 B.C.

In China, unless the sentence of the quite modern I shih chi shih, that in the reign of the legendary Emperor who first taught the use of fire, “fishermen used the silk of the cocoons for their lines, a piece of sharpened iron for their hooks, thorn-sticks for their rods, and split grain for their bait,” be potent enough to produce a protagonist for the priority of the Rod, the boldest advocate would shrink from championing either the Spear or Net. The first mention c. 900 B.C. (I know of none actually written before this date), shows them, and the Rod, in general and simultaneous operation.

From Crete shines out no guiding light. The débris recovered from centres of the ‘Minoan’ civilisation yields frequent and in the main vivid pictures of fish, e.g. those on the Phaistos Disc (which is considered the earliest instance of printing in Europe at any rate) and the flying fish on glazed pottery from Knossos. But unfortunately neither in the Annual Reports of Sir Arthur Evans to the British School at Athens nor (he tells me) in his forthcoming book do modi piscandi obtain notice.

In Greece, a champion of any single method would be sadly to seek. The Spear, the Net, the Line, and the Rod all occur in our earliest authority, Homer, and, curious to note, as a rule in similes. From the fact that the Spear finds mention but once, the Net twice, and the Line (with or without the Rod) thrice, a real enthusiast has deduced an argument for the priority of the last two over the Spear!

This short survey forces the conclusion that we cannot fix definitely which was the method adopted by the earliest historical fishermen.

Before proceeding on our search for further data two points should be emphasised. First, the period covered even by the longest historical or semi-historical record counts but as a fraction of the time since geology and archæology prove Man to have existed on earth.

Grant, if you will, the demand of the most exacting Egyptologists or Sumerologists, to whom a thousand years are as nothing; concede their postulated five or six thousand years; of what account is one lustrum of millenniums when compared with the years—not less than two million according to some geologists—which have elapsed since Man first came on the scene?

Second, all the above nations possessed an advanced civilisation. Neither civilisation nor fishing is a Jovelike creation, springing into existence armed cap-à-pie. Both, like our friend Topsy, “growed,” and both demanded long periods for growth and development from their primitive origin.

In fishing these were retarded by the innate conservatism of the followers of the cult. The psychology of the faithful is an odd blend of dogged, perhaps unconscious, adherence to the olden ways and of an almost Athenian curiosity about “any new thing,” which as often as not sees itself discarded in favour of the ancient devices.

Even in this year of our Lord a cousin of mine, who Ulysses-like many rivers has known, much tackle tested, habitually (influenced no doubt by the recipe for the line given by Plutarch and passed on by Dame Juliana Berners) inserts between his line and his gut some eighteen inches of horse hair! But even in him the law of development works, for he does not Pharisaically adhere to the strict letter of the text, and insist that the hair comes only from the tail of a stallion or gelding!

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