Origins
“This is a diminutive gentleman, e`en throw him in again,
and let him grow till he be more worthy your anger."
-Charles Cotton, Part the Second, The Complete Angler, 1673
CHAPTER 1
Igjugarjuk
(Chapters will be added to this post as fishing and rod building allows)
Gambell, Alaska, March, 2005;
Wherwell, England, May-June, 2005
The only true wisdom “lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness,”
- Igjugarjuk, Eskimo shaman (1)
Yupik men stand beneath racks of skin-covered boats and stare toward Siberia across the moving, frozen sea. Parka hoods thrown back, they search the grey ice. In the distance, a bright red smear shines from a berg sliding toward the lowering sun. One boat inches home through the icepack, only one. It rides low in the water, the captain and hunters churning through slush, the clawing of ice on the aluminum hull sounding as if the skiff was being sawed in half at the waterline. Only one boat. The watchers on Gambell’s West Beach shield their eyes, tightening their vision on leads of dark water between the rapidly shifting ice blocks, searching for a glint of light on metal, a plume of exhaust, listening for a sound other than that of the grinding ice. A second boat has not returned. The bloodied floe drifts past, gathering speed in the running tide, slipping into the growing darkness.
Two hundred miles from Nome, Saint Lawrence Island holds at uneasy anchorage, pack ice and wind-riven fog streaming past the island’s prow, as if it could drift the few miles to Russia. The low Arctic light on ridges hung with white brings to mind a Machantaz painting called “End of the Hunt,” of a Yupik hunter, his parka sagging over slumped shoulders, adrift on a small berg in an endless sea. New to this place, not certain I should be here if tragedy ends this hunt, I recall the Siberian origin myth of a vindictive god: “Such are you and such shall be your fate. When you go out to sea you shall be drowned. When you stay ashore you shall die of starvation.” (2)
School teachers that walked with me to the west beach turn to go, the science teacher whispers not to say I work for Alaska Fish and Game: strangers are not welcome, especially ones who work for wildlife agencies. These hunters take what they can for subsistence, and their brutally hard-won harvest often clashes with the law. Federal agents who come to Gambell dress in full uniforms, and carry sidearms and rifles. Some biologists will not leave the hotel, requiring those who report harvests to visit them. But I have been in too many villages where a willingness to help with hard tasks opened doors. I stay to scan the roiling ice with the Yupik men for any sign of life.
During the Cold War, Saint Lawrence Island was closed to all, the Iron Curtain trapping Russian Natives on United States soil. The island remains so remote that before I came, I could not learn what fish swim its rivers. Many of the people speak a Russian Yupik dialect foreign to their Alaskan kin. Outsiders are intruders and confined to the gravel spit on which the town rests, set hard against the storms and ice, enduring the constant battering of frozen seas. The oceans of the high Arctic flush past as giant tides, in and out of this narrow passage barring Russia from Alaska.
Between the frozen, uneasy beach and Old Town stand frames of skin boats and the jawbones of great whales. Feathers of baleen sing, suspended by sinew from gaping jaws. Incessant wind and tides grind ice along the shore, where rolling pebbles create white noise, as if the empty jawbones were humming. Skeletons of whale boats rest atop pole frames as the wind scours all to the fossil grey of wood, stark against the stones underfoot. On the West beach, we stand silently, watching the spinning floes as darkness settles out of the sky.
Suddenly an elder laughs and points south. A second skiff appears from behind a tall iceberg, and all the men dash to the water’s edge. One of the older men glances back at me, expectantly; I scuttle down to help. The boat’s captain guns his outboard to ram the beach. His crew leaps out and struggles to hold the heavily laden skiff in the slurry behind a beached iceberg. Ice churns along the hull inches below wide planks fixed to the gunnels. Great balls of dark meat and white slabs of fat weight the boat into the sea. All the men drag and lift. One of the younger men moves down the rail into slush so that I might have a part. Reaching in to grab a strut, I shake hands with a walrus flipper.
As if dogs in harness, four-wheelers are roped one behind another and knotted to the skiff’s bowline. Alternating between sitting over the wheels for traction and lifting and pushing the 4-wheelers up the beach, we tow both skiffs and tons of food ashore. When the boats are above the highest tide, the men nod toward me, dismissively. Cold, wet, walrus-bloodied, I walk under the hide boats on their racks, the wind drumming on the skins, through a maze of whale ribs and skulls, toward the rough trailers that serve as a hotel.
Gambell rests atop millions of polished stones piled by the tides in berms a mile wide and three miles long. Old town’s ancient clapboard sided houses rim the wide beach. Beyond, rows of newer homes surround a wide, pebbled area with the city offices, public health clinic, and old trailer-unit hotel to one side. Alone in this commons a slight Native man, buffeted by the wind, picks up pebbles, inspects them, and drops them to the ground. He is Terrance, a simple man who wanders about the village each day. Terrance, seeking gems to add to his pocketed stash, wears a ripped snow machine suit that bulges with rocks like sagging, anchoring pantaloons. He motions to me asks why I am on his island. I say I teach about fish and fishing. “Fishing?” he asks, looking toward the ice-bound sea, then back at me. “Fishing,” I say, though the science teacher expects me to sort bugs and discuss global warming, and the mayor is interested in my fostering work for villagers. I explain to Terrace that I was asked to come to teach how to tie feathers to hooks. He shrugs, distant even now, peering at me from under his tattered hood. I think of Joseph Campbell’s story of Igjugarjuk , the Eskimo shaman and his assertion that the only true wisdom “lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness.” Terrance returns to his searching for the moment, hunched over his gravel, thoughts turned inward while speaking to an un-listening world, as adrift as a Yupik hunter on a floe in the middle of the Bering Sea.
Ancient people of the north, co-existing with polar bears, hunting walruses, seals, and whales, asked me to visit to teach fly-tying so that ivory carvers might create new art from rare gifts of nature. Natives may sell crafts made from endangered species. Polar bear skins languishing in permafrost caches, scraps of seal fur, and walrus whiskers could be used to tie flies for sale. Art on hooks crafted from walrus ivory would command thousands of dollars if tied with the fine sinew of minke whales binding mated wings of dyed swan and plumage of exotic birds blown from Asia. While I look forward to introducing tying flies as art, I am not certain about teaching fly-fishing, and I will not consider teaching catch and release.
Standing outside the Atco trailer hotel in frozen Gambell, all of this comes back in an instant as a quizzical look from Terrance, and the word, “Fishing?” reminds me that in Alaska, fish are food. In Western Alaska, food is not to be played with. In Gambell, even while not hunting or fishing, behaviors must remain respectful of all life. The seasonal round of harvesting begins each July with taking and drying Dolly Varden, Arctic grayling, salmon, whitefish, and rainbow trout. People walk the beaches each summer and fall, harvesting food from tide lines and raking sea plants and animals from the shallows. Migratory birds, berries, and edible greens fill out the island’s natural larder. Seals and walruses provide protein almost daily. The annual taking of Native food ends each May with whaling, the most important cultural event for this ancient community. As for my blessed catch and release, only a madman would spend all that effort to intentionally let his catch go. Similar discussions over catch and release continue worldwide.
Fly-fishers in drift boats on the Yellowstone River throw stones at families keeping trout. One of the guiding lights of fly-fishing, with decades of catch and release angling behind him, was recently deemed a pariah for keeping a hatchery fish. At the extremes, many fishers for food insist that all returned fish die, and dedicated catch and release anglers claim to have never killed a fish. Catch and release is the most controversial practice in field sports, both by those who keep all fish they catch and by those for whom putting fish back has become religion. In Alaska, catch and release may be a regulation on some waters, but fish are not to be trifled with, regardless of culture. Whether fishing for sport, commercial, or subsistence, Alaskans rely upon fish as food. In Native villages I learned to wait to be asked before speaking of letting fish go. I certainly won’t mention it here, on St. Lawrence Island in late winter when natural foods may be in short supply and hunger stands at the door.
Terrance’s cousin approaches from a nearby house. Terrance seeks through his pockets, searching. His cousin glances at me, then stares at him, and, as if he were not there, says, “The scars to his mind are deeper than those on his face.” Terrance’s features mark him as much older than his forty years. When he was five he was mauled by dogs. He speaks softly of diamonds, sapphires, gold, and rubies hidden in the beach. We talk about fish, about the walrus hunt just over, and the richness of his island. He motions that I should stay for a moment, he has something for me. Terrance seeks frantically in his pocketed hoard for a remembered gem, insisting, “…that is not it, that is not it,” until his hand emerges with the correct pebble gift.
Deposits of tide polished stones add to the Gambell beach like the rings of trees. The oldest frame houses perch far back from the shore. Few date earlier than 1917, when great waves washed many homes from the spit. Behind Old Town’s defensive scattering of houses, rows of newer homes are bright and airy, well insulated, with modern, domestic interiors. None, new or old, are tied to the land. All rest on timbers and blocks stacked on smooth gravel. The only road off the spit leads high on the hillside, an evacuation route for the next time a tsunami washes the spit clean.
Older houses have the feel of traditional semi-underground dwellings, with windows sealed behind plywood and doors barriered behind layers of blankets. In 1891, missionaries built a church, the first above ground frame structure. The builders did not speak Siberian Yupik and did not stay. The church remained empty, the Natives, who lived in skin-covered half-underground houses, were at a loss for its meaning or use. When other missionaries eventually returned, the church held spools of rope, floats, and harpoons. A generation later wood houses lined the spit. Some of the oldest homes are shaped like overturned skin boats resting on their racks, bay-front frames facing the sea.
Gambell’s skin boats are used each spring to hunt whales. They would be crushed in the pack ice searching for walrus. Most are not sturdy, square umiaks like those of Alaskan Yup’iks. From New England’s whalers in the 1880s, Gambellites learned to build boats resembling Yankee whaleboats, with low, light wooden frames, covering them with split walrus hide. Each spring when bowhead whales blow among the leads in the shifting ice, captains fill the fragile boats with sails, harpoons, floats, and tubs of rope. Crews sail silently to their prey, the striker waiting until the last moment to hurl an explosive harpoon deep into the head of the whale. If leviathan turns on them or dives under the boat, the bomb may kill them all. When a whale is taken, all whalers drag it to the beach, clan ties strengthened by the fan of towlines. Communal memory is born of ice and wind, of storms and frail craft, the risks of the sea part of hard-earned lives. Storms may rise at anytime, swamping boats, killing crews, setting hunters adrift.
Villages rimmed Saint Lawrence Island hundreds of years ago and clans fought one another. During the 1800s, whalers brought alcohol, starvation, and disease, while slaughtering whales and walruses needed by the islanders as food. Ninety percent of the islanders died between the famine and starvation of 1878 and the turn of the century when the few survivors moved to the Northwest spit, and the population halved again. (3) For thousands of years people have lived and died on St. Lawrence Island, the frozen gravels riddled with the detritus of those lives. During the 1900s, archaeologists excavated several middens on the island, and taught the Yupik the craft of digging.
Now, exotic birds, carried on the winds of Asian storms, find refuge in bushes growing above the remains of vastly older societies. Birders from around the world come to Gambell each spring and fall. They stalk the bushes, adding rare Asian birds to their life lists, even as Yupik men leap into nearby holes to mole tunnels in the frozen gravel. The People dig for buried treasures. Children must be warned away from tunnels filled with water each spring while young men burrow deep, seeking the most ancient pieces. The elders know they are selling their past, but are unwilling to intervene: “There is no work; they must have money to survive.” Most islanders dig, even those with skill hunting or working ivory, furs, and skins. Some of their finds are worth tens of thousands of dollars. (4)
Ivory buyers taught birders and other visitors not to appear too eager when buying artifacts. Gambell’s people have been traders in the high arctic for centuries, but they prefer not to barter: if possible, and clan ties permit, when someone needs something it is freely given. In the evening, the diggers bring their finds of ivory, implements, and bone to sell in the hotel.
Outsiders wait until the diggers are desperate before purchasing treasures. While I watched, a birder from the Lower 48 collected a small cooler full of Old Bering ivory, paying a pittance for butterfly buttons and game pieces, each worth hundreds of dollars. In her stash lay an ancient ivory fishhook with knotted baleen line and an ivory slide above the hook.
One evening, Terrance came to trade a find he had made while searching his gravel. He drew from his pocketed horde a fine seal point, with polished slate blade and Old Bering lines etched into the ancient ivory. He asked half of what the artifact was worth, and halved his request each night thereafter, until, by the buyer’s final night on the island, the point had broken to shards among his pocketed stones. What quirk allows those of us with wealth sufficient for wandering to barter for meager return the heritage of ancient peoples?
An answer lies in the nature of western thought and how it differs from other ways of seeing the world. Joseph Campbell wrote of our tales of “domination and conquest─ be it of women, other men, or nature.” (5) These same Western myths, still germane to all of our relationships, also puzzle-out my riddle of cultural conflicts over letting fish go. My time on St. Lawrence Island sparked my interest in searching our ancient human past for traces of what we now call angling ethics. The juxtaposition of simple greed played out against such a rich subsistence background forced me to question what I had long considered universal values. My search for answers begins with the ancient culture of Saint Lawrence Island, however, it continues with the origins of fly-fishing on the British Isles.
It has been two months since I visited Gambell in the Bering Sea. Months of glacial winter in Alaska dissolving into glorious British spring as my wife Lesley and I travel in chalk stream England, reveling in May while I look for the roots of fly-fishing. I had not considered fishing England’s hallowed waters before reading J.W. Hills’ A Summer on the Test. The book’s images of long glides, idyllic afternoons, and trout languidly rising to dry flies dulled our Southeast Alaska’s reality of torrential rains and heavily weighted egg patterns lobbed at unwary fish. Clear water, dry flies, and rising trout seized me. That chalk stream vision and my desire to learn firsthand the history of fly-fishing drew us to the village of Wherwell, southwest of London.
Beyond the parlor of a bed and breakfast on the River Test, sunshine splashes from morning glories and hummingbirds zip about the garden. The village is in flower, as it has been each spring for a thousand years. Wherwell Abby was once the choice of Queens of England as refuge. “(T)he Abbey retained a certain social cache amongst those well born ladies who could not find suitable husbands.” (6) Wherwell remains idyllic, with rose covered cottages reflected in the glow of the river. J.W. Hills described days such as this:
It was one of those days which May sometimes brings. The sun shone, the sky was blue and silver, the breeze was light and the trees were all of a different shade of green. The water meadows were bright with flowers. The liquid gold of the kingcup was fading, but there were wide drifts of the delicate lilac of the cuckoo flower, whilst in the dryer spots the yellow cowslips were mixed with dark purple orchis. The broad Test ran full and fast and stainless. (7)
Wherwell Abbey’s fishing beat number one curves through a meadow on the estate, below a grove of yew trees that surround the flint-and-stone chapel. My “beat” (a length of fishing water rented for the day) extends from a flower garden barrier to a white pole a few hundred yards downstream. Nesting swans guard a long glide. The female rests atop five large green eggs next to the path and flares as we pass, wings spread wide, neck curved toward her developing brood. Her mate paddles to meet us and trails us away. The fishing is slow, the day damp, the forecast for heavy rains intermingled with cold mist and wind. John Waller Hills wrote despairingly of the “English climate, which no one really likes who knows any other,” but he also wrote that foul weather means good fish are moving, taking fly. (8)
Only the great insects of late May and early June are true mayfly. On the River Test, they are imaged in Halford’s works on the dry fly at the turn of the last century. (9)The bug’s body is translucent, yellow-cream with four brown bars across the abdomen, three long tails and gossamer grey wings. The fly is tied with long soft hackles: a wonderful, roughly imitative attractor, a mouthful for the foolish trout of spring. Mayfly have been tied and fished here for hundreds of years.
Lesley shields her book from the wet, reading under overhanging branches. I amble the beat, casting dry flies upstream, and take a few small trout. Good fish are not yet rising to the day’s mayflies, but some are taking a dark drake. A large fish sips flies from the edge of an eddy in a deep, willow-shaded pool. I cast a green drake into the foam. In a moment, a European grayling eats my fly and bullies back into the shadows. Over twenty inches long, she holds against the current, her great dorsal fin iridescent above the dark pool. She reluctantly comes to net. I step into the river to revive her, the broad, blue fin wavering as I move her back and forth, her gill covers working until she muscles her way free. Large enough to do as great trout, she swings below me in the current and returns to lean against my leg before settling across my boot. This fish is different from Arctic grayling, her head longer, eyes set well back from her snout.
Ancient progenitors of the bronze giantess resting on my foot survived a doubling of genes in Northern Europe more than a hundred million years ago. The abundance of genetic material allowed for evolution and adaptation into anadromous fishes, with part of their lives spent in the sea, returning to freshwater to spawn. Early salmonids crossed the Arctic and entered the Pacific Basin, to eventually evolve into the rainbow trout. And the rainbow became all five species of Pacific salmon. Here, on the River Test, after millennia of change, this great fish becomes briefly for me the mother of all salmon and trout.
While we rest, I take it all in─ the river itself, Halford’s giant mayfly, and the ancient, leaning fish. Fishing a bamboo rod I built with friends in Montana and a fly tied in Gambell, a dark world away, I have clearly fallen under the spell of the dry fly, but think I must shake it off. I recall the English chalk stream self-imposed rules that dictate up-stream fishing with dry fly only to rising fish, and the limits such fishing imposes.
Although beautifully manicured, idyllic, this beat is still a confinement─ not unlike the Gambell spit. When the sport of the dry fly was at its zenith in the late 1800s, the Gambell’s new church sat empty as villagers died in their underground homes. The disease that de-populated Saint Lawrence Island in 1887 may have been brought by whalers trading for baleen even as western women confined their waist with baleen stays and whale oil lamps illuminated houses. The needs of our world destroyed the villages of St. Lawrence Island. Even so, standing in the River Test a sense of being part of the whole of fly-fishing consumes me, until the grayling slaps my boot with her tail and fins into the dark pool.
Months before, late in winter, as I walked to the Gambell school, eyelets had frozen through to my ankles and left discs of frostbite. Each morning the sun peered flat and cold above the windswept, frozen sea, and houses emerged from the white dust like polar bears. Days were filled with teaching kids to classify benthic macroinvertebrates (bugs) and discussions of global warming bringing change to the island. One afternoon, men came to talk about cruise ships lightering tourists to the beach in the summer. Before the meeting, I tied flies. An ivory carver sat next to me and, rummaging in my kit of hooks and feathers, he dug out a box filled with painted beads. Joking, he asked, “What bug is this?” I said salmon and trout would take a bead if it was the correct color. Passing the box around for the others to compare the colors of aging roe, he said more salmon were coming to the island as the sea warmed. Other men lamented that soon they will be fishermen, not hunters; walrus were disappearing more quickly each spring with the retreating ice. When all present had chosen a bead or two, I lifted the box to put it in my kit, and the carver said, “I need those more than you.” We sat for a moment. I pushed the box across the table, and he slipped it into his pocket.
I taught fly tying each evening, beginning with wooly buggers and ending with streamers tied with dyed polar bear hair. On the third evening, elder Marvin Walunga took a seat at a vise to tie a Clouser minnow, his right hand shaking from a recent stroke. While I helped Marvin control the thread, he turned and told me, “You know we do this all the time.” I misinterpreted his comment. “Just for the past few evenings,” I said. He responded, “No, we use feathers on hooks to catch fish. We always have.”
Marvin’s eyes brightened as he recounted fishing with three “feathered hooks.” He said the people impale the skin and white feathers from the breast of guillemot on bare hooks to take giant sculpin from the frozen sea. In the same way, the head of a crested Auklet with its long black and white feathers and bright orange bill is used to jig. Marvin explained that he also catches fish on the red leg of a puffin hooked through the webbing between the toes. A younger man added, “Those are correct, but we use feathers to catch other fish also.” There, on St. Lawrence Island, in the midst of an ancient culture where people speak of how things are done, not how they were done, even as that culture changes, I found a true origin of fly-fishing and glimpsed catch and release.
Yupik people jig for fish and capture king crab through holes in the sea ice. Old women lower bits of fish on lines to the sea floor. When a king crab grasps the morsel, they tug back, until the crab takes the bait firmly and allows itself to be drawn upward. If the crab holds on until the surface, it is thanked for the gift of its life. If it lets go, it chose to be released. People who lived a thousand years ago may have arranged feathers in slides above ivory hooks and huddled about holes in the ice on the first warm spring day. Imagine men and women in parkas smiling atop the frozen sea, anticipating their catch. They do not laugh: laughter is disrespectful of the animals they seek. This is a sacred moment, life seeking life. They bend above the holes, jigging their deceits like softly waving fans in dances, like puppeteers attracting sea bass, sculpin, and rockfish to feathered hooks far below.
My memory of Gambell is little more than myth. That impossibly fundamental place should not exist at any distance from Wherwell’s Thomas Hardy version of England. Both seem parodies of reality, illusionary. Long before visiting Gambell, I planned to come to the River Test to discover fly-fishing’s origins among the storied waters of English chalk streams. But on St. Lawrence Island there remain much older uses for the feathered hook. I would like to return to see Marvin jig his polar bear Clouser. Beyond this English garden, swans paddle a beat where one angler casts each day to rising trout. Hundreds, if not thousands, of swans nest on St. Lawrence Island; the villagers eat them. Anglers crouching along the Wherwell beats strain to see rising fish like Terrance scanning his wealth of stones.
The odd juxtaposing causes my thin knowledge to slough away. I might have been comfortable in old stories, fishing bamboo, supporting ancient, leaning fish, but the English origin for fly-fishing is not enough. I want to know what stories shape fishing, and what myths justify letting fish go. Beliefs born of fishing with feathers must have begun with early mankind. Penetrating the mysteries to draw generous life from another realm has always been part of religion. How far back can I trace sacred fish? I feel like Igjugarjuk, seeking wisdom born in loneliness. It is possible to become lost in this, as fumbling as Terrance with his gems, as solitary as an angler on his beat. I should just go fishing- but I need to know as much as I love to fish.
(1) Campbell, Joseph, The power of Myth. Anchor Books, New york, 1991, p.xii
(2) Jolles, Carol Zane, Faith, Food and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002, p. 54.
(3) Ibid, p.63.
(4) Ibid, p.51.
(5) Campbell, Joseph and Charles Muses (Ed.), In all Her Names, Harper, San Francisco, (n.d.), p.4.
(6) http://www. wherwell.net/wherwell-history-ii.htm
(7) Hills, John Waller, A Summer on the Test, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1946, p.67.
(8) Ibid. p. 72.
(9) Halford, Frederick M., The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook, Derrydale Press, N.Y.,2000, p. 241-242.
Gambell, Alaska, March, 2005;
Wherwell, England, May-June, 2005
The only true wisdom “lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness,”
- Igjugarjuk, Eskimo shaman (1)
Yupik men stand beneath racks of skin-covered boats and stare toward Siberia across the moving, frozen sea. Parka hoods thrown back, they search the grey ice. In the distance, a bright red smear shines from a berg sliding toward the lowering sun. One boat inches home through the icepack, only one. It rides low in the water, the captain and hunters churning through slush, the clawing of ice on the aluminum hull sounding as if the skiff was being sawed in half at the waterline. Only one boat. The watchers on Gambell’s West Beach shield their eyes, tightening their vision on leads of dark water between the rapidly shifting ice blocks, searching for a glint of light on metal, a plume of exhaust, listening for a sound other than that of the grinding ice. A second boat has not returned. The bloodied floe drifts past, gathering speed in the running tide, slipping into the growing darkness.
Two hundred miles from Nome, Saint Lawrence Island holds at uneasy anchorage, pack ice and wind-riven fog streaming past the island’s prow, as if it could drift the few miles to Russia. The low Arctic light on ridges hung with white brings to mind a Machantaz painting called “End of the Hunt,” of a Yupik hunter, his parka sagging over slumped shoulders, adrift on a small berg in an endless sea. New to this place, not certain I should be here if tragedy ends this hunt, I recall the Siberian origin myth of a vindictive god: “Such are you and such shall be your fate. When you go out to sea you shall be drowned. When you stay ashore you shall die of starvation.” (2)
School teachers that walked with me to the west beach turn to go, the science teacher whispers not to say I work for Alaska Fish and Game: strangers are not welcome, especially ones who work for wildlife agencies. These hunters take what they can for subsistence, and their brutally hard-won harvest often clashes with the law. Federal agents who come to Gambell dress in full uniforms, and carry sidearms and rifles. Some biologists will not leave the hotel, requiring those who report harvests to visit them. But I have been in too many villages where a willingness to help with hard tasks opened doors. I stay to scan the roiling ice with the Yupik men for any sign of life.
During the Cold War, Saint Lawrence Island was closed to all, the Iron Curtain trapping Russian Natives on United States soil. The island remains so remote that before I came, I could not learn what fish swim its rivers. Many of the people speak a Russian Yupik dialect foreign to their Alaskan kin. Outsiders are intruders and confined to the gravel spit on which the town rests, set hard against the storms and ice, enduring the constant battering of frozen seas. The oceans of the high Arctic flush past as giant tides, in and out of this narrow passage barring Russia from Alaska.
Between the frozen, uneasy beach and Old Town stand frames of skin boats and the jawbones of great whales. Feathers of baleen sing, suspended by sinew from gaping jaws. Incessant wind and tides grind ice along the shore, where rolling pebbles create white noise, as if the empty jawbones were humming. Skeletons of whale boats rest atop pole frames as the wind scours all to the fossil grey of wood, stark against the stones underfoot. On the West beach, we stand silently, watching the spinning floes as darkness settles out of the sky.
Suddenly an elder laughs and points south. A second skiff appears from behind a tall iceberg, and all the men dash to the water’s edge. One of the older men glances back at me, expectantly; I scuttle down to help. The boat’s captain guns his outboard to ram the beach. His crew leaps out and struggles to hold the heavily laden skiff in the slurry behind a beached iceberg. Ice churns along the hull inches below wide planks fixed to the gunnels. Great balls of dark meat and white slabs of fat weight the boat into the sea. All the men drag and lift. One of the younger men moves down the rail into slush so that I might have a part. Reaching in to grab a strut, I shake hands with a walrus flipper.
As if dogs in harness, four-wheelers are roped one behind another and knotted to the skiff’s bowline. Alternating between sitting over the wheels for traction and lifting and pushing the 4-wheelers up the beach, we tow both skiffs and tons of food ashore. When the boats are above the highest tide, the men nod toward me, dismissively. Cold, wet, walrus-bloodied, I walk under the hide boats on their racks, the wind drumming on the skins, through a maze of whale ribs and skulls, toward the rough trailers that serve as a hotel.
Gambell rests atop millions of polished stones piled by the tides in berms a mile wide and three miles long. Old town’s ancient clapboard sided houses rim the wide beach. Beyond, rows of newer homes surround a wide, pebbled area with the city offices, public health clinic, and old trailer-unit hotel to one side. Alone in this commons a slight Native man, buffeted by the wind, picks up pebbles, inspects them, and drops them to the ground. He is Terrance, a simple man who wanders about the village each day. Terrance, seeking gems to add to his pocketed stash, wears a ripped snow machine suit that bulges with rocks like sagging, anchoring pantaloons. He motions to me asks why I am on his island. I say I teach about fish and fishing. “Fishing?” he asks, looking toward the ice-bound sea, then back at me. “Fishing,” I say, though the science teacher expects me to sort bugs and discuss global warming, and the mayor is interested in my fostering work for villagers. I explain to Terrace that I was asked to come to teach how to tie feathers to hooks. He shrugs, distant even now, peering at me from under his tattered hood. I think of Joseph Campbell’s story of Igjugarjuk , the Eskimo shaman and his assertion that the only true wisdom “lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness.” Terrance returns to his searching for the moment, hunched over his gravel, thoughts turned inward while speaking to an un-listening world, as adrift as a Yupik hunter on a floe in the middle of the Bering Sea.
Ancient people of the north, co-existing with polar bears, hunting walruses, seals, and whales, asked me to visit to teach fly-tying so that ivory carvers might create new art from rare gifts of nature. Natives may sell crafts made from endangered species. Polar bear skins languishing in permafrost caches, scraps of seal fur, and walrus whiskers could be used to tie flies for sale. Art on hooks crafted from walrus ivory would command thousands of dollars if tied with the fine sinew of minke whales binding mated wings of dyed swan and plumage of exotic birds blown from Asia. While I look forward to introducing tying flies as art, I am not certain about teaching fly-fishing, and I will not consider teaching catch and release.
Standing outside the Atco trailer hotel in frozen Gambell, all of this comes back in an instant as a quizzical look from Terrance, and the word, “Fishing?” reminds me that in Alaska, fish are food. In Western Alaska, food is not to be played with. In Gambell, even while not hunting or fishing, behaviors must remain respectful of all life. The seasonal round of harvesting begins each July with taking and drying Dolly Varden, Arctic grayling, salmon, whitefish, and rainbow trout. People walk the beaches each summer and fall, harvesting food from tide lines and raking sea plants and animals from the shallows. Migratory birds, berries, and edible greens fill out the island’s natural larder. Seals and walruses provide protein almost daily. The annual taking of Native food ends each May with whaling, the most important cultural event for this ancient community. As for my blessed catch and release, only a madman would spend all that effort to intentionally let his catch go. Similar discussions over catch and release continue worldwide.
Fly-fishers in drift boats on the Yellowstone River throw stones at families keeping trout. One of the guiding lights of fly-fishing, with decades of catch and release angling behind him, was recently deemed a pariah for keeping a hatchery fish. At the extremes, many fishers for food insist that all returned fish die, and dedicated catch and release anglers claim to have never killed a fish. Catch and release is the most controversial practice in field sports, both by those who keep all fish they catch and by those for whom putting fish back has become religion. In Alaska, catch and release may be a regulation on some waters, but fish are not to be trifled with, regardless of culture. Whether fishing for sport, commercial, or subsistence, Alaskans rely upon fish as food. In Native villages I learned to wait to be asked before speaking of letting fish go. I certainly won’t mention it here, on St. Lawrence Island in late winter when natural foods may be in short supply and hunger stands at the door.
Terrance’s cousin approaches from a nearby house. Terrance seeks through his pockets, searching. His cousin glances at me, then stares at him, and, as if he were not there, says, “The scars to his mind are deeper than those on his face.” Terrance’s features mark him as much older than his forty years. When he was five he was mauled by dogs. He speaks softly of diamonds, sapphires, gold, and rubies hidden in the beach. We talk about fish, about the walrus hunt just over, and the richness of his island. He motions that I should stay for a moment, he has something for me. Terrance seeks frantically in his pocketed hoard for a remembered gem, insisting, “…that is not it, that is not it,” until his hand emerges with the correct pebble gift.
Deposits of tide polished stones add to the Gambell beach like the rings of trees. The oldest frame houses perch far back from the shore. Few date earlier than 1917, when great waves washed many homes from the spit. Behind Old Town’s defensive scattering of houses, rows of newer homes are bright and airy, well insulated, with modern, domestic interiors. None, new or old, are tied to the land. All rest on timbers and blocks stacked on smooth gravel. The only road off the spit leads high on the hillside, an evacuation route for the next time a tsunami washes the spit clean.
Older houses have the feel of traditional semi-underground dwellings, with windows sealed behind plywood and doors barriered behind layers of blankets. In 1891, missionaries built a church, the first above ground frame structure. The builders did not speak Siberian Yupik and did not stay. The church remained empty, the Natives, who lived in skin-covered half-underground houses, were at a loss for its meaning or use. When other missionaries eventually returned, the church held spools of rope, floats, and harpoons. A generation later wood houses lined the spit. Some of the oldest homes are shaped like overturned skin boats resting on their racks, bay-front frames facing the sea.
Gambell’s skin boats are used each spring to hunt whales. They would be crushed in the pack ice searching for walrus. Most are not sturdy, square umiaks like those of Alaskan Yup’iks. From New England’s whalers in the 1880s, Gambellites learned to build boats resembling Yankee whaleboats, with low, light wooden frames, covering them with split walrus hide. Each spring when bowhead whales blow among the leads in the shifting ice, captains fill the fragile boats with sails, harpoons, floats, and tubs of rope. Crews sail silently to their prey, the striker waiting until the last moment to hurl an explosive harpoon deep into the head of the whale. If leviathan turns on them or dives under the boat, the bomb may kill them all. When a whale is taken, all whalers drag it to the beach, clan ties strengthened by the fan of towlines. Communal memory is born of ice and wind, of storms and frail craft, the risks of the sea part of hard-earned lives. Storms may rise at anytime, swamping boats, killing crews, setting hunters adrift.
Villages rimmed Saint Lawrence Island hundreds of years ago and clans fought one another. During the 1800s, whalers brought alcohol, starvation, and disease, while slaughtering whales and walruses needed by the islanders as food. Ninety percent of the islanders died between the famine and starvation of 1878 and the turn of the century when the few survivors moved to the Northwest spit, and the population halved again. (3) For thousands of years people have lived and died on St. Lawrence Island, the frozen gravels riddled with the detritus of those lives. During the 1900s, archaeologists excavated several middens on the island, and taught the Yupik the craft of digging.
Now, exotic birds, carried on the winds of Asian storms, find refuge in bushes growing above the remains of vastly older societies. Birders from around the world come to Gambell each spring and fall. They stalk the bushes, adding rare Asian birds to their life lists, even as Yupik men leap into nearby holes to mole tunnels in the frozen gravel. The People dig for buried treasures. Children must be warned away from tunnels filled with water each spring while young men burrow deep, seeking the most ancient pieces. The elders know they are selling their past, but are unwilling to intervene: “There is no work; they must have money to survive.” Most islanders dig, even those with skill hunting or working ivory, furs, and skins. Some of their finds are worth tens of thousands of dollars. (4)
Ivory buyers taught birders and other visitors not to appear too eager when buying artifacts. Gambell’s people have been traders in the high arctic for centuries, but they prefer not to barter: if possible, and clan ties permit, when someone needs something it is freely given. In the evening, the diggers bring their finds of ivory, implements, and bone to sell in the hotel.
Outsiders wait until the diggers are desperate before purchasing treasures. While I watched, a birder from the Lower 48 collected a small cooler full of Old Bering ivory, paying a pittance for butterfly buttons and game pieces, each worth hundreds of dollars. In her stash lay an ancient ivory fishhook with knotted baleen line and an ivory slide above the hook.
One evening, Terrance came to trade a find he had made while searching his gravel. He drew from his pocketed horde a fine seal point, with polished slate blade and Old Bering lines etched into the ancient ivory. He asked half of what the artifact was worth, and halved his request each night thereafter, until, by the buyer’s final night on the island, the point had broken to shards among his pocketed stones. What quirk allows those of us with wealth sufficient for wandering to barter for meager return the heritage of ancient peoples?
An answer lies in the nature of western thought and how it differs from other ways of seeing the world. Joseph Campbell wrote of our tales of “domination and conquest─ be it of women, other men, or nature.” (5) These same Western myths, still germane to all of our relationships, also puzzle-out my riddle of cultural conflicts over letting fish go. My time on St. Lawrence Island sparked my interest in searching our ancient human past for traces of what we now call angling ethics. The juxtaposition of simple greed played out against such a rich subsistence background forced me to question what I had long considered universal values. My search for answers begins with the ancient culture of Saint Lawrence Island, however, it continues with the origins of fly-fishing on the British Isles.
It has been two months since I visited Gambell in the Bering Sea. Months of glacial winter in Alaska dissolving into glorious British spring as my wife Lesley and I travel in chalk stream England, reveling in May while I look for the roots of fly-fishing. I had not considered fishing England’s hallowed waters before reading J.W. Hills’ A Summer on the Test. The book’s images of long glides, idyllic afternoons, and trout languidly rising to dry flies dulled our Southeast Alaska’s reality of torrential rains and heavily weighted egg patterns lobbed at unwary fish. Clear water, dry flies, and rising trout seized me. That chalk stream vision and my desire to learn firsthand the history of fly-fishing drew us to the village of Wherwell, southwest of London.
Beyond the parlor of a bed and breakfast on the River Test, sunshine splashes from morning glories and hummingbirds zip about the garden. The village is in flower, as it has been each spring for a thousand years. Wherwell Abby was once the choice of Queens of England as refuge. “(T)he Abbey retained a certain social cache amongst those well born ladies who could not find suitable husbands.” (6) Wherwell remains idyllic, with rose covered cottages reflected in the glow of the river. J.W. Hills described days such as this:
It was one of those days which May sometimes brings. The sun shone, the sky was blue and silver, the breeze was light and the trees were all of a different shade of green. The water meadows were bright with flowers. The liquid gold of the kingcup was fading, but there were wide drifts of the delicate lilac of the cuckoo flower, whilst in the dryer spots the yellow cowslips were mixed with dark purple orchis. The broad Test ran full and fast and stainless. (7)
Wherwell Abbey’s fishing beat number one curves through a meadow on the estate, below a grove of yew trees that surround the flint-and-stone chapel. My “beat” (a length of fishing water rented for the day) extends from a flower garden barrier to a white pole a few hundred yards downstream. Nesting swans guard a long glide. The female rests atop five large green eggs next to the path and flares as we pass, wings spread wide, neck curved toward her developing brood. Her mate paddles to meet us and trails us away. The fishing is slow, the day damp, the forecast for heavy rains intermingled with cold mist and wind. John Waller Hills wrote despairingly of the “English climate, which no one really likes who knows any other,” but he also wrote that foul weather means good fish are moving, taking fly. (8)
Only the great insects of late May and early June are true mayfly. On the River Test, they are imaged in Halford’s works on the dry fly at the turn of the last century. (9)The bug’s body is translucent, yellow-cream with four brown bars across the abdomen, three long tails and gossamer grey wings. The fly is tied with long soft hackles: a wonderful, roughly imitative attractor, a mouthful for the foolish trout of spring. Mayfly have been tied and fished here for hundreds of years.
Lesley shields her book from the wet, reading under overhanging branches. I amble the beat, casting dry flies upstream, and take a few small trout. Good fish are not yet rising to the day’s mayflies, but some are taking a dark drake. A large fish sips flies from the edge of an eddy in a deep, willow-shaded pool. I cast a green drake into the foam. In a moment, a European grayling eats my fly and bullies back into the shadows. Over twenty inches long, she holds against the current, her great dorsal fin iridescent above the dark pool. She reluctantly comes to net. I step into the river to revive her, the broad, blue fin wavering as I move her back and forth, her gill covers working until she muscles her way free. Large enough to do as great trout, she swings below me in the current and returns to lean against my leg before settling across my boot. This fish is different from Arctic grayling, her head longer, eyes set well back from her snout.
Ancient progenitors of the bronze giantess resting on my foot survived a doubling of genes in Northern Europe more than a hundred million years ago. The abundance of genetic material allowed for evolution and adaptation into anadromous fishes, with part of their lives spent in the sea, returning to freshwater to spawn. Early salmonids crossed the Arctic and entered the Pacific Basin, to eventually evolve into the rainbow trout. And the rainbow became all five species of Pacific salmon. Here, on the River Test, after millennia of change, this great fish becomes briefly for me the mother of all salmon and trout.
While we rest, I take it all in─ the river itself, Halford’s giant mayfly, and the ancient, leaning fish. Fishing a bamboo rod I built with friends in Montana and a fly tied in Gambell, a dark world away, I have clearly fallen under the spell of the dry fly, but think I must shake it off. I recall the English chalk stream self-imposed rules that dictate up-stream fishing with dry fly only to rising fish, and the limits such fishing imposes.
Although beautifully manicured, idyllic, this beat is still a confinement─ not unlike the Gambell spit. When the sport of the dry fly was at its zenith in the late 1800s, the Gambell’s new church sat empty as villagers died in their underground homes. The disease that de-populated Saint Lawrence Island in 1887 may have been brought by whalers trading for baleen even as western women confined their waist with baleen stays and whale oil lamps illuminated houses. The needs of our world destroyed the villages of St. Lawrence Island. Even so, standing in the River Test a sense of being part of the whole of fly-fishing consumes me, until the grayling slaps my boot with her tail and fins into the dark pool.
Months before, late in winter, as I walked to the Gambell school, eyelets had frozen through to my ankles and left discs of frostbite. Each morning the sun peered flat and cold above the windswept, frozen sea, and houses emerged from the white dust like polar bears. Days were filled with teaching kids to classify benthic macroinvertebrates (bugs) and discussions of global warming bringing change to the island. One afternoon, men came to talk about cruise ships lightering tourists to the beach in the summer. Before the meeting, I tied flies. An ivory carver sat next to me and, rummaging in my kit of hooks and feathers, he dug out a box filled with painted beads. Joking, he asked, “What bug is this?” I said salmon and trout would take a bead if it was the correct color. Passing the box around for the others to compare the colors of aging roe, he said more salmon were coming to the island as the sea warmed. Other men lamented that soon they will be fishermen, not hunters; walrus were disappearing more quickly each spring with the retreating ice. When all present had chosen a bead or two, I lifted the box to put it in my kit, and the carver said, “I need those more than you.” We sat for a moment. I pushed the box across the table, and he slipped it into his pocket.
I taught fly tying each evening, beginning with wooly buggers and ending with streamers tied with dyed polar bear hair. On the third evening, elder Marvin Walunga took a seat at a vise to tie a Clouser minnow, his right hand shaking from a recent stroke. While I helped Marvin control the thread, he turned and told me, “You know we do this all the time.” I misinterpreted his comment. “Just for the past few evenings,” I said. He responded, “No, we use feathers on hooks to catch fish. We always have.”
Marvin’s eyes brightened as he recounted fishing with three “feathered hooks.” He said the people impale the skin and white feathers from the breast of guillemot on bare hooks to take giant sculpin from the frozen sea. In the same way, the head of a crested Auklet with its long black and white feathers and bright orange bill is used to jig. Marvin explained that he also catches fish on the red leg of a puffin hooked through the webbing between the toes. A younger man added, “Those are correct, but we use feathers to catch other fish also.” There, on St. Lawrence Island, in the midst of an ancient culture where people speak of how things are done, not how they were done, even as that culture changes, I found a true origin of fly-fishing and glimpsed catch and release.
Yupik people jig for fish and capture king crab through holes in the sea ice. Old women lower bits of fish on lines to the sea floor. When a king crab grasps the morsel, they tug back, until the crab takes the bait firmly and allows itself to be drawn upward. If the crab holds on until the surface, it is thanked for the gift of its life. If it lets go, it chose to be released. People who lived a thousand years ago may have arranged feathers in slides above ivory hooks and huddled about holes in the ice on the first warm spring day. Imagine men and women in parkas smiling atop the frozen sea, anticipating their catch. They do not laugh: laughter is disrespectful of the animals they seek. This is a sacred moment, life seeking life. They bend above the holes, jigging their deceits like softly waving fans in dances, like puppeteers attracting sea bass, sculpin, and rockfish to feathered hooks far below.
My memory of Gambell is little more than myth. That impossibly fundamental place should not exist at any distance from Wherwell’s Thomas Hardy version of England. Both seem parodies of reality, illusionary. Long before visiting Gambell, I planned to come to the River Test to discover fly-fishing’s origins among the storied waters of English chalk streams. But on St. Lawrence Island there remain much older uses for the feathered hook. I would like to return to see Marvin jig his polar bear Clouser. Beyond this English garden, swans paddle a beat where one angler casts each day to rising trout. Hundreds, if not thousands, of swans nest on St. Lawrence Island; the villagers eat them. Anglers crouching along the Wherwell beats strain to see rising fish like Terrance scanning his wealth of stones.
The odd juxtaposing causes my thin knowledge to slough away. I might have been comfortable in old stories, fishing bamboo, supporting ancient, leaning fish, but the English origin for fly-fishing is not enough. I want to know what stories shape fishing, and what myths justify letting fish go. Beliefs born of fishing with feathers must have begun with early mankind. Penetrating the mysteries to draw generous life from another realm has always been part of religion. How far back can I trace sacred fish? I feel like Igjugarjuk, seeking wisdom born in loneliness. It is possible to become lost in this, as fumbling as Terrance with his gems, as solitary as an angler on his beat. I should just go fishing- but I need to know as much as I love to fish.
(1) Campbell, Joseph, The power of Myth. Anchor Books, New york, 1991, p.xii
(2) Jolles, Carol Zane, Faith, Food and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002, p. 54.
(3) Ibid, p.63.
(4) Ibid, p.51.
(5) Campbell, Joseph and Charles Muses (Ed.), In all Her Names, Harper, San Francisco, (n.d.), p.4.
(6) http://www. wherwell.net/wherwell-history-ii.htm
(7) Hills, John Waller, A Summer on the Test, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1946, p.67.
(8) Ibid. p. 72.
(9) Halford, Frederick M., The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook, Derrydale Press, N.Y.,2000, p. 241-242.
CHAPTER 2
Fish Simple
Connecticut, 1954
Florida, 2001
“The things a man has heard or seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments or belief please them best.”
-W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight
Mr. Edwards lived in a moss-green Plymouth and fished out of it year-round thru the 1950s. Each summer he eased the car up the lane to the Connecticut Valley farm and sat in his boat-tailed coupe while speaking to my father. World War II had crushed Mr. Edwards’ legs and Dad had rigged pedal extensions and a hand throttle in the car so that the old man could drive south each winter. Mr. Edwards knew all the fishing piers between New England and Florida. He would set out his rods and camp in his car along beaches to break the monotony of the long drive. I recall standing on his running board, my father talking to him over my shoulder, as I squinted to see into his backseat, piled with fly-boxes and fishing poles. He would open a tackle box and tell me in his Lucky-Strike gravel-lined voice wildly exotic stories of fish each lure had caught. He was my only relative who fished. I remember wanting to disappear with Mr. Edwards in that ancient boat-tailed coupe to the Florida Keys.
Many years later, I thought of him as I drove near Orlando to meet with other angling instructors about bringing families to fishing. Walt Disney World sprawled in the middle of piney woods and swamps, the Magic Kingdom surrounded by an endless ring road guarded by wilderness fringe. I imagined Mr. Edwards and myself as modern day Ponce de Leons, slogging through Florida futilely seeking the Fountain of Youth.
Coronado Springs is one of the Magic Kingdom’s satellite resorts, with yellow stucco and colorful flags hung high above wide terracotta floors. An odd setting for a meeting about fishing, its central lake’s bass competing with a Mayan pyramid waterslide, waterskiing, paddleboats, and the Magic Kingdom. In the morning angling instructors gathered in a courtyard that smelled of coffee, with tropical plants and the piped-in call of toucans.
We began with introductions of representatives from State agencies and angling programs. Colonel Tom unintentionally brought the introductions to a halt. Tom was tall, angular, brush cut, having served in the First Gulf War; three years spent abroad, his family in Kentucky, his kids growing older. He wanted to bring fishing to wounded warriors in America’s heartland. The Colonel knew that sounded trite, so he explained;
After all the parades, the speeches, the flags, I was done. No one knew. No one had seen…three years gone! I sat on the steps. We went to church, shopping, amusement parks, day after day, weeks sliding by. I always ended up on the steps, remembering, sinking back to the Gulf. My family moved about as if on eggshells, whispering. Until one morning my daughter, a teenager now, came and sat beside me. She wrapped her arms around my neck…I was far away. After a while, she moved a bit, braided her fingers in mine, and said, ‘Daddy, let’s go fishing.’ I came home that day.(1)
America heals through contact with nature. After every conflict we turn to the outdoors, and more specifically, fishing, to find solace, to renew bonds, to heal. Since Colonel Tom’s admission at Coronado Springs, it has taken me years to discover the roots of this cleansing. I believe I finally understand why Disney World serves our need for entertainment, but America becomes whole again through contact with living nature.
We owe this vision of healing through nature to W. H. H. Murray, a preacher from Boston who urged his countrymen and women, wounded by the Civil War and/or the new urban industrial revolution, to go to the Adirondack Mountains to heal. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, and the young Theodore Roosevelt learned these lessons well. With the Spanish American War came Roosevelt’s National Parks and his ethics of fair chase. After the first Great War and the flu epidemic, remote waters were opened to the Model T during the Golden Age of American fly-fishing. Families that fished after WWII saw fiberglass rods and spin-fishing erupt onto America’s rivers, lakes, and streams. Korean vets came home to President Eisenhower’s highways and the Fishing for Fun movement, and the Vietnam War birthed my generation of back-to-the-earth hippies, many of us still intent on catch and release.
Our nation inherited this legacy from ancient times. John Bale, in Lives of the Most Eminent Writers of Great Britain (1559), wrote about hunting and fishing: “They were the exercises of noble men ….Ulysses instituted such diversions after the conquest of Troy, and …they received commendation from Plato, as the sources of renewed enjoyment to those who suffered, either from domestic calamities, or the injuries of war.” (2) After every conflict from the Civil War on, America has turned to nature to heal. Regardless of our source of injury, from the Healing Waters Fly Fishing program for wounded veterans, to Casting for Recovery rehabilitating the muscles of breast cancer survivors, to inner-city youth fly-fishing in Montana, America turns to nature to heal. For me, this is personal. When I was three on the family farm, I slipped from timbers framing a tobacco barn and plunged head first onto the scrabbled headbolts of a flathead Ford engine block. My father pulled me off, bloody from the bolt I had speared, and worried his fingers across my pulsing scalp. The press of my father’s thumb still pocks my skull. I suspect the bolting serves as a convenient excuse for my wandering ways, though my questing differs from others only in being fish simple.
First fascinated with pollywogs trapped in puddles each spring, then by stock ponds─ exotic with snapping turtles, water snakes, and catfish─ in a family largely without fishers, I have always loved to fish. Pumpkin seeds, bluegills, and perch wove threads of connectedness. My mother’s “Fishy, fishy in the brook, Papa catch him on a hook,” among my earliest memories, and my son’s young joy at salmon which came to his “Here, fishy, fishy!” bookmark my life. Fishing is a way to order, to understand the world. It is more for me than a metaphysic. It is both a healing and a re-creation. I am not alone in this, fishing has always renewed.
Long before the time of Christ, spotted fishes sacred to Europe’s first deity, the White Goddess, sang like thrushes and leapt for mayflies in her moonlight. (3) Assyrian priests helmeted as great fish wore capes of silver scales. Freshwater springs and the fishes they contained were sacred to Greeks and Romans. Agrarian myth gives us the story of the Fisher King, who, his land laid fallow with his wounded thigh, can only feed his people with fish.
Our foundation myth tells of the origin of mankind in the Garden of Eden. Archeologists and religious scholars have argued for hundreds of years about where The Garden was located, many asserting that our religious origins lie at the juncture of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. But the Book of Genesis speaks of four rivers of Eden: we see only two. Withdraw a bit. Go straight up, go to a Land-Sat image from space, and the beds of two additional rivers appear. Thousands of years ago, as the last great Ice Age waned, tremendous flows sprang across Western Asia.
In the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, descendents of European brown trout exist that are found nowhere else. These Rivers of Eden flow beyond barriers of mountains and deserts into the Pacific Basin: the wrong pond for Atlantic Ocean fish. Called Tigris or Euphrates trout, they have overly large fins rounded from the swift flows they inhabit and display bright blue bars on a lemon-green background with red spots. They were isolated in these rivers when ancestor European trout migrated up flows issuing from the melting ice, flows that must have overtopped mountains. (4) As the last great Ice Age waned, torrents may have delayed our Indo-Aryan ancestor’s arrival in Europe, on their first journey from the grasslands of the Asian Steppes.(5)
Western humankind took time at the mouth of the Volga to birth the Celtic culture, shaped by our horse-warrior god Lug. Reminders of our earliest story remain: the endangered Caspian Trout, hundred pound fish returning like steelhead to the Volga River; great offerings of ancient weapons and treasure found in central Europe’s rivers; brightly clothed mummies preserved in salt and peat from Europe to Asia; and the nomadic Vlach, the indigenous people of the Balkins whose name means horse. Rivers flowing into the Caspian Depression may have provided a locus, a gathering, as early Celtic culture formed and grew, from where thousands of years ago it sprang like a wolf upon placid Europe. (6) God Lug became the Celtic god Bran, consort to the White Goddess. Her sacred spotted fishes remain as part of the godhead of anglers.
Stories of mythic heroes surely sustained humankind out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. This must have been a different hero from the chivalric loner of the Middle Ages. Prior to the Aryan invasions, Europe’s primary deities were feminine, linked to the fertile earth.
During the Holocene Wet period (10,000-5,000 BCE) people settled near water to farm and fish. The remains of early European agricultural civilizations show no defensive rings, no fortified walls: apparently they were very pacific people. Then, in the fourth millennia BCE, invaders showed up. Tribes of Indo-Aryan origin overturned the matriarchy of Europe, replacing the pastoral with a masculine-dominated social order of farmers and craftsmen ruled by warriors and priests. Early Celts riding their recently domesticated horses birthed the plundering hero and their gods of war. (7)
When a new order enforces its beliefs, the old order does not simply fade away. We are still the product of both the ancient, fecund feminine and the warrior bent on eternal struggle. Though the new, masculine God dominates western storytelling, underneath the Goddess does not shrink or fail. Our fables often reflect this disunity, although the male God dominates western myth. Persius and Andromeda provide the tale of the beautiful princess rescued from the sea monster by the hero on his winged horse. The myth twists into the repeatedly martyred St. George from Ethiopia to the Balkans and finds nearly universal form in the West in Saint George and the dragon. The story of the hero wanderer with his series of adventures intent upon rescuing the fair maiden becomes the model for tales of chivalry from the Dark Ages to the present. I believe the beginnings of angling ethics are found in religiously inspired knights’ tales.
It is too easy to dismiss western sagas as coincidentally related to fishing. In the Summer 2008 issue of The American Fly Fisher, Samuel Snyder wrote about the tie between fly-fishing and religion: “Anglers, then, in literature and life, often seek experiences that represent essential quests for meaning in the lives of all humans; anglers simply perform these quests on streams, rivers, and lakes while ritually waving a wand in the air.” (8) The importance of fish to our survival both in a physical and spiritual sense makes it likely that the beginning of our sport is to be found in fulfillment of common archetypes. Emma Jung, wife of Carl Jung, wrote in The Grail Legend:
When a myth is enacted in a ritual performance...the healing factor within it acts on whoever has taken an interest in it and allowed himself to be moved by it …by this means (he is) enabled to put himself "into order"…Equally, this putting oneself "in order" or "becoming one with a higher will" is the content of religious experience. (9)
With roots in religion and branches as complex as chivalry, is it any wonder that angling stirs deep feelings? To understand this intensity we must return to the common thread of fishing as a healing force, a theme which surfaces in almost all fishing stories, regardless how simple or divine.
A copy of the oldest English fishing book, The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle (1496), reposes in the Library of Congress, but when I sought it neither the title nor supposed authoress Dame Juliana Berners appeared in the computerized system. The mission of the endless stacks seemed to be to hide what might be known. Old drawers of Dewey Decimal cards concealed her book. Ultimately, she was there, and the white-gloved librarian issued The Treatise forth, cradled in velvet. With freshly washed hands I read velum pages crisp as fallen leaves, with reds as deep as cherry blood, and black ink as old as coal.
The Treatise begins by comparing the field sports. The authoress declares hunting is too much work, hawking is laborious, and fowling is the poorest sport of all. In contrast, the angler, “At the very least, will have his wholesome and merry walk at his own ease, and also many a sweet breath of various plants and flowers…He will hear the melodies of the harmony of birds.” (10) Regardless of who authored The Treatise, it is a book about healing through the gentle art of fishing.
Although the existence of Dame Berners has been challenged, she is still believed by many to be the first woman published in England. I fear, however, that Richard Hoffman has it correct when he writes, ”Put bluntly, the alleged Dame Juliana is a fabrication, a figment, a myth, confirmed and supported by no known historical record." (11) It may have been literary historians who created the myth of Juliana, but we anglers have made her real. Fly-fishers continue to do so out of the common need for assurance that our sport pleases our God. The legend of Juliana has her accomplished as a hunter and angler, of great physical beauty, and of noble birth- an English goddess of the hunt. A “dame” in an abbey was either a gentlewoman or a humble lay sister raised to higher office. Houghton Mifflin defines dame, in part, as from the middle English domina, meaning lord or master. Juliana is a feminine of Julian, prior to 1500, the name of three Catholic Popes. Also, the Blessed Juliana of Norwich wrote during the time of the plague and the peasants’ revolt of the late 14th century.(12) Her message was of renewal through God's love, an oft repeated theme in The Treatise. Juliana, Julian, Julius, the name's godhead runs through the Christian church, the pantheon of Roman Emperors, and classical gods. It is easy to see why a publisher eager to promote a new sport would choose a Dame Juliana as author. What then of Berners?
The Berners name is associated with men who came to sad ends with Norman kings, which is appropriate, given their mythic progenitor. Berners had been Barnes, which is related to the Irish O’Brian. The name finds its way back through Brennus, the Gaul who sacked Rome in the 5th century, B.C., to the Welsh god Bran. (13) In legend, Bran was the Celtic warrior God, consort to the White Goddess, then a regional king associated with King Arthur. He is most solidly rooted in England’s west county folk tales and myth. Bran was both a warrior and the god of renewal and regeneration, appropriate to the naming of Dame Juliana. Catholic, Roman, and Celtic: Dame Juliana Berners provides the authority of the gods of England to the sport of angling. It took more than a hundred years for her name to ascend to the godhead of fishing. Interest in fly-fishing as a marker of wealth took hundreds of years more, but near its beginning lies the naming of the healing Dame.
A long list of clerics angled and wrote in England, but let’s skip to the colonies. The first publication about fishing in America was Reverend Joseph Seccombe’s Business and diversion inoffensive to God, and necessary for the comfort and support of human society: A discourse utter'd in part at Ammauskeeg-Falls, published in 1739. The good reverend had run afoul of his congregation by fishing on the Sabbath. In his defense, Seccombe argued that the business of America is business: to do the Lord’s work is to provide for your family and the generous support of the church’s good works. You must toil six days of the week to meet the needs of family, community, church, and poor. The Lord provides only the Sabbath for rest, and fishing has long been known to be the best way to re-create oneself. As one’s appointed Sabbath task is renewal, one may fish on Sunday.(14) Even though his parishioners failed to appreciate his logic, such was the wisdom of Reverend Seccombe: the business of America is business.
Religion as a business requires a culture of work, harking directly back to the feudal belief that work is a form of prayer. The Reverend Jonathan Edwards, the cleric associated with the First Great Awakening, insisted that God's blessing was earned. (15)Toiling for salvation involved wresting a new Eden from Governor Bradford’s “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” (16)
My family lived in New England for hundreds of years before I dove into that Ford short block. Gunsmiths, tinsmiths, tool-makers, and farmers never leaving the land, never throwing anything away: Swamp Yankees. Grandparents told of the aunt who fled the east after the Civil War, the great-grandmother who traveled with Buffalo Bill, the missing sister who sent postcards from the Klondike, the stories pressed into my being as surely as my father’s thumb. The colonial farmhouse groaned with the reach of past generations. Grandfather had a hodgepodge of fishing tackle in a corner of his gun room where he did not mind my untangling the mares-nest of lines and hooks. How I would love to attempt that unraveling today: gifts from generations shaped by the two great wars and the depressions of the 1930s and 1890s. I have one family rod of lancewood and a brass reel from the 1850s, its story heralding the Civil War.
In this age of rapid change, we seek groundings. It has always been so: what we pass on is hardly a choice. The stories I recall from Grandfather were those of his gunroom, of Swamp Yankee frugality. I can no more hope to teach grandchildren about their ipod lives than he could me of television. It is only through our reflected past that we shape who we become in future’s memory. The chivalric loner we had first from the Celts morphed into the knightly code in England before appearing in our westward quest. The hero’s dragon was replaced by wilderness, his task the rendering of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal; a return to Eden. As the frontier closed, the heroic story morphed into the cowboy of the dime novel, the West of Walt Disney, complete with weekly installments of the hero on the white horse. Gunsmoke became Paladin, Rawhide, and Route 66. The heroic quest was reborn as the cowboy, to rescue the fair maiden and return her to her home before riding on to the next adventure.
Fulfillment of the hero’s story remains at the heart of angling ethics. Because we are the product of cultural myths, because under our skin lies an unassailable shuck of cultures past, fly-fishers are condemned to fulfill the quest. The belief in the chivalry of fly-fishing is a standard metaphor in fishing literature. But it was not always so, and we should spend a moment ferreting out the origins of trout and salmon as noble adversaries. The elevation of salmonids begins with the White Goddess herself, described by Robert Graves as the three-fold goddess: the mother, wife, and layer-out. She was the life force, the cyclical god-head balancing the whims of male gods with her certainty of mortality. She was the earliest of our deities, the Mother Goddess to whom the moon, waters, and her fish were sacred. In Grave’s The White Goddess, singing spotted fishes leap for mayflies in her moonlight from Macedonia to Ireland.
Near the beginning of the second century A.D., Athenaeus of Naucratis wrote in his Deipnosophistae of sacred fishes as those “…let go and dedicated to the God…” (17) In Fishing in Earliest Times (1921), Radcliffe notes that while the Greeks and Romans ate tremendous amounts of marine fish, they rarely partook of fish that lived in the few clear freshwater streams that flow into the Aegean and Mediterranean. Those fish were sacred to the gods and goddesses of the waters. (18) As late as the 19th century, young women were believed to speak to fish at springs in the mountains of Europe. The story of the golden ring swallowed by a trout occurs in several cultures, as do tales of sacred or empowered fishes. The naming of Dame Juliana Berners as authoress of the first book on fishing is part of this godhead, as is her admonition that angling pleases God: “For it shall cause him to be holy.” (19) The sacred nature of sport well-done lies at the heart of our ethics.
It was not until the 19th century that fly-fishing, the fish themselves, and the waters they inhabited, gained full status during the resurgence of interest in chivalry. As the English Acts of Enclosure restricted access on flowing waters to those who could afford the fees, the fishes those waters contained became the sporting equal to those who fished for them. With the chivalric romances as a guide to proper behavior for the gentleman, and the long history of trout as sacred, elitist anglers elevated their sport with musings on the nobility of angling for salmon and trout.
In recent literature, we are more ecumenical in our quest as all fish have been somewhat ennobled. Andrew Taylor wrote of fishing the Zambezi for tiger fish, “Like knights preparing to joust, we were all bounded together by a great camaraderie …focused on the shared goal of finding the truth within the river.” (20) The dean of trout scientists, Robert Behnke, wrote in Trout of seeking remnant native trout populations in the west and concluded, “The joy of life is in the quest.”(21) On the final page of an issue of Fish and Fly, a sepia toned picture shows Ted Williams holding a large bonefish, captioned, in part, “When you feel him on, wait for the line to tighten….Then it’s cowboys and Indians…”(22)
Mythic angler Sonny Medeiros (aka Dr. Hector Cruz Lopez ”Che” and I) dashes toward the Florida Keys. When Che and I are together as our fictitious uber-persona “Sonny,” we sport ties while fishing, honoring the years we have invested in learning fly-fishing. Che has a friend at the Fort Lauderdale Salvation Army Store who keeps an eye out for horrendous silk ties for us, and the joke has gone so far as to infuse anglers from Maine to Oregon, inspiring them to wear ties when they fly-fish. Today Che wears a Daffy Duck tie, I show a bit of class with a knock-off Jerry Garcia favorite. We drive south on the Florida turnpike, then pick up the Intercoastal Waterway before Miami. Che knows of flats where we might bump into a bonefish, and I am soon wading in shorts, sandals, dress shirt, and a bright, unearthly blue tie in a mangrove swamp. He stalks off to islands as I explore backwater sloughs out toward the waterway. Redfish should be dropping out of the skinny water from mangroves. The tide flows like a river. I cast a standing shrimp pattern, throwing a fan of casts across current, feeling the bouncing shrimp, taking two steps sideways, up channel, before casting again. Nothing, not a nudge, until a redfish rockets from the skirting mangrove and grazes my leg on its flight to deep water.
My launch may rival those at Cape Kennedy. I erupt skyward, the next two hundred yards now surely empty of fish. Fishing flats is like stalking open grasslands as every motion signals the prey. Shuffle forward too quickly and fish pushing nervous water turn away. Jump and everybody hears the splash.
The slough shows no activity on this side of the waterway; on the far side, schools of small fish leap and dash about a central shallows. Something fast is driving those fish, but I am reluctant to cross. A fishless quarter mile further, the tide has slowed and baitfish are still scorching the surface on the far shore.
Trailing the rod from my belt, I loosen my tie, fold my hat around flies, and jam it deep into a pocket. The current sweeps me against the far mangroves and carries me down-channel across from the car before I can stand, to where baitfish are still being harassed by predators. Well back from the channel, I stumble onto a marl pile and wait for the water to clear.
Baitfish charge past, hurling into the air. They are barred like parr marks on salmon smolts. I tie on a clouser minnow tied with flanking grizzly hackles as the school swings far out to the edge of the channel. Finally they comes within range. I cast across the school, stripping the fly hand over hand, then a second cast before I hook up. A big fish surges away, not fast enough to be a bonefish, but it pulls line steadily against the deeply bent rod and has me in the backing before it turns and runs past my roost, heading for the mangrove bushes along the bank. Three strong runs, each a bit shorter than the last, and it comes to hand, or nearly so. A snook in the mid-twenty inches cruises by, the long shovel-nose snout and broken lateral line shine through the tea-colored water. The fish spirals in against the flex of the rod. It swims past, opens its mouth, and spits out my fly. The fly does not drop from its jaw, nor rip from its lip; instead, the snook expels the fly with force, the deer hair folding forward of the painted eyes, as if it had been tangled in teeth. Having flossed with my deceit, the snook pauses, straightens, and fins away, disappearing back to its murk as Gifford Pinchot wrote, “to fight again another day.”
“Pettuii,” said the snook. The falling tide exposes bars hooking from both sides of the channel. I work through the ooze, walk the curve of shells, and swim back to the flats. Che is at the car. I empty a bottle of water through my reel, wring out my tie, and we are off for the Florida Keys. The fish simple cowboy rides away.
(1) (.As recalled)
(2) McDonald, John, The Origins of Angling, Lyons and Burford, NY, 1963, p. 28-73.
(3) Graves, Robert, The White Goddess, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, p. 369.
(4) Prosek, James, Trout of the World, Tabori & Chang, NY, 2003, p.116.
(5) http://paleogeo.org/epoch_en.html
(6) Herm, Gerhard, The Celts, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1976, p.83.
(7) Campbell, Josephand Charles Muses (ED.) , In All Her Names, Harpers, SF, NY, 1991, p. 13.
(8) Snyder, Samuel, Casting for Conservation: Religious values and Environmental Ethics in Fly-Fishing Culture,
The American Fly-Fisher, Summer, 2008, Vol. 34, Number 3, p.32.
(9) Jung, Emma and Von Franz, M-L, The Grail Legend, Princeton University Press, Princeton,1970, p.37.
(10) McDonald, John, The Origins of Angling, p.28-30.
(11) Hoffman, Richard, Fishers' Craft and Lettered Art, p.6
(12) http://ww.newadvent.org/cathen/08557a.htm
(13) http://www.britannia.com/celtic/gods/bran.htm
(14.) http://www.izaak.unh.edu/dlp/esccombe/pages/SEC001.htm
(15)http://wwwapuritansmind.com/Jonathan Edwards-sermons-TheManner Salvation Sought.htm
(16) William Bradford, A History of the Plymouth Plantation, (c.) 1650, chapter 9.
(17) http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Literature.AthV1
(18) Radcliffe,William, Fishing From the Earliest Times,E.P. Dutton an Co., 1926, p.2.
(19) McDonald, John, The Origins of Angling, p.46.
(20) Taylor, Alexander, The Longest Cast, New Holland Publishers, London, (nd), p.15.
(21) Behnke, Robert, Trout, fall, 2005.
(22) Williams, Ted, Fly and Fish, spring, 2005.
Chapter 3
Duffer's Fortnight
Chalk streams, England, May-June, 2005
“For the novice, his first two or three days on a well stocked water during the “Duffer’s Fortnight” is an experience to remember all his life.”
-L. Angreid, An Introduction to Fly-Fishing, 1939(?)
Lesley basks in the meadows of southern England, playing the cowmaid to my fly-fishing duffer. She sits along meadow paths, or atop a stile between fields, reading in the soft sunlight until docile cows approach as I willingly take to my role, catching trout made foolish by mayfly. Spring 2005 sees the best mayfly in decades, the great wobbling flies appearing each afternoon, hovering over the pools and glides. Good trout on gently flowing water should be difficult to catch, requiring serpentine casts, long gossamer tippets, and immaculate presentations, the angler crouched behind bushes of English nettles. Cotton’s admonition to fish “far and fine” is hardly needed this May. “Duffers Fortnight,” late spring on English chalk streams, is a time “when even the novice may expect to be rewarded by a brace of decent fish.” (1) It is a return to Walton’s age, to days when cowmaids sing and mortal anglers shine. The giant, cream-colored Ephemeroptera as described in Halford’s The Dry-Fly Man’s Handbook are the mayfly. Green drake, blue-winged olive, pale morning dun are no more mayfly than fishing with wet flies downstream and across is fly-fishing. The master of the wet fly, Skues, had it wrong, dry-fly proponent Halford still reigns: on the best waters, the rule is dry flies upstream to rising trout. Far and fine may not be necessary, but it is still required, even of duffers.
Victor, the son of the family that ran the White Lion Inn in Wherwell in the years between the wars, is a tall, very thin, older man who suffers from vertigo. His unlit briar pipe clamped in his jaw, he sways a bit and tends to hang onto nearby objects or an offered hand until we sit in his parlor across from the Inn. “There was a time when none of this ‘rent a fish’ was allowed,” Victor says, "gentlemen came down from London and took a proper beat for the season….The river is not ours, it belongs to a trust or corporation. We never fished it. The riverkeeper here would know if someone poached. It simply wasn’t done here, not since the enclosure laws. I guess they fished before that, but that was a long time ago, you see… But then we did used to get eels. After a great thunderstorm, the eels drop out of the top of the river and they’d trap them, ship boxes of them to London. Prized fish, that."
I am reminded of Victor’s eel boxes the next day in Stockbridge where the River Test winds under the road and great trout align in the current as if on display in a fishmonger’s shop. Alistair Robjent owns the local fly shop across the street. Alistair is in his 40’s, florid, hair parted in the middle, wide-eyed and, when he speaks of fishing, passionate. The front of his shop smells of leather and wood, hard-backed chairs draped with Scottish tartans and Irish woolens. The back room is more familiar, with rods and reels and bins of flies. When I enter the shop, Alistair is tutoring an American, the conversation moving from boots and waders to rods, lines, and leaders. They stall at the trays of flies like children considering jars of penny candy until Alistair directs the would-be angler to the front of the shop with his booty.
Then the American asks where to fish and Alistair explains the system of beats and fees, while thumbing through his registration book. The new angler assumed he could access water wherever he chose. It takes a bit to persuade him otherwise. Finally, Alistair declares, “Look, almost everything is taken just now, with the mayfly and all, but I do have these. This beat is available tomorrow, for this much.” A pause, then the would-be angler says, “For how many days is that?” Alistair responds, “Just the one, though you can have a second rod.” A minute later the American is gone, without tackle or flies, and Alistair, shaking his head, turns to me. He appears chagrined as I look like the fellow who just left in a huff, though scruffier and certainly less moneyed.
We talk fishing. He shows me a few patterns, his cranefly a marvel of knotted legs and cinnamon dubbing. We talk about catch and release and a little history of the river, Alistair explaining the River Test is man-made; it had been a series of marshes impossible to ford in pre-Roman times. The Romans channeled the river, top to bottom, and dumped rock across the marsh to build a base for the road and village. “Step outside the back door of my shop and you’ll sink nearly out of sight,” he says. “This is why the chalk streams of southern England are a commodity, private water. They were never public, always owned, a manufactured product which may be bought, sold, or rented.” We arrange to meet that evening for a pint to talk about fish and fishing.
In the Middle Ages, across Europe and England, fish were food. Every village had its fish pond, monasteries controlled huge acreages dedicated to rearing fish. The climactic optimum of the period from the 11th to 13th century led to the spread of warm water carp, reared in tremendous numbers in “stiewes.” From France comes a sense of the popularity of fishing in the 13th century: “The sport is so royal that there is neither gentle nor villain, if he knew of it and loved it well, who would not be more honored for that reason by all who understand it.”(2) Exactly what that means I am not certain, but it appears to bode well for anglers. An early reference to the sport of angling is found in an Italian text from the 1330s, which, after providing extensive instruction on how to build and maintain a fish pond, declares:
…and therefore I will wade a little further in this art, and shew you the manner of taking all sorts of fish, by the angle, which is the most generous and best kind of all other, and may truly be called the Emperor of all exercises. To speak then first of this art of angling …you shall understand that it consist in three especial things, that is to say, in the instrument which is the angle, in the instrument which is the bait, and in the true use of them both together, which is the seasons and times of the year fittest for the sport. (3)
The author provides information on the making of hooks and tackle, but “buy them from such as make a living or trade thereof,” (4) Imagine that: in the 14th century being able to go to a shop to buy fishing hooks! Which brings me back to the Trent and Alistair's fishing shop.
In the evening we meet Alistair in the Grosvenor Hotel. English walnut, cherry paneling, and dark timbers cozy the pub with displays of early tackle, pictures of great fish, and the ambiance of Thomas Hardy’s England. The Houghton Club meets here, the club which once denied access to its waters to royalty, the place from which Captain Lunn was Riverkeeper of the Test in the late 19th century, and his son and grandson after him. The Grosvenor is where much of the history of fly-fishing was written.
Alistair has loved fishing all his life. He recounts his earliest memories, sitting atop a grate above goldfish, pointing out the fish below. When he was five his parents took the grate off the pool. Alistair recalls capturing the goldfish, carrying them to the rain barrel. “They were there one second,” he says, “then, poof, they disappeared into the depths.” A year later, “Mum was hosing water from the barrel and plop, a gold fish swam out the tube. It was years before I confessed.”Alistair’s story aside, the roots of voluntarily letting fish go in England extend back to at least the plague of 1348.
For over two hundred years prior to the 14th Century, extended periods of warm weather and mild winters meant cereal grains came to be grown throughout the British Isles: human population in England grew from 1.4 million in the late eleventh century to over 5 million by 1300. (5) Feudal landowners no longer needed to support workers from cradle to grave. Laborers were hired as needed. Landlords were distressed by old serfs holding onto their household’s land and rights to graze the commons while their productivity on the Lord’s lands decreased. The advent of capitalism and decades of flood and drought drove thousands from rural villages. (6)
The Flood, Greenland Below, The Great Dying of Beasts; all are names for years between 1315 and 1323─ years of famine and disease. Then the weather turned cold. The beginning of the Little Ice Age forced a change in English agriculture. Large unfenced farms gained value as pasturage for raising English sheep. Fine English wool commanded such a premium in Europe that many self-sufficient villages were eliminated and the open fields fenced as pasture. These “villeins” were simply turned off their land to wander.
The period from 1315 through the middle of the century was one of deep change. Disease and cold struck. “(T)heft of food and livestock rose sharply, and bodies of paupers were found in the streets. Dogs and cats disappeared and cannibalism was rumored.” (7) In 1348, the plague came on. Starvation, disease, and cold killed millions, fully 40 percent of the English died. Suddenly, there was an alternative to working for low, pre-plague wages: many rural survivors turned to farming and taking fish and wildlife as subsistence.
A Royal Ordinance (1348) and a Statute of Labor (1351) were imposed which fixed wages to their low, pre-plague levels. Qualification statutes followed that reserved wildlife as “gentleman’s game,” (8) disallowing harvest by persons who needed wildlife as food. By statute, in the rivers of Southern England, “No person (not duly qualified) shall hereafter kill salmon or any other fish;” “No person shall keep a net, angle, &c.if not qualified.” (9) This combination of laws was intended to force reluctant commoners to work in a newly invented wage system that was already failing. By 1362 Langford, in Piers Ploughmen, could write of laborer’s work as a form of prayer. Peasants would make Piers the hero for the 1381 revolt. One of their demands was the return of the right to fish in the River Ver. (10) The Ver runs through St. Albans, where Dame Juliana Berners is said to have authored The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle. Over the next few centuries the river went from supporting one mill─ besieged during the Peasant Revolt─ to becoming largely a still-water fishery with eleven mills along its length.
Prior to the industrial age, England’s unpolluted and unrestrained rivers contained all manner of fishes. As an Island nation, England’s free-flowing rivers teamed with aquatic life, a natural larder for all. In 1420, Piers of Fullham described flowing waters as common property: “But in rennyng ryvers that be commone, There will I fisshe and take my fortune.” Piers of Fullham begins the discussion of fishing ethics with the admonition, echoed a few years later in The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, not to fish another man’s “stiewe.” “For off false fisshying commyth a fowle ende,” Piers also mentioned fishing with “angle hookys” and explained, for the first time I can find in English literature, why some fish should be returned;
And ete the olde fisshe, and leve the yonge,
Thought they moore towgh be upon the tonge,
…Late this yonge fisshe lyve till certain yeres,
And payneus to fisshe our olde weres,
But stynkkyng fishes, and unseasonable,
Latt passé, and take such as be able. (11)
In 1496 Wynkyn de Worde wrote that The Treatise was published with the text on heraldry and falconry to keep it out of the hands of “every idle person who would desire it.” (12) When viewed against the stress of the birth of capitalism, the advent of the Little Ice Age, the depopulating of large tracts of rural England, and the subsequent imposition of qualification statutes, early references to restricting sport to those worthy of it may represent the origin of the idea that releasing a portion of one’s catch was the mark of a true sportsman, a gentleman. “Fishing with an angle was not necessary for earning a living and involved nothing laborious. It was thus a suitable disport for the well-to-do and helped distinguish them from common folk.” (13) What better way to indicate that you were a member of the elite than to fish for pleasure rather than food?
As American commoners, Southern England brings Lesley and me more church spires than trout. Most days we are content to wander. The great cathedrals in Winchester and Salisbury overwhelm me as I quickly sour of crypts. In Winchester Cathedral, however, I seek out the fisherman’s chapel and Izaak Walton’s grave. Unlike the cathedral’s grey stone and dark wood, the chapel glows with color. Morning light streams through stained glass, a golden, fluted log pulpit stands before the altar. In the lower corner of the window Izaak sits under a willow awash in spring greens and yellow. The bright chapel lightens even the stone of his grave.
Another memorial in the cathedral is as compelling to my understanding as Walton’s. A statue dedicated to the diver William Walker stands behind the great alter curtain. In the early 1900s, Walker spent six years replacing footings with concrete and stone to keep the cathedral from collapsing. He worked alone, twenty feet down, sightless in the black, peat-stained waters that fill the weak soil under the cathedral. Each day crawling into his diving suit and helmet, he labored blindly under the Lord’s house disappearing into the murk, his work a form of prayer.
I empathize with Walker. One winter in Fairbanks I clawed about like a blind mole, emptying fifty-five gallon drums of waste oil as the construction of the Alaska oil pipeline wound down. Mornings we donned rubberized overalls, black from the waist down, oil-splashed jackets, oil-spattered hats and oil-soaked gloves. We worked seven days a week, ten hours a day in temperatures to thirty below zero. We began in darkness, the sun glowing dimly through the icefog between ten and one, the blackness of our afternoon labor brightened occasionally by moonlight on surrounding berms of snow. Vans hauled more waste from the pipeline camps as we rolled barrels from trailers onto a grid, swung pickaxes, and drained their contents into great bladders. Sometimes there was used oil, sometimes gasoline, sometimes fluids that caused us to rush gagging into the snow. Frozen barrels, expanded near-rupture in the cold, were filled with human waste. We rolled these plugs aside for others to thaw and drain into the Fairbanks sewers. Each day we struggled in the dark, hardly noticing the growing light in our blackness. I took the job to pay for my son’s birth; the only call-out in weeks from the union hall. Work I chose for simple love.
What intensity of belief must Walker have known, lowering himself daily for six years into black water under the cathedral, groping blindly to remove failing timbers, guiding bags of concrete and great stone blocks to shore-up footings. Did he work for love of God? Did he work to expunge personal demons? Or was he simply making a living in hard times, doing what he knew as the surest way to feed his family. What did William do on his Sabbath to re-create himself for God’s work under God’s house? I hope he fished. Walker died in the influenza epidemic in 1918. In 1956 the cathedral commissioned a statue of him. When it was unveiled, his family saw the sharp features of the royal engineer in place of “Our William’s” broad commoner’s face. The sculptor had elevated the engineer over the diver. The authorities failed to place Walker’s features on display in the church he saved from collapse until 2001, relegating a true bust of the man who saved Winchester Cathedral to the kirkyard. (14)
The morning after our visit to Winchester, I am blessed with a beat on the River Avon, north of Salisbury. We walk the paths with riverkeeper Andy Turner as the sun strikes dew laden grasses behind a great goal of flint and brick. Andy confides, “Our four beats are empty today. Feel free to fish them all.” A long glide flows into a willow hung pool on the lowest beat, a meadow path leads to riffles and a carrier above, and carrier beats bisect a meadow beyond. The day promises nesting swans, clutches of newly hatched coots, a late hatch of mayfly, but perhaps best of all, we have a real length of stream to be explored. As it is hours before the mayfly will begin, Andy suggests we drive on to Salisbury and visit The Book Barn.
John and Judith Head’s antiquarian sporting book shop is down a side street near Salisbury Cathedral, a simple business card at the bell, sporting prints in the window. John emerges from a stack and welcomes me into two floors of sporting press teetering around us. In a state of juvenile anticipation, I wander rooms of fly-fishing treasures that smell of parchment and old leather. A bookcase full of early editions of Izaak Walton stands among great shelves of atlases, many titles half-hidden. On a central reading table, lighted by a tall window, rests a row of ancient first editions.
In the next hour I find only one early reference to letting fish go. John Waller Hills writes of Mascall, from the 16th century, as a fish preserver: “many in this realm, he complains, ‘that spares no time to kill, nor cares for no time to save, but takes all at all times…’”(15) John Head returns and as we talk about early catch and release, he encourages, “I think no one has looked at this.” I ask about ephemera, newsprint, and flyers─ specifically looking for a copy of Frank Forester’s advice to young anglers from the 1860s. John relates the low value of anything but fishing books. First drafts and printers’ copies that would fetch astronomical sums in the world of books go for a pittance in angling circles. “Anglers are fishermen first,” he says, “and book collectors second. Given a choice between a book and a beat, they’ll go to the beat every time.” Which reminds me mayfly are due on the Avon and, amid laughing goodbyes, John invites me to return the next day.
Hatches of English mayfly are supposed to be over by mid-June, but this afternoon on the Avon they are prolific, lighter in color than on the Test: cream with red ribbing. The flies Andy had me buy at Robjents take brown trout from twelve to eighteen inches. A heifer waddles along the fence and nuzzles Lesley’s shoulder while she reads. Across the stream a white horse gambols below Tudor barns. Mocking birds sing from the willows, sparrows and song birds flitter about the sedges.
After landing a large brown, I change flies, stopping my catching and greatly improving my fishing. I have to focus on the stalk, the cast, and the presentation to get fish to come up and look at my odd deceits─ good sport. Changing flies to toughen the odds seldom takes good fish, but I do get to keep casting without the guilt of hooking too many. Anglers say, “Never leave fish to find fish.” Why not? Take a walk, change flies, stalk an especially difficult lie. If the contest lies within, why hassle easy fish? Brown trout continue to rise and nudge my flies before turning away.
Toward the bottom of the lower beat, a bright fish rolls lazily behind an overhanging willow’s branches. I quarter across the stream to get below the rising fish, then lay a Tupps Indispensible along the seam. Well, it’s my version of a Tupps, as I had to substitute pale yellow for the requisite billygoat urine-stained dubbing. A wild brown comes up and gobbles the fly, the fish lighter in color than the stocked fish and feisty. It swims a complete circle around me, keeping my rod bent nearly double, and does it again before quieting down. It is a good fish, into the high teens in length, light lemon-brown and confrontational even in the net. Refusing my ministrations, it darts over the rim and away as soon as I slip the hook from its kype. I change the fly again, this time to Alistair’s crane fly. The great jumble of legs works to raise fish that turn away.
Enjoying evening in an English meadow, Lesley and I walk the length of the beats. A family of coots squiggles into grasses along the far bank, we find empty bird nests in an arch of vines, and swans parade their cygnets. In twilight we stroll back down the path.
A school boy scurries across the mowed hayfield, drops to the ground and rolls under the electric fence, carrying a four-foot-long spear made of half-inch steel re-bar, one end knotted with twine, the other sharpened to a barbed point. He steps cautiously onto a thinly planked bridge, peers into the river, carefully aligns his rod and drops it point first through the widely spaced boards where large trout hold in the current. We come up then, out of the dusk, and ask if he is fishing. “Oh, no, couldn’t do that,” he stammers, “Just dropping it in and pulling it out for fun.” He demonstrates, this time hurling the spear deep into the muddy bottom. The twine breaks as he strains to free the buried shaft from the river's grasp and we leave him peering through the planks at his lost weapon.
Two anglers and a guide rush down the far side of the river to the barrier that marks the beginning of the lower beats. They charge through the high grass and nettles and cast at will, the guide stumbling along the edge of the unmowed bank. He wears vest, zingers, chest waders, wading belt, long-brimmed hat; his clients in jeans and long-sleeved shirts. They learn soon enough to keep their hands high while thrashing about in nettles. The guide rushes a net from one to the other as they shout that another fish has been pricked. His hands will swell and itch the next day, or is he, a poaching guide, of sterner stuff? English nettles are everywhere; one swish past a bush, any bush, and you will immediately feel a brand, a burn that takes days to fade.
The guide must be a local, he does not flinch or rub his hands. They fish the run hard but the browns have stopped taking mayfly and are rising to a small grey drake, hard to see against the river at dusk. They shout comments about getting supper with each near hook-up and appear crestfallen at each fish that turns away. The next day we stop in at Robjents to thank Alistair and mention the poaching. Alistair becomes very excited and calls Andy immediately. “A boy with a spear is one thing,” he exclaims, “but a guide involved cannot stand!”
Later that morning in Salisbury, I ring at John and Judith Head’s and we settle into the question of early references to releasing fish. John leads me to the fishing stacks and says, “Feel free to seek what you need here.” He spreads his hands, motions to his collection, and leaves me to read. In two days of searching, I try to piece together the ascent of fly-fishing in England.
After The Treatise, a hundred and fifty years passed in which the main effort of fishing authors seems to have been to borrow from each other. Arnold Gingrich, in The Fishing in Print, finds only two books between the Dame and Walton of note: The Art of Angling and the poem The Secrets of Angling. (16) A sense of the popularity of angling in the middle years of the 17th century, however, may be found in Robert Venables’ The Experienced Angler: or Angling Improved…(1662): “this recreation falleth within the capacity of the lowest fortune to compass.” (17)
Except for Piers of Fulham’s comment in 1420, writing about voluntarily releasing a portion of one’s catch apparently begins near the time of the final outcome of the English Civil War. In Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653), he mentions fish surviving with hooks in them; however, he does not speak of releasing fish intentionally. Walton befriended Charles Cotton, a gentleman 37 years his junior, and for the fifth edition of The Complete Angler (1676), Walton asked Cotton to write a section on fly-fishing. In his "Part the Second" Cotton advises his novice angler, “this is a diminutive gentleman, e`en throw him in again, and let him grow till he be more worthy your anger." (18) This line is noted in a later popular edition of the work (Ephemera, 1853), “This passage proves Cotton to have been a real sportsman. He contemns catching small fish, and says, “throw them in again.” (19)
Cotton’s “Part the Second” was written at the time of the restoration of the Monarchy. Possible dissenters who remained alive after Charles II's purges were prohibited from participation in the sport of hunting by the Game Act of 1671. The law provided that only protestant gentry earning over 100 pounds from their lands had the right to hunt. (20) The Game Act effectively kept the opposition, Catholics, and the rising merchant class from practicing with the new technology of flintlock firearms. Very rich merchants could bankroll fox hunting and work their way upward socially. For less well to do gentry, angling may have served a similar purpose at the time when participation in field sports began to be a virtue of the English gentleman.
The final removal of the public’s right to fish on many waters in England was brought about by the Acts of Enclosure between 1700 and 1845. In The Compleat Angler, Walton quoted a popular phrase; “everyman’s business is no man’s business.” (21) The Acts were the 18th century solution to what Garrett Hardin labeled the “Tragedy of the Commons.” (22) Starting in the early 1700s, these acts were initially used to consolidate holdings within boroughs, increasing agricultural yield though efficiency of effort. On paper, if you held title to any land in a borough, you were assured of having similar property, though your land might now be located in a different part of town. In reality, the large landowners decided who got what and the poor were driven out. Tens of thousands of small tract farmers who could not survive without the fruits of the once-common fields were forced from the land. Withdrawal to the cities became an intended result of the Acts, as more workers were needed for the growing number of mills and industry. (23)
In the Doomsday Book of 1086, there were 5,624 mills listed in England serving about 3,000 communities. Because of the initial high cost, mills were often owned by either the local Abbot or Lord, and villagers were required to have their crops ground in the local mill, where the owner charged fees as soke-rights. The advent of the Little Ice Age greatly diminished the yield brought for milling. That the abbot or lord, no longer beholden to the peasant for his survival, could claim a significant portion of his diminished crops fueled commoners’ anger. Soke fees came to haunt owners during the peasant’s revolt of 1381 when mills were targeted and burned across England.
Even so, by the 1700s approximately 20,000 English mills were powered by ponds confined behind dams on what had been flowing waters. Over the next several decades that number of water-powered wheels multiplied many times, but these new mills were not the small ones needed for local grinding and the wool industry. In 1717 the Derby Silk Mill stood over six-stories tall, was over 500 feet long and was powered by an immense water wheel. It proved to be so profitable that in spite of its 30,000 pound cost, it was soon imitated in scale on many other rivers. (24)
The Acts of Enclosure were strengthened in the latter half of the 18th century and the effect was to drive even more small landholders off their farms and into the mills. The Little Ice Age created an annual threat of crop failure that continued to the middle of the 19th century. It remained so cold that the kings of Europe held competitions for the design of the most fuel-efficient woodstoves. (25) Drought interspersed with torrential rains, crop rot inflicted stored foods and grain in the field. Farmers were forced to turn from cereal grains to more hardy crops to survive. The return of the English population to pre-plague levels by the 18th century led to improvements in agriculture that necessitated larger holdings.
Enclosure came to be supported by many as the way to reform agriculture, but it was very costly to the small farmer and the poor. Yet seldom was any attempt made to provide for those to whom the loss of their rights in the common field and common waste was ruination. "‘Has Meriden Common been long enclosed?’ …’Ah, lackaday, Sir, that was a sad job…’ ‘Why so?’ ‘Because we had our garden, our bees, our share of a flock of sheep, the feeding of our geese; and could cut turf for our fuel.-Now all that is gone.’ (26)
This was the age of the rise of the English nation of shopkeepers. The booming English economy, in which only the poor were left behind, provided increased leisure time and growing interest in angling. The growth in interest in angling occurred at the peak of the enclosure movement. When enclosure was applied to previously public waters, riparian rights were lost to the average angler, and local people could no longer fish local waters. Poaching became popular as many disenfranchised anglers continued to fish. (27)
The period of canal building in England further rearranged the fishing landscape. Industrialization required cheaper, more reliable sources of energy─ coal had to be moved. By the middle years of the 19th century, thousands of miles of canals interlaced the waterways of England, still-water ponds providing commoners with access to coarse fishing. Flowing waters and the fish they contained commanded a premium in England during the Industrial Age. With the rise of industrial centers on England’s rivers, numbers of salmon returning to spawn soon decreased, and fishing for this increasingly rare resource gained in status. Writing about 19th century salmon fishing, Robert Venables established the origin of angling’s elitism,"It stood with the stalking of deer in highland forests, the decorous and ordered shooting of pheasant; it became a symbol of position and affluence. …It became accepted that the sport had the most extreme excitements that were somehow ennobling, somehow vaguely something to do with being a straight, clean English gentleman."(28) The growing scarcity of clean and flowing waters, and more specifically, the game fish that those waters contained, elevated fly-fishing for trout in England. With the dry fly movement, trout were accorded a supreme status. “When dry fly purism soared to its greatest heights, not only the method was deified but also the quarry. The trout became a noble fish, only to be compared with the salmon. Trout snobbery was born…” (29)Early writings about fishing clearly illustrate this change in attitude toward different fishes.
Prior to enclosure little distinction was made between species of fish. The author of The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle asserted that "The salmon is a noble fish…" and the trout is "a right dainty fish...", but other species were in no way lesser. The grayling"...is a delicious fish to man's mouth." The barbel is sweet, the carp is dainty, the chub is stately, the bream is noble, on and on, good is found in all except the eel and pike, which are called indigestible and a glutton.(30) Likewise Thomas Best's Art of Angling (1794) lists the salmon as king of the freshwater fishes but holds the carp as the queen of fishes. Best catalogued the fishes by their palatability as coarse or fine, and spent a good deal of time on fish to be angled for because of the sport they provide. In fact, he rambled on for nearly six full pages on how to fish for pike. (31) He was not alone in elevating what we now call game fishes over other species.
Sir Humphrey Davy hardly considered fish other than salmonids and pike in his appropriately named Salmonia (1828). By 1833, James Rennie's Alphabet of Angling devoted 44 pages to trout, salmon, and grayling fishing; the pike took six pages and all others were treated on about one page each. As Rennie put it, "Next to trout and salmon, the pike or jack affords the best sport to the angler; for though it will seldom rise at the fly....it will bite greedily and voraciously at almost every bait which is offered it, and therefore good sport may often be obtained by ground-fishing or trolling for pike."(32)
Rennie's introduction to canal angling differentiates among fishes: "I mean to comprehend all slow-running and weedy waters, which, though not canals have a similar character...In waters like these we find none of the best sorts of fish, which inhabit swift running streams, such as the trout, salmon, and grayling..."(33) It was during the final push to exclude the public from riparian areas that the game fish of England were defined as a superior resource, available to the well-to-do angler on beats of flowing waters which became the exclusive properties of angling clubs.
More may be gleaned from Best's 1822 edition of The Art of Angling. He quotes the fisheries regulations for private waters. The fine for simple poaching was ten pence and possible jail time of a week. In at least one early printing, he states that the law is so cumbersome that it is impossible to enforce and even poachers regularly get off or have their convictions set aside. In later printings he modified this to say that "the necessities required in information and convictions under the statute have been the occasion of an extraordinary number of prosecutions having failed." (34)
After our week on the River Test, we move to a B&B in Twyford, on the River Itchen, south of Winchester. Our previous hosts in Wherwell allowed us to come and go throughout the day. Here, new hosts would confine us to our room each evening behind locked doors until breakfast at eight, and we are not to set foot in the house or yard between nine and six. We tolerate such confinement for one night, taking to the surrounding trails in the afternoon.
The Itchen flows through farm meadows that may have once been common lands, now fenced and divided. Above the meadows, low-income housing squats behind brick walls and barbed wire and signs warn of dire consequences for trespass on the field. Three gamboling horses have far more space to roam than the children confined to their tract yard. Down a path from the housing, next to Twyford Chapel, an ancient, smoothly crowned yew grows in a graveyard.
Giants such as this yew are thousands of years old, marking Druid’s hallowed places where the early Christian church raised its chapels to continue sacred traditions. Druids may have knelt under the yew’s branches, performing rites of sacrifice or prayer. The great trunk rises as thick and fluted as a cathedral column. Twisted and knotted roots knee into broad folds in the swell of the butt, as if the yew once stood much taller and a malevolent God pressed it downward, splaying the roots into the soil and surrounding graves.
The stout yew recoiled, nurturing itself from the nearby feast of bones. Even so, the great gnome has been tamed. It wears a pageboy cut to its lowest branches and a smooth bench circles the great trunk. Signs warn not to climb on or harm the giant. Just as it took centuries to collar the yew, it took hundreds of years for Parliament to alter the patterns of land ownership across England and confine the public through the Acts of Enclosure. One result of those acts was to elevate commoner’s fishing to class-specific fishing with the fly.
From the bench around the great yew, the River Itchen glows in afternoon light. Mayfly deposit eggs, caddis struggle to burst through the water’s surface, trout remain intent upon the June feast. A solitary fly-fisher plying his Itchen beat paid dearly for this fishing, his day on hallowed water the result of hundreds of years of increasingly restricted riparian access. One angler on a river the public does not own, the end product of a millennium of shifting laws and culture. This most modern of fly-fishers is the inheritor of privilege by class or cash, but his story of angling grows from deeper roots. Though this chalk stream fly-fisher seems far removed from the children confined to a backyard, both are ultimately the product of the Acts of Enclosure. Yet the angler has inherited mysteries far more ancient than even the Twyford yew.
(1) Angreid, L, An Introduction to Fly-fishin. W.Foulsham &Co. London, 1939 (?), p.55.
(2) Blakey, Robert, Historical Sketches of the Angling Literature of All Nations. John Russell Smith, London, 1856, p. 37-38.
(3) http://farreaches.org/fishing/farme/onefarme.html , p.6
(4) Ibid.
(5) Canton, Norman, The Last Knight. Harper Collins Publishers, NY, 1990, p. 162.
(6) Fagan, Brian, The Little Ice Age. Basic Books, NY,2000.
(7) Gies, Francis and Joseph, Life in a Medieval Village. Harper Collins Publishers NY, 1990, p. 196.
(8) Lund, Thomas, American Wildlife Law. p.8.
(9) Nelson, William, The Laws Concerning Game: of Hunting, Hawking, Fishing and Fowling, Etc., and of Forests, Chases, Parks, Warrens, Deer, Dovecotes, Conies, (1762). Kessinger Publishing, LaVergne, TN, 2009, p. 93,192.
(10) Herd, Andrew, The Fly. The Medlar Press Limited, Ellesmere, 2003, p.32.
(11) Blakey, Robert, Historical Sketches of the Angling Literature of All Nations. p.38.
(12) McDonald, John, The Origins of Angling. p. 229.
(13) Horrox, Rosemary and Ornrod, A Social History of England 1200-1500. Cambridge University Press, NY, 2006, p. 279.
(14) http://ww.thehds.com/events/walker.html
(15) Hills, John Waller, A History of Fly-fishing For Trout. p.193.
(16) Gingrich, Arnold, The Fishing in Print. Winchester Press, NY, 1974.
(17) Venables, Robert, The Experienced Angler. Antrobus Press, London, 1969, p.ii.
(18) Ibid.
(19) Walton, Izaak and Cotton, Charles, The Complete Angler. Ingram,Cooke, 1853, p.288.
(20) http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/cand/crime/gg04/g04cs6s2.htm
(21) Walton, Izaak, The Complete Angler.The Modern Library, NY, 2004. p.51.
(22) Hardin, Garrett, The Tradgey of the Commons," Science, 162, (1968) : 1243-1248.
(23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure also see: http://cal.calpoly.edu/~lcall/enclosures.html
(24) ?
(25) Lyle, David, The Book of Masonry Stoves. Brick House Publishing Co. Andover, 1984, p.53.
(26) Bovill, E.W. English Country Life, 1780-1830. Oxford University Press, London, 1963, p.25.
(27) Herd, Andrew, The Fly, p. 121.
(28) Venables, Bernard, Fishing. B.T. Batsford Ltd., London, 1953, p. 217-218.
(29) Ibid., p.214.
(30) McDonald,John, The Origins of Angling. p.56-62.
(31) Best, Thomas, The Art of Angling. William Orr, London, 1833, p.114.
(32) Rennie, James, Alphabet of Scientific Angling. William Orr, London, 1833, p.114.
(33) Ibid. p.133.
(34) Best, Thomas, The Art of Angling. p.239.
Chapter Four
The River Piddle
Topuddle, England, June, 2005
“On a regularly fished chalk-stream beat a catch and release limit of ten fish per day is reasonable.”
-Richard Slocock, Salmo Truttaa, vol. 1,1998
From the Itchen to the Piddle is thirty white-knuckled miles. Drivers wear cars like suits of armor, no lance needed for the jousts─ horses under each hood turn automobiles into weaponry. Every few miles a sign tallies the latest toll of highway dead, the lists seemingly limited to periods of six months to avoid boasting. No one drives at sensible speeds; traffic charges by at sixty miles per hour on the wrong side of the road. A fly-fisher carrying his rod assembled on a roof rack appears too similar to a lanced knight for anything but a cartoon in Punch. The ancient society of armorers is likely a fellowship of body shop owners. A guard at the arms museum in Dorchester explains that the English drive on the left because of the English Civil War. Troops of cavalry riding lanes bordered by high hedges had to stay left to have sword hands clear in case of sudden attacks. The arms museum consists of dioramas comparing civilian life in different periods with the lot of soldiers. Hard as the soldier’s life was, civilians had it far worse, especially in the early 14th century as feudalism gave way to a cash economy.
Our catch-and-release version of the knightly code must be sought through the distortion of the thousand years between chivalry’s Middle Ages reality and our fly-fishing culture. The legacy of chivalry as portrayed in Victorian England was a myth, created to give direction to the lives of England’s ruling classes. King Arthur bears little resemblance to the actual thuggery of knights in the Middle Ages. Nobles took what they wanted as they chose, secure in the pardons of kings. One reason for the crusades was to get the heavily armored upper classes out of Europe so that they would take their random violence elsewhere. The few existing references to fishing during this time detail how to construct weirs or commercial fishing activities with nets.
From the plague of 1348 on, the struggle for existence was a fight for survival. The period of the writing and publication of The Treatise on Fishing with and Angle (1440-1496) was marked by the end of the Hundred Years War and conflicts that led to the War of the Roses. This especially bloody war began in 1455 in the streets of St. Albans, during the same period as the Dame was supposedly penning her treatise. Warfare evolved in the 17th century due to the advent of firearms, making obsolete the knight in armor in single combat. With this demise, notions of chivalric behavior also declined. In The Return to Camelot (1981) Mark Girouard wrote that by the 1700s the behaviors associated with chivalry were considered “stupid rather than noble.” (1)
This attitude changed during the final decade of the 18th century when the conservative views of George III were broadly adopted. The new support for a strong monarchy was a reaction to the American and French revolutions. King George, wanting to avoid revolution in England, needed a reason for his nobility to exist. A code of chivalric behavior emerged based on the tales of King Arthur. The story of Arthur had its source in Welsh song, and was codified in the eleventh-century chronicle Mabinogion. The legend was expanded both in Britain and on the continent writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes. It became associated with the Grail cycle, of separate Celtic origin, in the twelfth century. Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1496) is the source for most modern interpretations of the legend. (2) The model of the proper English gentleman was based on the heroic myth of chivalry as interpreted by the romantic poets during what was to become the Victorian Age. (3) Sir Walter Scott’s and Lord Alfred Tennyson’s vision caused the behavior of gentlemen in all aspects of British life to be redefined according to the new code of chivalry. This code changed and expanded through the century, but themes of quest and regimented contest with a worthy opponent came to color the English version of field sports.
During the first decades of the 19th century, King George IV’s interest in angling fueled a widespread growth in fishing as sport. With the publication of Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, beginning in 1838, were a restatement of early Celtic myths.(4) These tales rewritten as Arthurian legend were given new life. The romantic version of the chivalric tradition came to dominate ideals of ethical behavior in field sports: one sought opponents of equal worth. What better way for the rising merchant or gentrified angler to show that they were of the upper classes than to release some fish, thereby giving credence to Cotton’s admonition to let the small fish go as a mark of being gentile.
Gentleman fished as a relaxation, as hinted in Thomas Best’s Art of Angling. In his introduction to the 1822 edition, Best notes that in the years from 1794 to 1822 his book sold “upwards of twenty-five thousand” copies with “few noble or gentleman anglers not giving it a place in their libraries.” (5)His rules for fly-fishing contain a poem by Thompson:
…If yet too young, and easily deceiv’d,
A worthless prey scarce bends your pliant rod,
Him, piteous of his youth, and the short space
He has enjoy’d the vital light of heav’n,
Soft disengage, and back into the stream
The speckled captive throw…(6)
During the 19th century fly-fishing took on many of the trappings of other field sports as blood sports were cloaked in chivalric dress. Sir Humphrey Davy, in Salmonia, wrote of the questionable morality of field sports and then defended fly-fishing and release:
…but if fish are to be eaten, I see no more harm in capturing them by skill and ingenuity with an artificial fly, than in pulling them out of the water by main force with the net; and in general when taken by the common fishermen, fish are permitted to die slowly, and to suffer in the air, from want of their natural element; whereas, every good angler, as soon as his fish is landed, either destroys his life immediately, if he is wanted for food, or returns him to the water. (7)
Davy continues to instruct his student when he catches a fish just under two pounds: “As the object of your fishing I hope, is innocent amusement, you can enjoy this and show your skill in catching the animal; and if every fish that took the Mayfly were to be killed, there would be an end to the sport…” (8)
Sir Humphrey Davy lived, fished, and wrote during a period of great change. The son of a woodcarver, he rose in society due to his great mind and fortuitous marriage. He died young from breathing the noxious gasses he discovered as part of his scientific research. I think of Davy as the diamond he showed to be common carbon by burning it. Davy was the President of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, an exclusive club of scientists. When Davy instructed anglers to release fish under two pounds,(9) he was preaching a gospel of conservation to those who did not need their catch as food.
T.C. Hofland’s British Angler’s Manual became popular in its second edition of 1848. Hofland provided advice on where to fish public waters and gave very clear instructions on fish to be released: “and in Malham Tarn…a trout under three pounds is not considered a killable fish. …In the Kennet and Test, in Hampshire, a trout under a pound is not considered killable, and in many other rivers the same regulation is observed.”(9) And again, “A trout, in this part of the Clone, is not considered a killable fish under two pounds weight.” (10)
The most popular angling author of the middle years of the 19th century, Francis Francis, wrote in A Book on Angling (1867) of letting out of condition grayling go because of their poor quality as food. His admonition immediately brings to mind the first such advice from Piers of Fullham in 1420: “But stynkkyng fishes, and unseasonable, Latt passe, and take such as be able.” " I hate a man who slaughters kelts and ill-conditioned fish more than any other species of poacher going. What good does it do him? He has had his sport. Let him be satisfied; and let the poor beast live to grow fat and healthy, and don’t take a mean advantage of starvation and illness."(11)
By 1913, Fredrick Halford in The Dry-Fly Man's Handbook could declare that "the sportsman is not only willing to return any below the legal limit of the water, but exercises great care both in extracting the hook and returning the fish to the water.” (12) Halford’s chief rival in the argument over dry versus wet fly, G.E.M. Skues, was noted for catching so many fish that if he kept all he caught, his gillie could not have carried them home. (13)
Odin Shepard’s Thy Rod and Thy Creel (1931) begins with the tale of an evening’s walk along the Itchen, watching an old angler fish the rise: "Then I saw him hook, play and net three trout in quick succession, any one of which would have been a prize on almost any American stream, for all of them must have weighted well over a pound. This English angler unhooked them very carefully however, without touching them with his hands, and returned them unharmed to the water. When the last had been brought to net and released he took down his rod and strode off toward home. He had solved the secret of the stream for that evening." (14)
Richard Slocock, from Topuddle, embodies these beliefs with his work on the River Piddle. Richard’s farm has been in his family for over 500 years, the fields and farmhouse rambling behind a hedgerow of briar roses down a circular drive, the horse barn attached to the main house. A common reading room and apartment nestle behind an outbuilding crammed with the detritus of hundreds of years. Across the lightly tarred lane, fallow fields and ponds border bushes along the appropriately named Piddle. It is a small flow, at most twenty feet wide, the beats often choked with weeds and grasses. No cut grass banks or paths, no stocking of fish, no barriers to obligate fish to the fisherman. The Piddle is wild water, brought back to its status through Richard’s efforts.
Richard hosts a B&B for anglers on his family farm. He opens his “fly-fishers’ surgery” each morning, where he sells graphite rods and modern reels displayed beyond a rack of old Hardy bamboo and greenheart rods complete with brass winders. In the breakfast room, Richard intones that his wife is off with the horses this morning and he must “make do.” He warns that the house full of anglers means coffee and tea will be set out on a relic sideboard, “very old, probably 1500s.” Slocock ancestors glare from portraits hung above the coffee and tea urns. Richard thinks better of spillage and pours for all. Other anglers breakfasting are two young men down from London to fish the River Frome and a father and son from the midlands. Fly-fishing’s easy banter enfolds the table and we speak of wild fish. The father and son fished the upper beat the day before. When they hear I am to fish it, the older man inveighs against the nettles while praising the fish he landed. “Anglers have always released the small fish,” he says, “we had that from our fathers and they from their fathers before. Here, we simply must learn to release them all for the benefit of our sport.” Detailed instructions are given on how to find the beat and where to park, which I get wholly backward: I have trouble simply staying on the wrong side of the road.
It is a few miles from Richard’s farm to his beats on the Piddle, but what marvelous miles they become. Churchyards are being dressed for town fetes, a flower shop owner is putting out her plants at a crossroad lined with rose-covered cottages, a ridge lane overlooks the downs. We drive on past ancient ruins, through a maze of paths and crossings, sheepfolds, pastures, and fields until the Piddle winds through a copse of trees across a broad unkempt meadow of wildflowers. In the field, steep banks and waist high grasses shadow the margins where the best fish hold, well back from the Piddle’s flow. Upriver, the flow bends near a barn where a stout electric fence contains a black bull with a wild red eye. Slipping past the farmer's keep, we enter a tight swamp of alder and wind our way through a grove, over a three-legged stile, and into a wide meadow, where swans greet us. Above the alders, the Piddle broadens, offering fine wading between pools and glides. Lesley stops at the meadow’s edge, to sit and read on a bench that seems as old as Walton.
I cast up a ripple lined with watercress that shields a small, clear pool and my fly is sipped in by a brown. The trout’s green back and tigering highlights beautiful bright spots of blue and red along its flanks. A second fish rises mid-stream at the top of a pool where a riffle breaks into smooth water. Both fish are about ten inches, good fish for the Piddle. The weed and wild grasses force me into the water, wading up the fine gravel, feeling it settle beneath my feet. There are certainly bigger fish here, but they have wide, sedge covered banks under which to hide. I fish slowly through the upper meadow, pausing for each fish I encounter to rise repeatedly before casting.
At the top of the beat, in a long pool below a vine-laden bridge where mayflies ride in the shadows, a bulge appears in the surface, opens briefly, and a fly disappears. A good fish is sipping mayflies in a languid, unhurried fashion above a broad tree root that drinks from the pool. I step back from view, take time to change the tippet, re-tie knots, and tie on a mayfly. The fly settles at its furthest length, a foot above the last casual rise, and the king of this bridge pool sucks it in. He has room to run and my only concern is keeping him from that submerged root. He laps the pool before he comes to net, a wonderfully bright speckled sea trout, well hooked, quickly fought, and released. Lesley comes up and we picnic on the bank of the River Piddle, wild swans and a bull below us, wild browns and sea trout rising in the unkempt stream. The England of my fish simple imagining.
(1) Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1981, p.19.
(2) Verduin, Kathleen (ed.) Medievalism in North America, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1994, Erica E. Hirshler,
A Quest for the Holy Grail: Edwin Austin Abbeys Murals for the Boston Public Library, p.37.
(3) Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot, p. 145-163.
(4) Guest, Lady Charlotte, The Mabinogion. Bernard Quaritch, London, 1877.
(5) Best Thomas, The Art of Angling. 1822, Preface.
(6) Ibid.,p. 26-27.
(7) Davy, Sir Humphrey, Salmonia. p.11.
(8) Ibid., p. 27.
(9) Ibid., p.26-37.
(10) Hofland, T.C., The British Angler's Manual. H.G. Bohn, London, 1848, p.56, 97.
(11) Francis, Francis, A Book on Angling. John Culler and Sons, Camden, 1995, p. 284.
(12) Halford, Frederick, The Dry-Fly Man's Handbook. The Derrydale Press, Lanham, 2000, p. 208.
(13) Robson, Kenneth (ed.), The Essential G.E.M. Skues . The Lyons Press, London, 1998, p. 18.
(14) Shepard, Odell, Thy Rod and Thy Creel.Dodd, Mead, and Company, NY, 1930, p. 20.
“On a regularly fished chalk-stream beat a catch and release limit of ten fish per day is reasonable.”
-Richard Slocock, Salmo Truttaa, vol. 1,1998
From the Itchen to the Piddle is thirty white-knuckled miles. Drivers wear cars like suits of armor, no lance needed for the jousts─ horses under each hood turn automobiles into weaponry. Every few miles a sign tallies the latest toll of highway dead, the lists seemingly limited to periods of six months to avoid boasting. No one drives at sensible speeds; traffic charges by at sixty miles per hour on the wrong side of the road. A fly-fisher carrying his rod assembled on a roof rack appears too similar to a lanced knight for anything but a cartoon in Punch. The ancient society of armorers is likely a fellowship of body shop owners. A guard at the arms museum in Dorchester explains that the English drive on the left because of the English Civil War. Troops of cavalry riding lanes bordered by high hedges had to stay left to have sword hands clear in case of sudden attacks. The arms museum consists of dioramas comparing civilian life in different periods with the lot of soldiers. Hard as the soldier’s life was, civilians had it far worse, especially in the early 14th century as feudalism gave way to a cash economy.
Our catch-and-release version of the knightly code must be sought through the distortion of the thousand years between chivalry’s Middle Ages reality and our fly-fishing culture. The legacy of chivalry as portrayed in Victorian England was a myth, created to give direction to the lives of England’s ruling classes. King Arthur bears little resemblance to the actual thuggery of knights in the Middle Ages. Nobles took what they wanted as they chose, secure in the pardons of kings. One reason for the crusades was to get the heavily armored upper classes out of Europe so that they would take their random violence elsewhere. The few existing references to fishing during this time detail how to construct weirs or commercial fishing activities with nets.
From the plague of 1348 on, the struggle for existence was a fight for survival. The period of the writing and publication of The Treatise on Fishing with and Angle (1440-1496) was marked by the end of the Hundred Years War and conflicts that led to the War of the Roses. This especially bloody war began in 1455 in the streets of St. Albans, during the same period as the Dame was supposedly penning her treatise. Warfare evolved in the 17th century due to the advent of firearms, making obsolete the knight in armor in single combat. With this demise, notions of chivalric behavior also declined. In The Return to Camelot (1981) Mark Girouard wrote that by the 1700s the behaviors associated with chivalry were considered “stupid rather than noble.” (1)
This attitude changed during the final decade of the 18th century when the conservative views of George III were broadly adopted. The new support for a strong monarchy was a reaction to the American and French revolutions. King George, wanting to avoid revolution in England, needed a reason for his nobility to exist. A code of chivalric behavior emerged based on the tales of King Arthur. The story of Arthur had its source in Welsh song, and was codified in the eleventh-century chronicle Mabinogion. The legend was expanded both in Britain and on the continent writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien de Troyes. It became associated with the Grail cycle, of separate Celtic origin, in the twelfth century. Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1496) is the source for most modern interpretations of the legend. (2) The model of the proper English gentleman was based on the heroic myth of chivalry as interpreted by the romantic poets during what was to become the Victorian Age. (3) Sir Walter Scott’s and Lord Alfred Tennyson’s vision caused the behavior of gentlemen in all aspects of British life to be redefined according to the new code of chivalry. This code changed and expanded through the century, but themes of quest and regimented contest with a worthy opponent came to color the English version of field sports.
During the first decades of the 19th century, King George IV’s interest in angling fueled a widespread growth in fishing as sport. With the publication of Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the Welsh Mabinogion, beginning in 1838, were a restatement of early Celtic myths.(4) These tales rewritten as Arthurian legend were given new life. The romantic version of the chivalric tradition came to dominate ideals of ethical behavior in field sports: one sought opponents of equal worth. What better way for the rising merchant or gentrified angler to show that they were of the upper classes than to release some fish, thereby giving credence to Cotton’s admonition to let the small fish go as a mark of being gentile.
Gentleman fished as a relaxation, as hinted in Thomas Best’s Art of Angling. In his introduction to the 1822 edition, Best notes that in the years from 1794 to 1822 his book sold “upwards of twenty-five thousand” copies with “few noble or gentleman anglers not giving it a place in their libraries.” (5)His rules for fly-fishing contain a poem by Thompson:
…If yet too young, and easily deceiv’d,
A worthless prey scarce bends your pliant rod,
Him, piteous of his youth, and the short space
He has enjoy’d the vital light of heav’n,
Soft disengage, and back into the stream
The speckled captive throw…(6)
During the 19th century fly-fishing took on many of the trappings of other field sports as blood sports were cloaked in chivalric dress. Sir Humphrey Davy, in Salmonia, wrote of the questionable morality of field sports and then defended fly-fishing and release:
…but if fish are to be eaten, I see no more harm in capturing them by skill and ingenuity with an artificial fly, than in pulling them out of the water by main force with the net; and in general when taken by the common fishermen, fish are permitted to die slowly, and to suffer in the air, from want of their natural element; whereas, every good angler, as soon as his fish is landed, either destroys his life immediately, if he is wanted for food, or returns him to the water. (7)
Davy continues to instruct his student when he catches a fish just under two pounds: “As the object of your fishing I hope, is innocent amusement, you can enjoy this and show your skill in catching the animal; and if every fish that took the Mayfly were to be killed, there would be an end to the sport…” (8)
Sir Humphrey Davy lived, fished, and wrote during a period of great change. The son of a woodcarver, he rose in society due to his great mind and fortuitous marriage. He died young from breathing the noxious gasses he discovered as part of his scientific research. I think of Davy as the diamond he showed to be common carbon by burning it. Davy was the President of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, an exclusive club of scientists. When Davy instructed anglers to release fish under two pounds,(9) he was preaching a gospel of conservation to those who did not need their catch as food.
T.C. Hofland’s British Angler’s Manual became popular in its second edition of 1848. Hofland provided advice on where to fish public waters and gave very clear instructions on fish to be released: “and in Malham Tarn…a trout under three pounds is not considered a killable fish. …In the Kennet and Test, in Hampshire, a trout under a pound is not considered killable, and in many other rivers the same regulation is observed.”(9) And again, “A trout, in this part of the Clone, is not considered a killable fish under two pounds weight.” (10)
The most popular angling author of the middle years of the 19th century, Francis Francis, wrote in A Book on Angling (1867) of letting out of condition grayling go because of their poor quality as food. His admonition immediately brings to mind the first such advice from Piers of Fullham in 1420: “But stynkkyng fishes, and unseasonable, Latt passe, and take such as be able.” " I hate a man who slaughters kelts and ill-conditioned fish more than any other species of poacher going. What good does it do him? He has had his sport. Let him be satisfied; and let the poor beast live to grow fat and healthy, and don’t take a mean advantage of starvation and illness."(11)
By 1913, Fredrick Halford in The Dry-Fly Man's Handbook could declare that "the sportsman is not only willing to return any below the legal limit of the water, but exercises great care both in extracting the hook and returning the fish to the water.” (12) Halford’s chief rival in the argument over dry versus wet fly, G.E.M. Skues, was noted for catching so many fish that if he kept all he caught, his gillie could not have carried them home. (13)
Odin Shepard’s Thy Rod and Thy Creel (1931) begins with the tale of an evening’s walk along the Itchen, watching an old angler fish the rise: "Then I saw him hook, play and net three trout in quick succession, any one of which would have been a prize on almost any American stream, for all of them must have weighted well over a pound. This English angler unhooked them very carefully however, without touching them with his hands, and returned them unharmed to the water. When the last had been brought to net and released he took down his rod and strode off toward home. He had solved the secret of the stream for that evening." (14)
Richard Slocock, from Topuddle, embodies these beliefs with his work on the River Piddle. Richard’s farm has been in his family for over 500 years, the fields and farmhouse rambling behind a hedgerow of briar roses down a circular drive, the horse barn attached to the main house. A common reading room and apartment nestle behind an outbuilding crammed with the detritus of hundreds of years. Across the lightly tarred lane, fallow fields and ponds border bushes along the appropriately named Piddle. It is a small flow, at most twenty feet wide, the beats often choked with weeds and grasses. No cut grass banks or paths, no stocking of fish, no barriers to obligate fish to the fisherman. The Piddle is wild water, brought back to its status through Richard’s efforts.
Richard hosts a B&B for anglers on his family farm. He opens his “fly-fishers’ surgery” each morning, where he sells graphite rods and modern reels displayed beyond a rack of old Hardy bamboo and greenheart rods complete with brass winders. In the breakfast room, Richard intones that his wife is off with the horses this morning and he must “make do.” He warns that the house full of anglers means coffee and tea will be set out on a relic sideboard, “very old, probably 1500s.” Slocock ancestors glare from portraits hung above the coffee and tea urns. Richard thinks better of spillage and pours for all. Other anglers breakfasting are two young men down from London to fish the River Frome and a father and son from the midlands. Fly-fishing’s easy banter enfolds the table and we speak of wild fish. The father and son fished the upper beat the day before. When they hear I am to fish it, the older man inveighs against the nettles while praising the fish he landed. “Anglers have always released the small fish,” he says, “we had that from our fathers and they from their fathers before. Here, we simply must learn to release them all for the benefit of our sport.” Detailed instructions are given on how to find the beat and where to park, which I get wholly backward: I have trouble simply staying on the wrong side of the road.
It is a few miles from Richard’s farm to his beats on the Piddle, but what marvelous miles they become. Churchyards are being dressed for town fetes, a flower shop owner is putting out her plants at a crossroad lined with rose-covered cottages, a ridge lane overlooks the downs. We drive on past ancient ruins, through a maze of paths and crossings, sheepfolds, pastures, and fields until the Piddle winds through a copse of trees across a broad unkempt meadow of wildflowers. In the field, steep banks and waist high grasses shadow the margins where the best fish hold, well back from the Piddle’s flow. Upriver, the flow bends near a barn where a stout electric fence contains a black bull with a wild red eye. Slipping past the farmer's keep, we enter a tight swamp of alder and wind our way through a grove, over a three-legged stile, and into a wide meadow, where swans greet us. Above the alders, the Piddle broadens, offering fine wading between pools and glides. Lesley stops at the meadow’s edge, to sit and read on a bench that seems as old as Walton.
I cast up a ripple lined with watercress that shields a small, clear pool and my fly is sipped in by a brown. The trout’s green back and tigering highlights beautiful bright spots of blue and red along its flanks. A second fish rises mid-stream at the top of a pool where a riffle breaks into smooth water. Both fish are about ten inches, good fish for the Piddle. The weed and wild grasses force me into the water, wading up the fine gravel, feeling it settle beneath my feet. There are certainly bigger fish here, but they have wide, sedge covered banks under which to hide. I fish slowly through the upper meadow, pausing for each fish I encounter to rise repeatedly before casting.
At the top of the beat, in a long pool below a vine-laden bridge where mayflies ride in the shadows, a bulge appears in the surface, opens briefly, and a fly disappears. A good fish is sipping mayflies in a languid, unhurried fashion above a broad tree root that drinks from the pool. I step back from view, take time to change the tippet, re-tie knots, and tie on a mayfly. The fly settles at its furthest length, a foot above the last casual rise, and the king of this bridge pool sucks it in. He has room to run and my only concern is keeping him from that submerged root. He laps the pool before he comes to net, a wonderfully bright speckled sea trout, well hooked, quickly fought, and released. Lesley comes up and we picnic on the bank of the River Piddle, wild swans and a bull below us, wild browns and sea trout rising in the unkempt stream. The England of my fish simple imagining.
(1) Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1981, p.19.
(2) Verduin, Kathleen (ed.) Medievalism in North America, D.S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1994, Erica E. Hirshler,
A Quest for the Holy Grail: Edwin Austin Abbeys Murals for the Boston Public Library, p.37.
(3) Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot, p. 145-163.
(4) Guest, Lady Charlotte, The Mabinogion. Bernard Quaritch, London, 1877.
(5) Best Thomas, The Art of Angling. 1822, Preface.
(6) Ibid.,p. 26-27.
(7) Davy, Sir Humphrey, Salmonia. p.11.
(8) Ibid., p. 27.
(9) Ibid., p.26-37.
(10) Hofland, T.C., The British Angler's Manual. H.G. Bohn, London, 1848, p.56, 97.
(11) Francis, Francis, A Book on Angling. John Culler and Sons, Camden, 1995, p. 284.
(12) Halford, Frederick, The Dry-Fly Man's Handbook. The Derrydale Press, Lanham, 2000, p. 208.
(13) Robson, Kenneth (ed.), The Essential G.E.M. Skues . The Lyons Press, London, 1998, p. 18.
(14) Shepard, Odell, Thy Rod and Thy Creel.Dodd, Mead, and Company, NY, 1930, p. 20.
Chapter Five
Avon Springs
Durington, Wherwell, England, June, 2005
“The willful summoning up of past styles of cultural behavior as a way of dealing with the present is always with us…(a)sleep in their splendid caves until they are needed.”
-Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 2003
As good as the day on the Piddle was the next morning at the Avon Springs Trout Farm in Durrington is tough. Avon Springs sprawls beyond a working class neighborhood, down a long avenue of trees, behind tall fortified brick walls that loom above a stout iron gate. The owner, Barry, made money in the garage trade, and then carved out this series of ponds near the top of the Avon River to rear rainbow trout. He sits in his shop-office to greet anglers, behind a defense of trucks and cars in degrees of repair shuffled about the concrete floor. For a fraction of a day’s cost on chalk streams, the fly angler can cast for giant rainbows in Barry’s ponds with no catch and release: you take a monster; you kill it and haul its bloody carcass home. Barry rears 10,000 rainbows annually and guards them ferociously from poachers. He has movement activated cameras along the drive and about the ponds. Walls surround his fishery, except at the top where his land blends into fields beyond. Rolls of concertina wire lie hidden in the waist high nettles to keep thieves at bay. “The local kids swim at the top of our river,” Barry Jr. says,” but we run ‘em off if they come into the fishing water.”
As I star outside the garage, a great trout is hooked as a dozen fly-flingers work their craft. When the fish is netted, other fishermen pause, tuck their rods under their arms, and politely applaud the catch as the angler swings his “priest” (club) and administers “last rites.”
The day in Durington is a day for religion, though I cannot help but drag even this back to fishing. Just down the road we come on Woodhenge, with its three concentric ovals of concrete markers set in ancient postholes─ rings aligned with movements of the sun and moon. Under a great central stone lie the bones of a child, marking the circle as either a burial site or a place of sacrifice. Archaeologists have little more than these postholes and the stones of Stonehenge to tell who the English were 4,000 years ago.
At that time, the Chinese were using bamboo rods, silk lines, and feathered hooks. Egyptian slaves consumed the Nile’s fish and built the pyramids, while the pharaoh and his court angled for sport. Societies that had settled along the waters of the world to fish had become farmers, while the wandering hero's story of quest, conquest, and quest yet again was being forged by the horse-wanderers who had developed the culture that was to influence tribes living from the Volga to Ireland.
In western storytelling, according to a host of myth mongers, chief among whom was the poet Robert Graves, all stories are part or whole of the hero saga. Graves begins To Juan at the Winter Solstice with “There is one story and one story only.” (1) Western cultures retell this story of masculine gods at war for the affection of the muse, reshaping mysteries to fit the lives of each generation. The elemental story tells of the hero called on a quest, receiving divine aid, and, accomplishing the task, gaining his ultimate prize: the hero returns in full knowledge and acceptance of his mortality. The successful hero is able to rise above his intuition of immortality and accept his position in the cycle of life and death. (2)
We have erased the final chapter of this archetype as western dogma recounts that the hero renounces death as a part of life and lives forever. Our monotheistic religions─ Christianity, Judaism, and Islam─ share this curtailing of the one true poetic myth. Our God made us in his image and we returned the favor, granting ourselves immortality. Saint George quests for endless numbers of dragons. We worship the central myth of the hero unfettered, not responsible for his actions in the world, able to transcend mortality itself, ultimately becoming one with God.
But in other mythologies, in systems of belief not founded on the wandering hero, the individual does not become one with God. Societies as diverse as those of Malaysia and Western Alaska have very different concepts of the worth of the individual. In many hunter-gatherer societies there were, or are, no chiefs. The individual is part of the greater group, valued for his contributions. (3) It is the hero’s return to normalcy with knowledge which fulfills the saga, desire for life eternal balanced by the acceptance of mortality. In a very real sense, car-shop Barry of Avon Springs has it right: kill the great beast and eat it. Fish are food, death is part of life.
True Believers in the Church of Catch and Release maintain they never kill a fish, their hundred-fish days are ethical because they really harm no fish, that they do no damage. Fly-fishing is a blood sport, where fish do die from simple handling. Biologists have researched this for decades, identifying several culprits: overplaying, mishandling, lifting the fish from water, hook placement, stress, and any number of other factors. Because a fish swims from my hands does not automatically mean it survives. This admission places obligations on the catch and release fisher to take every precaution for the fish’s survival, to know the particulars of the species being handled for release, to understand and accept that her/his behavior is an anomaly to the fish.
Catch and release becomes ethical when personal responsibility is taken for the survival of the fish, but this is not the vision most anglers have of their sport or of their actions when releasing fish. The image we have been sold for more than a hundred years is sport shared with the noble trout, his wariness and cunning, our need to overcome an equal adversary. That is all in our heads. As a boss of mine once opined, “It’s a fish, for God’s sake.”
The Mayfly is a pub and outdoor eatery along the River Test, just below a narrow bridge on Route 37 between Wherwell and Stockbridge. A sign along the sun-dappled lane proclaims that 31 persons have been killed on this narrow section of country road in the past six months. We sit outdoors for dinner, with a clan of courteous bikers in attendance, while on a mid-stream island a solitary angler casts his giant mayfly upstream and across for trout, oblivious to the bridge, the traffic, the bikers, and the pub. His casting is as foreign to the bar scene as clutches of ducklings along the shore, paddling furiously against the current, leaping wildly for hovering mayflies. Lorries roar across the dangerously narrow bridge above us, bikers quay for pints, the ducklings leap, and the angler casts; fragments tucked along this storied beat, below a murderous road. And I am trying to find my way into the story, the primary story, of the myths of fishing for sport which beat like a drum in the heart of every angler.
The tie between chivalry and fly-fishing forged in the 19th century still exists in this solitary angler’s behavior, fishing upstream with dry flies only, casting far and fine, handling his catch in the water with near reverence before release. Fish tales lie close to the skin, just below the patina of the dedicated catch and release angler. If I have it right, angling is about the setting out, the immediate quest fulfilled. The difference between the catch and release angler and the catch and keep angler is not simple. The many defenses of catch and release pale when seen through the wonderfully round lens of a trout’s eye. You and I may practice catch and release or catch and keep, but the fish, in either case, is wholly committed to our sport─ willing or not.
Dr. David Policansky has done much to summarize and present the early laws requiring letting fish go. He is also a dedicated fly angler. While he sometimes practices catch and release, he tries to present good science on both sides of the argument. When explaining the practice to the novitiate, David relies on a parallel circumstance for humans. To paraphrase David: let us take PETA at their word, that fish feel pain and assume that they are like us in all particulars. In fact, for this exercise, let us assume that we are all fish. And that a creature unknown to us dangles a bauble in front of us, which, upon our closer inspection, we are so intrigued by that we seize it and are immediately impaled upon a hook and drawn up through the surface of the sky into a realm beyond our thinking. Let us assume it is a dimension located somewhere on a different string of the universe and our survival in that realm is largely in doubt. Sometimes we humans simply disappear, sometimes we are placed back on the sidewalk near our place of origin, wounded but alive. Assume you are so caught: do you wish to disappear from your life, or to be returned to the sidewalk?
Catch and kill is all about the fish, whereas catch and release is hardly about the fish. Catch and release has to do with our cultural myths, fulfilling our vision of the hero epic and healing psychically. Even so, as part of the fly-fishing culture, we often fail to understand the deeper, primal role of fish as food, a physically as well as psychically regenerative force. Our core beliefs as anglers are the product of ancient heroic myth that we brought with us on mankind’s first great journey and reshaped into the endless wanderer. The reliving of a portion of the heroic archetype lies at the level of an ethical value for today’s dedicated catch and release angler.
I have tried until now to shape the fly-fishing story through traces of history. Farther on, we shall plunge through myth’s surface and seek a vision of the role of fishing in our common past─ but not yet. Going back must wait until we have caught ourselves up; the Boy Scouts remain in England’s history of catch and return.
(1) Williams, Oscar (ed.) Immortal Poems of the English Language. Washington Square Press, NY, 1966, p.559.
(2)Campbell, Joseph, Hero with a Thousand Faces.Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1968.
(3) Ingold, Tim (ed.) Hunters and Gathers, vol 3. Property, Power and Ideology. p. 95-105, p.110-127.
“The willful summoning up of past styles of cultural behavior as a way of dealing with the present is always with us…(a)sleep in their splendid caves until they are needed.”
-Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 2003
As good as the day on the Piddle was the next morning at the Avon Springs Trout Farm in Durrington is tough. Avon Springs sprawls beyond a working class neighborhood, down a long avenue of trees, behind tall fortified brick walls that loom above a stout iron gate. The owner, Barry, made money in the garage trade, and then carved out this series of ponds near the top of the Avon River to rear rainbow trout. He sits in his shop-office to greet anglers, behind a defense of trucks and cars in degrees of repair shuffled about the concrete floor. For a fraction of a day’s cost on chalk streams, the fly angler can cast for giant rainbows in Barry’s ponds with no catch and release: you take a monster; you kill it and haul its bloody carcass home. Barry rears 10,000 rainbows annually and guards them ferociously from poachers. He has movement activated cameras along the drive and about the ponds. Walls surround his fishery, except at the top where his land blends into fields beyond. Rolls of concertina wire lie hidden in the waist high nettles to keep thieves at bay. “The local kids swim at the top of our river,” Barry Jr. says,” but we run ‘em off if they come into the fishing water.”
As I star outside the garage, a great trout is hooked as a dozen fly-flingers work their craft. When the fish is netted, other fishermen pause, tuck their rods under their arms, and politely applaud the catch as the angler swings his “priest” (club) and administers “last rites.”
The day in Durington is a day for religion, though I cannot help but drag even this back to fishing. Just down the road we come on Woodhenge, with its three concentric ovals of concrete markers set in ancient postholes─ rings aligned with movements of the sun and moon. Under a great central stone lie the bones of a child, marking the circle as either a burial site or a place of sacrifice. Archaeologists have little more than these postholes and the stones of Stonehenge to tell who the English were 4,000 years ago.
At that time, the Chinese were using bamboo rods, silk lines, and feathered hooks. Egyptian slaves consumed the Nile’s fish and built the pyramids, while the pharaoh and his court angled for sport. Societies that had settled along the waters of the world to fish had become farmers, while the wandering hero's story of quest, conquest, and quest yet again was being forged by the horse-wanderers who had developed the culture that was to influence tribes living from the Volga to Ireland.
In western storytelling, according to a host of myth mongers, chief among whom was the poet Robert Graves, all stories are part or whole of the hero saga. Graves begins To Juan at the Winter Solstice with “There is one story and one story only.” (1) Western cultures retell this story of masculine gods at war for the affection of the muse, reshaping mysteries to fit the lives of each generation. The elemental story tells of the hero called on a quest, receiving divine aid, and, accomplishing the task, gaining his ultimate prize: the hero returns in full knowledge and acceptance of his mortality. The successful hero is able to rise above his intuition of immortality and accept his position in the cycle of life and death. (2)
We have erased the final chapter of this archetype as western dogma recounts that the hero renounces death as a part of life and lives forever. Our monotheistic religions─ Christianity, Judaism, and Islam─ share this curtailing of the one true poetic myth. Our God made us in his image and we returned the favor, granting ourselves immortality. Saint George quests for endless numbers of dragons. We worship the central myth of the hero unfettered, not responsible for his actions in the world, able to transcend mortality itself, ultimately becoming one with God.
But in other mythologies, in systems of belief not founded on the wandering hero, the individual does not become one with God. Societies as diverse as those of Malaysia and Western Alaska have very different concepts of the worth of the individual. In many hunter-gatherer societies there were, or are, no chiefs. The individual is part of the greater group, valued for his contributions. (3) It is the hero’s return to normalcy with knowledge which fulfills the saga, desire for life eternal balanced by the acceptance of mortality. In a very real sense, car-shop Barry of Avon Springs has it right: kill the great beast and eat it. Fish are food, death is part of life.
True Believers in the Church of Catch and Release maintain they never kill a fish, their hundred-fish days are ethical because they really harm no fish, that they do no damage. Fly-fishing is a blood sport, where fish do die from simple handling. Biologists have researched this for decades, identifying several culprits: overplaying, mishandling, lifting the fish from water, hook placement, stress, and any number of other factors. Because a fish swims from my hands does not automatically mean it survives. This admission places obligations on the catch and release fisher to take every precaution for the fish’s survival, to know the particulars of the species being handled for release, to understand and accept that her/his behavior is an anomaly to the fish.
Catch and release becomes ethical when personal responsibility is taken for the survival of the fish, but this is not the vision most anglers have of their sport or of their actions when releasing fish. The image we have been sold for more than a hundred years is sport shared with the noble trout, his wariness and cunning, our need to overcome an equal adversary. That is all in our heads. As a boss of mine once opined, “It’s a fish, for God’s sake.”
The Mayfly is a pub and outdoor eatery along the River Test, just below a narrow bridge on Route 37 between Wherwell and Stockbridge. A sign along the sun-dappled lane proclaims that 31 persons have been killed on this narrow section of country road in the past six months. We sit outdoors for dinner, with a clan of courteous bikers in attendance, while on a mid-stream island a solitary angler casts his giant mayfly upstream and across for trout, oblivious to the bridge, the traffic, the bikers, and the pub. His casting is as foreign to the bar scene as clutches of ducklings along the shore, paddling furiously against the current, leaping wildly for hovering mayflies. Lorries roar across the dangerously narrow bridge above us, bikers quay for pints, the ducklings leap, and the angler casts; fragments tucked along this storied beat, below a murderous road. And I am trying to find my way into the story, the primary story, of the myths of fishing for sport which beat like a drum in the heart of every angler.
The tie between chivalry and fly-fishing forged in the 19th century still exists in this solitary angler’s behavior, fishing upstream with dry flies only, casting far and fine, handling his catch in the water with near reverence before release. Fish tales lie close to the skin, just below the patina of the dedicated catch and release angler. If I have it right, angling is about the setting out, the immediate quest fulfilled. The difference between the catch and release angler and the catch and keep angler is not simple. The many defenses of catch and release pale when seen through the wonderfully round lens of a trout’s eye. You and I may practice catch and release or catch and keep, but the fish, in either case, is wholly committed to our sport─ willing or not.
Dr. David Policansky has done much to summarize and present the early laws requiring letting fish go. He is also a dedicated fly angler. While he sometimes practices catch and release, he tries to present good science on both sides of the argument. When explaining the practice to the novitiate, David relies on a parallel circumstance for humans. To paraphrase David: let us take PETA at their word, that fish feel pain and assume that they are like us in all particulars. In fact, for this exercise, let us assume that we are all fish. And that a creature unknown to us dangles a bauble in front of us, which, upon our closer inspection, we are so intrigued by that we seize it and are immediately impaled upon a hook and drawn up through the surface of the sky into a realm beyond our thinking. Let us assume it is a dimension located somewhere on a different string of the universe and our survival in that realm is largely in doubt. Sometimes we humans simply disappear, sometimes we are placed back on the sidewalk near our place of origin, wounded but alive. Assume you are so caught: do you wish to disappear from your life, or to be returned to the sidewalk?
Catch and kill is all about the fish, whereas catch and release is hardly about the fish. Catch and release has to do with our cultural myths, fulfilling our vision of the hero epic and healing psychically. Even so, as part of the fly-fishing culture, we often fail to understand the deeper, primal role of fish as food, a physically as well as psychically regenerative force. Our core beliefs as anglers are the product of ancient heroic myth that we brought with us on mankind’s first great journey and reshaped into the endless wanderer. The reliving of a portion of the heroic archetype lies at the level of an ethical value for today’s dedicated catch and release angler.
I have tried until now to shape the fly-fishing story through traces of history. Farther on, we shall plunge through myth’s surface and seek a vision of the role of fishing in our common past─ but not yet. Going back must wait until we have caught ourselves up; the Boy Scouts remain in England’s history of catch and return.
(1) Williams, Oscar (ed.) Immortal Poems of the English Language. Washington Square Press, NY, 1966, p.559.
(2)Campbell, Joseph, Hero with a Thousand Faces.Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1968.
(3) Ingold, Tim (ed.) Hunters and Gathers, vol 3. Property, Power and Ideology. p. 95-105, p.110-127.
Chapter 6
Jamboree
Fort A.P. Hill, U.S.A., July, 2005
“There isn’t any confusion about a catfish strike. The hookset will be similar to snagging a stump.”
-Terry Wilson, Catching Hillbilly Salmon, Flyfisher, summer 2005
Federation of Fly Fishers volunteers taught fly-fishing at the Boy Scout’s National Jamboree, 2005, held on Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. The heat and humidity were so intense that hundreds of boys suffered dehydration or heat stroke. The fishing ponds were increasingly popular all week, so much so that we had to define areas for fly fishing apart from the crush of baitcasters. Ted Rogowski and Bill Kalbas sat under a shading tarp, tying wooly buggers, surrounded by scouts dragging stringers of catfish to the cleaning station. Boys stepped out of the stalled cleaning line as they became captivated by the men tying flies. Amid piles of marabou, chenille, and hackle, Ted and Bill tied fly after fly, surrounded by boys, catfish, and wooly buggers. Over and over, again and yet again, they demonstrated their craft in the stench of dead fish and sweating boys that blanketed the oak-dappled grove, all shimmering like memory in the 115 degree heat.
FFF Volunteers began teaching each morning when the first scout arrived and ended each evening as the last scout left. Boys waited patiently in the heat as each mentor tried to keep up with three scouts tying at a time. Others volunteers worked with scouts on their casting stroke or took them fishing. We scrounged more vises, cleared weeds from casting lanes, dodged errant flies flung by overeager boys. Proselytizers for fly-fishing, high priests for the religion of fish and feathers, true believers lost in a mantra of mentoring our craft, we became a strange order of sweat-soaked monks doing nodding penance through our vises, finding absolution in each boy’s success with fly, rod, or fish. Men who would not be dissuaded from their dreams.
Lord Baden-Powell, king of the scouts, was such a man. He was a celebrity to the generation of Englishmen fated to die in the trenches of World War I. B-P became a national hero at the siege of Mafeking in South Africa during the Boer War and was recruited by the King to start the scouting movement. He lived two different lives, sharply divided on the cusp of modern English history.
At nineteen, B-P took a commission as a junior officer and was posted to India.(1) He rose to the rank of Captain, performing small feats of scouting and tracking before being detailed to Africa. In 1896, Colonel Baden-Powell and the American Fredrick Russell Burnham were charged with scouting the Matopo Hills in South Africa. B-P’s knowledge of scouting techniques grew during the three days he spent with Burnham reconnoitering the tribes. (2)
F.R. Burnham, contributed to both the birth of scouting and conservation. His life spanned the great themes of American history: having been orphaned at the age of thirteen in California, he made and lost several fortunes, finding gold in Colorado, coal in Rhodesia, gold in the Klondike and, finally, oil in California.(3) Burnham’s story remains the model for Theodore Roosevelt’s Strenuous Life, with its vision of success brought by daring in multiple fields of endeavor, a retelling of the American hero. (4) Perhaps his greatest legacy, however, is that he scouted with Baden-Powell and, on several dangerous trips, taught B-P to survive and think as a scout.
In the early 1900s Baden-Powell found himself a sacrificial lamb during the Boer War. The Boers had repeating rifles and German cannons, and they outnumbered and outgunned the British. In order to split the Boer forces, Baden-Powell was sent with a small garrison of troops to hold Mafeking, a sleepy backwater at the end of the railroad in the Transvaal. B-P and his troops were expendable, a holding action expected to be quickly overrun. His small force survived, however, maintaining its position for 217 days as the Boer command sent 7,500 troops against them.
B-P enrolled the young men of Mafeking between 13 and 16 years old as scouts and messengers, writing for them a small guide on tracking and survival skills. During the siege, chapters of this guide were widely published in England. The Boers neither cut the telegraph lines nor stopped the mail from going through. Messages that read, “They shelled us for four hours today. Killed one dog,” were taken as quintessential English understatement. When the siege was finally lifted in May of 1907, the victory brought hundreds of thousands of Londoners parading in Piccadilly Square, carrying images of Baden-Powell. (4) British boys started informal scouting groups based on B-P’s dispatches. The king asked B-P to begin a movement of young men to prepare them for the coming conflagration of World War I. B-P was launched on his second career and the Boy Scout movement that serves millions of boys worldwide was born.
B-P became a passionate fly-fisherman who released most of the fish he caught.(5) His life and times are important to a history of catch and release because scouting provided a cauldron, a mixing pot, in which catch and release lost its chivalry-laced, class-specific role of the 19th century to become a widely accepted practice worldwide. B-P wrote of the need to release what you catch “if your fish are not needed for food or your collection of natural history.” He released fish for all the right reasons. “Your catch should be returned unharmed to grow and give more pleasure to other anglers.” (6) B-P maintained that it was the fishing itself that renewed the angler, not taking fish. Others had said the same before, but it was B-P’s popularity with youth that gave him the bully pulpit needed to preach catch and release to all.
A hundred years later, the boys at National Jamboree knew about catch and release. Many who landed catfish wanted to get them back in the water immediately or borrow pliers and remove the hook without taking the fish from the water. As part of their merit badge, they had to practice catch and release; as well as catch, kill, cook, and eat a fish. The doglegged lake at the fort had been drained and cleared of all fish just a few months earlier. It had been refilled with water and stocked with twelve thousand large catfish a week before Jamboree. The water still had the thick, muddy smell of a tilled field. A small number of sunfish had been stocked and were hiding in weedy marshes at either end of the pond.
Our first Jamboree Boy Scout, Steven, arrived early, the first morning of Jamboree. He took full advantage of the empty tying bench and team of volunteers to whip out a half dozen wooly buggers. As soon as the casting lanes were open, he moved on to learn the basic pick-up and lay down cast. Well before noon on that first day, he was throwing his flies in the far end of the pond. He worked on his casting over the next two days, spending hours each day perfecting his technique. Once he had the timing right for tight loops, he learned to accelerate the line with a haul. His face erupted with delight as the line shot from his hand. He wanted to know how it worked. We talked about the rules of a good cast: he studied them one by one, and, in three days, Steven was laying out casts of seventy feet with incredibly taut backcasts, double hauls shooting wondrous lengths of line, his leader turning over to present his most recent fully-dressed wooly buggers to the fish. Casting a beginner’s rod, he easily reached the aerators at the center of the pond. Great fish cruised below the fountains, in the nervous rippling of their spray, holding in the freshly oxygenated water. Steven took a four-pound catfish, then turned his attention to the bluegills. At the end of the week he stopped by each volunteer who had helped him, saying, “Thank you for giving me my lifetime sport.”
The story of the wooly buggers taught to Steven and hundreds of other boys illuminates several themes of our foolish sport. The wooly bugger is, arguably, the most popular fly in the world. Fish it with a two handed retrieve and it resembles a baitfish, strip a weighted version with pauses, and it darts about the bottom as a hiding sculpin. Strip, pause, strip, pause and the wooly bugger becomes a dragon fly larva, or a lake leech. It catches steelhead in Alaska as readily as catfish in Virginia. Hundreds of years ago the technique of palmering its hackle was named for English penitents returned from the Holy Land carrying palm fronds. Throughout the British Empire, it remains the wooly worm, tied with a red hackle tail─ American anglers added marabou and changed the name to an English curse. Alaskans added their favorite salmon egg and named the sweet concoction the egg sucking leech. Add crystal flash, sparkle maribou, and weighted eyes, tie it in all the colors of the rainbow, and the wooly bugger has caught most fish species anglers seek. There could be no better pattern to teach the scouts than this most ecumenical of flies.
On Wednesday, five black scouts sat on the fence at the far corner of the fly-fishing area as a member of their troop, Charlie, stood rigidly, chopping his line into the water. I stopped his hacking cast and asked his name, where he was from, and if he had fished before. His buddies howled. Fishing was Charlie’s life in Mississippi, but the awkward casting sequence did not suit him. We eliminated his chop. He tended to glide in his casting motion, like an uncurling wave. Within an hour he had the pulse and flow mastered, casting fifty feet and more. He was stripping his wooly bugger in as a dragon fly larva when the line came taut and a fish spun line from his reel. There was no hesitation, Charlie knew how to play his catch and soon had it to hand, the largest fish all week. His friends gathered around as the fish lay in the net; weighing easily seven, perhaps eight pounds. Charlie considered his fish and his friends’ desire to be away. They looked toward the long line of scouts waiting to have their fish cleaned and cooked. These young men from Mississippi did not want to stand in the cleaning line, not even for this great fish, fried and theirs to eat. Charlie grasped the catfish by its slim tail, popped the hook free, wagged the giant through the water once, twice, and released his grip. The fish disappeared back into the cream and coffee brown water of the pond. Charlie and his friends walked away.
In 1944, Fredrick Burnham wrote in Taking Chances of a conversation he had with Baden Powell in 1896. They were nearing the end of three days of scouting Native positions in the Transvaal. Warmed by a small fire, hidden in a draw, for the moment secure from those pursuing them, B-P revealed his vision:
"Out of the alleys and streets our youths must be brought to camps under the stars. Their eyes trained for the night and their feet to move lightly without fatigue. The young and strong of today will be our rulers of tomorrow. We must hurry to preserve our best virtues, for nations without courage and discipline are very short lived. At the same time, we must always remember and respect the code of the knights–in-armor, who, for generations, gave Europe her only ray of hope during the Dark Ages. Through that code, a single knight with mercy and love of God in his heart, brought confidence and comfort to the weak and oppressed as he rode forth against the evil doers who cowered before his high-held lance."(7)
The Boy Scouts were founded on the same late 19th century vision of chivalry that shaped Edwardian romantic myths of fly-fishing. (8) When B-P was assigned the task of starting a youth movement, he returned to his family’s library to search for models. B-P found that form in two existing American programs. (9) The League of Woodcraft Indians was begun in 1902 by Earnest Thompson Seaton, who later served as the chief scout for the Boy Scouts of America. (10) Seaton’s original program emphasized the wilderness skills B-P had learned from Fredrick Burnham. The second program B-P used as a model was the Knights of King Arthur. William Byron Forbush began the first “Castle” in 1893 to capture “the spirit of fealty and piety that made the Medieval legends in general and “the literature of the Artherian and sangrial”… appeal to young boys.” (11)
Baden-Powell’s task was to prepare all of the youth of England for the coming Great War. What he took from the American programs was to combine woodcraft and scouting skills with a new American egalitarian notion of Chivalry. In America’s growing populist youth movements, the concept of English nobility on knightly quests was replaced with the idea that all persons could perform nobly. “Any person of character can possess this moral strength. Because it is not a condition of birth or wealth, it becomes an appropriate model for American Youth…” (12)
The 19th century chivalric tradition colored field sports as taught by the scouting movement. B-P chose Saint George as the patron saint of scouting to further the spread of chivalric ideals. The literature of the hunt in the 13th and 14th centuries was the template for The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, complete with the first code of angling behavior. Modern angling ethics have their origins both in The Treatise’s final pages and in 19th century romantic ideals of chivalry. Baden-Powell preached the elitist gospel of catch and return taken from his English roots to millions of boys worldwide during his visits to Jamborees. In many ways, we owe the popularity of catch and release as an egalitarian contest with the fish to his teachings. For millions of boys worldwide, the scouting adventure instills core values. Adapted to the particulars of the American experience, generation by generation, chivalric tales lead from slaying dragons to defeating wilderness, and finally, to releasing catfish in a stocked pond.
1. Reynolds, E.E., B-P. Oxford Press, London, 1963, p.7-20.
2. Van Wyk, Peter, Burnham, King of Scouts.Trafford Publishing, Victoria, 2000, p.224-231; 256-259.
3. Burnham, Fredrick Russell, Scouting on Two Continents. Garden City Publishing, Garden City, 1926, p. 12-71.
4. Roosevelt, Theodore, The Strenuous Life. The Review of Reviews Company, NY, 1910.
5. Aitken, W.Francis, Baden-Powell, The Hero of Mafeking.S.W. Partrodge & Co., London, 1900.
6. Baden -Powell, Heather, Baden-Powell A Family Album. Alan Sutton, Gloucester, 1990, p. 27.
7. http://www.pinetreeweb.com/bp-precourt-fly-fishing.htm
8. Ibid. /burnham-on-bp.htm
9. Giroud, Mark, The Return to Camelot. p.254.
10. Ibid. p. 254.
11. Verduin, Kathleen (ed.), Medievalism in North America, Lupik, Alan, Visions of Courageous Achievement: Arthurian Youth Groups in America, p.52.
12. Ibid. p.66.
Chapter Seven
Brother Jonathan
“to hear the cheerful whistling, the rural song, where there was no sound heard before save…the screech of the owl or the hissing of the snake─”
-St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer,1782
Travels in the wilderness were part of the Romantic Movement during the early 1800s, but few lines were given to fishing. Books on fishing published in America before the Civil War were often copies of English works or authored by transplants from England who imported British sensibilities. In 1835, British author Paul Fisher in The Angler’s Souvenir remarked about American anglers that “Brother Jonathan is not yet sufficiently civilized to produce anything original on the gentle art.” (1)
Our consuming zeal for progress was born of the pilgrim’s belief in transforming wilderness into the useful garden, the re-creation of the Garden of Eden. In America there was no greater work than to subdue ungodly wilderness to the Lord’s and man’s will. Two themes, the conquest of the West and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, combined in the conversion of the Great American Desert into the Garden. Bending nature to man’s will remains a fundamental part of our American archetype. As long as the seemingly infinite lands of the West retained the promise of America, the vision of wild nature to be conquered drove our national purpose. Perhaps a role for Custer at the Little Big Horn was, and still is, to assure us as a people that we were justified in the absolute destruction of the Native people of the west: unruly Nature bent to our God’s will.
In the early 1800s, the study of Natural History was a way to understand the hand of God. We believed all life was fixed in form from the moment of creation and displayed intelligent design. “Science counted for absolutely nothing compared to religion. It stood, at best, in the relation of a handmaid to religion but, like a handmaid, it could be sacked if it ever showed signs of becoming uppity.” (2) It was not until the controversy surrounding Darwin’s Origins of the Species that the formal study of science achieved respectability. Our ongoing battle between “uppity science” and religious dogma began with coming to terms with the legacy of the American Civil War. Two books from this period illustrate this division in thought. An understanding of human’s impact on the earth was articulated in 1864 in the first great work of conservation, George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature. With this book the phoenix of the conservation movement emerged from the ashes of the Civil War. Marsh’s detailed argument that mankind is a primary shaper of the world resonates today. His evidence lay in the deteriorating lives of Americans, as progress led to urban blight and the wanton destruction of forests and wildlife. Man and Nature sold over a thousand copies its first year and became required reading to understand the war just over and the impacts of the industrial revolution. Marsh did not abandon God’s role in creation or man’s primacy in that creation. According to Marsh, it was man’s fall from grace and his excesses toward nature which doomed cultures. Man remained above the beasts, Marsh firm in his belief in man’s dominion. (3)
Man and Nature appeared five years after Darwin’s Origins of the Species. In contrast to Marsh’s vision of mankind errant from God, Darwin established humans as ascendant from nature, seeing mankind as a crowning natural achievement. “Darwin’s agnosticism made it congenial for him to stress human affinities with other living beings, Marsh’s Christian faith spurred him to stress their differences.” (4)
These differing roles for nature are still in vogue in America. Marsh’s view, although critical of the outcome, supports the western myth of wilderness to be conquered by the heroes of the frontier and the Great American Desert reborn as Eden, made fruitful under the plow. Darwin established mankind as part of nature, as one with the world, ultimately questioning the foundation myths of western mankind. The paradox of nature apart yet one with the self led to the schism between those who would continue the conversion of wild nature and those who choose to preserve wilderness. This conflict, carried out in writings about hunting and fishing, underpinned by the heroic ideal, ultimately leads to the acceptance of catch and release as a tool of fisheries management and as religion for millions of anglers.
The first reference I can find to voluntarily releasing fish in America was published in March, 1832 in The American Turf Register. In an article entitled “The Cincinnati Angling Club,” an anonymous writer apologized for his club member’s taking of catfish and wrote, "Some of the members, disdaining even to touch him, cut him loose when caught and kick him back in the water.” (5) Who wrote this account of intentionally releasing fish (even though maimed) is not known because authors did not usually sign their sporting pieces. Fishing was held in such low regard that many gentlemen would not acknowledge being anglers.
Paul Schullery wrote in Royal Coachman that George Gibson’s notes to The American Turf Register and The Spirit of the Times were some of the earliest and best informed writings on fly-fishing before the 1860s:
The evening was fine- a cloud obscured the sun, a gentle breeze rippled the pool, and such was my success, that in less than one hour I landed twenty trout, from one to two pounds each. The proprietor cried “enough.”- I asked for the privilege of another cast. I made one, and hooked a large trout with my bobbing fly, and playing him, another of equal size ran at and was hooked by my trail fly, and both were landed in handsome style. The last throw was fatal to my sport in that pool-for I never after was a welcome visitor but many is the day I have met with nearly as good success in the other mill pool. (6)
Early American fishing literature bore the mark of British sensibilities toward angling. Publishers and writers came from that tradition; however, they do not appear to have accepted the idea of letting some fish go. The American Turf Register published a long, laudatory review of Sir Humphrey Davy’s Salmonia, but the reviewer did not mention Davy’s repeated advocacy for releasing a portion of one’s catch.(7) Bethune’s edition of The Complete Angler (1847) has an American introduction to the English work, a source of information on pre-war angling in America. Bethune affirms the link between angling and chivalry:
He (the angler) scorns to entrap by weir, or fyke, or wicker–pot, the finny people, when not bent on harm; but as they watch murderously for the pretty fly, the helpless minnow, or the half drowned worm, he comes like a chivalrous knight to wreak upon them the wrong they would do and slay them as they think to slay. (8)
Bethune takes no notice of Cotton’s admonition to release the “diminutive gentleman.” Instead, Bethune illuminates early angling with a summary of the proceedings of the Lake Piseco trout club. The harvest figures provide insight: 1842-nine days fishing, 730 pounds; 1844- seven days fishing, 715 pounds; 1845- eleven days fishing, 1119 pounds. Nothing is mentioned of fish being released.
The most popular author on field sports in America prior to the Civil War was Henry William Herbert, a.k.a. Frank Forester, a British writer who carved out a niche for his English sporting sensibilities in the American press. In Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America (1855), Herbert defined sportfishing as targeting food fish:
“Again, it is true that no sportsman captures that, which, captured, is worthless; and that to be game, whether bird, beast or fish, is to be eatable. Therefore it is of eatable fishes alone that I propose to treat.” In the second edition, Herbert further explains, “I certainly supposed it unnecessary to state so self evident a fact as that game is eatable. Hence my non-mention of ...Alligator Gar, Esox Osseus. He is no more game than the Shark or Dog-Fish, both of which men catch for fun.” (9)
This may imply releasing these non-food fish unharmed, but given the thinking of the times, probably not. We were still enamored with the conquest of nature, not her preservation. The Indian Wars began in the 1840s after the Mexican War and the birth of Manifest Destiny. The frontiersman-hero had grown in our imagination with the likes of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and, in fiction, Natty Bumppo. In the 1840s he emerged in the person of Kit Carson. As early as 1843 John Freemont, the “Pathfinder,” assigned chivalric virtues to the scout:
"Two men, in a savage desert, pursue day and night an unknown body of Indians into the defiles of an unknown mountain-attack them on sight without counting numbers- and defeat them in an instant. And for what? To punish the robbers of the desert, and to avenge the wrongs of Mexicans whom they did not know.” (10)
Who would do such a thing? Fremont asked rhetorically…”Kit Carson, an American, born in the Boonestock county of Missouri…” And so by 1845 the image was sealed: Kit Carson became a kind of action figure hero, the noble rescuer, righteous avenger, white knight of the West.
It would be more than twenty years before we began as a people en-mass to recreate in wilderness. Samuel Hammond’s Wild Northern Scenes (1857) was among the first American fishing, hunting, and camping books. Hammond offered renewal in the Adirondacks, complete with limited harvesting of fish: "I say," said the Doctor, "how many have you in your boat?""Sixteen," I replied, after counting them."We've got eight, and I bar any more fishing. The law has reached its limit. No wanton waste of the good things of God, you know." (11) Several other books were written about the Adirondacks prior to the Civil War; however, “None of these books…brought either fortune or fame to their authors, nor did they succeed in enticing more than a few of their readers into seeking the Adirondacks…” (12) Still in the thrall of progress, of westward questing, heroic efforts were needed to tame wilderness, with little public regard for its preservation.
By the 1850s however, hunting and fishing had gained in popularity with upper-class sportsmen. In Casting a Spell (2006) George Black illustrates early acceptance of the dual roles for nature with a journey by Henry David Thoreau and Hiram Leonard on a trip to the Maine camps in 1857. Leonard, who went on to perfect the six-sided split-bamboo fly rod, is presented by Black as the American frontier hero. “Leonard belongs to that great American series of heroic archetypes- the lineage that includes Johnny Appleseed and Horatio Alger, but above all Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo.” (13)
Well-to-do sportsmen visited rough camps from the Catskills to Maine, Thoreau was writing and lecturing on nature, and the conservation movement had begun. By 1860, on the shore of Ampersand Pond in the Adirondacks, the Adirondack Club had their shanty.
"Agassiz, of Cambridge, the genial and witty Tom Appleton, of Boston, Charles E. Norton, Emerson, Lowell, Judge Hoar, Judge Gray, John Holmes, and W.J. Stillman of The Nation, were among the company who made their resting-place under the shadow of Mount Seward. They had bought a tract of forest land completely encircling the pond, cut a rough road into it through the woods, and built a comfortable log cabin, to which they proposed to return from summer to summer. But the civil war broke out, with all its terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts; the club existed but for two years, and was abandoned." (14)
Over a million young men and women who served in the American Civil War did not return whole to their families, as more than 600,000 died from combat and disease, and another 450,000 returned home maimed. Nearly a third of all who served became war casualties as tradition-bound generals sent wave after wave of soldiers against industrial age weapons. Written in 1863 but with its publication delayed because of the war, the first truly American fishing book was published in 1865. In The American Angler Thaddeus Norris, “Uncle Thaddeus”, as he is known by fly anglers who revere him as America’s Dame Juliana, initiated the scientific study of fish and fisheries in America. In his introduction, Norris takes issue with earlier works that spoke of American angling,
"The best informed of those who have written on American fishes, have omitted many important species, and treated slightingly of others which are worthy of a more extended notice. …With a view to filling up the blank left by my predecessors, of correcting some erroneous ideas that have been imparted, not only concerning fish, but the adaptation of English rules and theories, without qualification, to our waters...I have devoted many spare hours to the following pages." (15)
Norris described a wide variety of anglers, each still recognizable today, and dozens of fish species. He decried the fish-hog, vilifying the fisher who takes his sport from spawning fish or who harvests every fish he catches to prove his prowess to neighbors or friends. He wrote of such fishers as less than anglers. While he had harsh words for polluters, farmers, loggers, and urban sprawl, he saved his sharpest tongue lashings for the would-be angler intent only upon harvesting the greatest number of fish. In his appendix “Dies Piscatoryae” he provided anglers with notions of sport which included the release of a significant portion of one’s catch. His anger flashed when he wrote of the fish-hog:
"There are no good fish here…. I have thrown in a dozen little fellows within the last ten minutes.…The last time I fished it was when that lean hungry-looking Scotchman came over here from Jim Henry’s; he had been sneaking through the bushes and poaching all the little brooks around, where the fish had run up to spawn…Poor fellow! His piscatory education must have been neglected, or he belonged to that school who brag only on numbers…Such fishermen are but one removed from the bark peelers I found snaring and netting trout in still water below here, last August. I can just see their shanty from here. “Instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret…” (16)
But, in the end, Uncle Thaddeus disappoints the modern angler focused on releasing wild fish. Norris’s solution to the depletion of sport fish was that of the hatchery manager, advocating hatchery fish as the ultimate solution to pollution, progress, overharvest, and habitat destruction. Norris blazed the trail from G.P. Marsh and “Man and Nature,” toward scientific management, with concepts of the conservation of resources that lead to Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. A parallel path for sportsmen intent upon catching and releasing wild fish leads just as surely from Darwin’s Origin of the Species to the preservation of wilderness as essential to the spirit.
(1) Schullery, Paul, American Fly-fishing A History. Nick Lyons Books, NY, 1987, p.30.
(2) Barber, Lynn, The Heyday of Natural History, Doubleday and Company, Garden City, NY, 1980,p.25.
(3) Loventhal, David, George Perkins Marsh. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2000.
(4) Ibid.p. 308.
(5) An Angler, The Cincinnati Angling Club, The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, Skinner, J.S. (ed.), Edward Troye, Baltimore,
1840, vol. 3 no. 7, p.355.
(6) Schullery, Paul, Royal Coachman. Simon and Schuster, NY, 1999, p. 50-51, 68.
(7) Skinner, J.S. (ed.), The American Turf Rregister and Sporting Magazine. 1840, vol. 2no. 5, p. 241.
(8) Walton, Isaac and Cotton, Charles, The complete Angler. Wiley and Putnam, NY, 1847, p. ii, part II, p. 73, 133-137.
(9) Herbert, Henry, Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provences of North America. Stringer and Townsend, NY, 1855, p. 17.
(10) Sides, Hampton, Blood and Thunder. Anchor Books, NY, 2006, p. 79.
(11) http://www.fullbooks.com/Wild-Northern-Scenes1.html
(12) Murray, William H.H., Adventures in the Wilderness. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1970, p. 62.
(13) Black, George, Casting a Spell. Random House, NY, 2006, p.7.
(14) Ampersand, Harper"s. July 1885, p.225.
(15) Norris, Thaddeus, The American Angler's Book. Derrydale Press, Lyon, ND, p. viii.
(16) Ibid. 580-581.
-St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer,1782
Travels in the wilderness were part of the Romantic Movement during the early 1800s, but few lines were given to fishing. Books on fishing published in America before the Civil War were often copies of English works or authored by transplants from England who imported British sensibilities. In 1835, British author Paul Fisher in The Angler’s Souvenir remarked about American anglers that “Brother Jonathan is not yet sufficiently civilized to produce anything original on the gentle art.” (1)
Our consuming zeal for progress was born of the pilgrim’s belief in transforming wilderness into the useful garden, the re-creation of the Garden of Eden. In America there was no greater work than to subdue ungodly wilderness to the Lord’s and man’s will. Two themes, the conquest of the West and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, combined in the conversion of the Great American Desert into the Garden. Bending nature to man’s will remains a fundamental part of our American archetype. As long as the seemingly infinite lands of the West retained the promise of America, the vision of wild nature to be conquered drove our national purpose. Perhaps a role for Custer at the Little Big Horn was, and still is, to assure us as a people that we were justified in the absolute destruction of the Native people of the west: unruly Nature bent to our God’s will.
In the early 1800s, the study of Natural History was a way to understand the hand of God. We believed all life was fixed in form from the moment of creation and displayed intelligent design. “Science counted for absolutely nothing compared to religion. It stood, at best, in the relation of a handmaid to religion but, like a handmaid, it could be sacked if it ever showed signs of becoming uppity.” (2) It was not until the controversy surrounding Darwin’s Origins of the Species that the formal study of science achieved respectability. Our ongoing battle between “uppity science” and religious dogma began with coming to terms with the legacy of the American Civil War. Two books from this period illustrate this division in thought. An understanding of human’s impact on the earth was articulated in 1864 in the first great work of conservation, George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature. With this book the phoenix of the conservation movement emerged from the ashes of the Civil War. Marsh’s detailed argument that mankind is a primary shaper of the world resonates today. His evidence lay in the deteriorating lives of Americans, as progress led to urban blight and the wanton destruction of forests and wildlife. Man and Nature sold over a thousand copies its first year and became required reading to understand the war just over and the impacts of the industrial revolution. Marsh did not abandon God’s role in creation or man’s primacy in that creation. According to Marsh, it was man’s fall from grace and his excesses toward nature which doomed cultures. Man remained above the beasts, Marsh firm in his belief in man’s dominion. (3)
Man and Nature appeared five years after Darwin’s Origins of the Species. In contrast to Marsh’s vision of mankind errant from God, Darwin established humans as ascendant from nature, seeing mankind as a crowning natural achievement. “Darwin’s agnosticism made it congenial for him to stress human affinities with other living beings, Marsh’s Christian faith spurred him to stress their differences.” (4)
These differing roles for nature are still in vogue in America. Marsh’s view, although critical of the outcome, supports the western myth of wilderness to be conquered by the heroes of the frontier and the Great American Desert reborn as Eden, made fruitful under the plow. Darwin established mankind as part of nature, as one with the world, ultimately questioning the foundation myths of western mankind. The paradox of nature apart yet one with the self led to the schism between those who would continue the conversion of wild nature and those who choose to preserve wilderness. This conflict, carried out in writings about hunting and fishing, underpinned by the heroic ideal, ultimately leads to the acceptance of catch and release as a tool of fisheries management and as religion for millions of anglers.
The first reference I can find to voluntarily releasing fish in America was published in March, 1832 in The American Turf Register. In an article entitled “The Cincinnati Angling Club,” an anonymous writer apologized for his club member’s taking of catfish and wrote, "Some of the members, disdaining even to touch him, cut him loose when caught and kick him back in the water.” (5) Who wrote this account of intentionally releasing fish (even though maimed) is not known because authors did not usually sign their sporting pieces. Fishing was held in such low regard that many gentlemen would not acknowledge being anglers.
Paul Schullery wrote in Royal Coachman that George Gibson’s notes to The American Turf Register and The Spirit of the Times were some of the earliest and best informed writings on fly-fishing before the 1860s:
The evening was fine- a cloud obscured the sun, a gentle breeze rippled the pool, and such was my success, that in less than one hour I landed twenty trout, from one to two pounds each. The proprietor cried “enough.”- I asked for the privilege of another cast. I made one, and hooked a large trout with my bobbing fly, and playing him, another of equal size ran at and was hooked by my trail fly, and both were landed in handsome style. The last throw was fatal to my sport in that pool-for I never after was a welcome visitor but many is the day I have met with nearly as good success in the other mill pool. (6)
Early American fishing literature bore the mark of British sensibilities toward angling. Publishers and writers came from that tradition; however, they do not appear to have accepted the idea of letting some fish go. The American Turf Register published a long, laudatory review of Sir Humphrey Davy’s Salmonia, but the reviewer did not mention Davy’s repeated advocacy for releasing a portion of one’s catch.(7) Bethune’s edition of The Complete Angler (1847) has an American introduction to the English work, a source of information on pre-war angling in America. Bethune affirms the link between angling and chivalry:
He (the angler) scorns to entrap by weir, or fyke, or wicker–pot, the finny people, when not bent on harm; but as they watch murderously for the pretty fly, the helpless minnow, or the half drowned worm, he comes like a chivalrous knight to wreak upon them the wrong they would do and slay them as they think to slay. (8)
Bethune takes no notice of Cotton’s admonition to release the “diminutive gentleman.” Instead, Bethune illuminates early angling with a summary of the proceedings of the Lake Piseco trout club. The harvest figures provide insight: 1842-nine days fishing, 730 pounds; 1844- seven days fishing, 715 pounds; 1845- eleven days fishing, 1119 pounds. Nothing is mentioned of fish being released.
The most popular author on field sports in America prior to the Civil War was Henry William Herbert, a.k.a. Frank Forester, a British writer who carved out a niche for his English sporting sensibilities in the American press. In Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America (1855), Herbert defined sportfishing as targeting food fish:
“Again, it is true that no sportsman captures that, which, captured, is worthless; and that to be game, whether bird, beast or fish, is to be eatable. Therefore it is of eatable fishes alone that I propose to treat.” In the second edition, Herbert further explains, “I certainly supposed it unnecessary to state so self evident a fact as that game is eatable. Hence my non-mention of ...Alligator Gar, Esox Osseus. He is no more game than the Shark or Dog-Fish, both of which men catch for fun.” (9)
This may imply releasing these non-food fish unharmed, but given the thinking of the times, probably not. We were still enamored with the conquest of nature, not her preservation. The Indian Wars began in the 1840s after the Mexican War and the birth of Manifest Destiny. The frontiersman-hero had grown in our imagination with the likes of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and, in fiction, Natty Bumppo. In the 1840s he emerged in the person of Kit Carson. As early as 1843 John Freemont, the “Pathfinder,” assigned chivalric virtues to the scout:
"Two men, in a savage desert, pursue day and night an unknown body of Indians into the defiles of an unknown mountain-attack them on sight without counting numbers- and defeat them in an instant. And for what? To punish the robbers of the desert, and to avenge the wrongs of Mexicans whom they did not know.” (10)
Who would do such a thing? Fremont asked rhetorically…”Kit Carson, an American, born in the Boonestock county of Missouri…” And so by 1845 the image was sealed: Kit Carson became a kind of action figure hero, the noble rescuer, righteous avenger, white knight of the West.
It would be more than twenty years before we began as a people en-mass to recreate in wilderness. Samuel Hammond’s Wild Northern Scenes (1857) was among the first American fishing, hunting, and camping books. Hammond offered renewal in the Adirondacks, complete with limited harvesting of fish: "I say," said the Doctor, "how many have you in your boat?""Sixteen," I replied, after counting them."We've got eight, and I bar any more fishing. The law has reached its limit. No wanton waste of the good things of God, you know." (11) Several other books were written about the Adirondacks prior to the Civil War; however, “None of these books…brought either fortune or fame to their authors, nor did they succeed in enticing more than a few of their readers into seeking the Adirondacks…” (12) Still in the thrall of progress, of westward questing, heroic efforts were needed to tame wilderness, with little public regard for its preservation.
By the 1850s however, hunting and fishing had gained in popularity with upper-class sportsmen. In Casting a Spell (2006) George Black illustrates early acceptance of the dual roles for nature with a journey by Henry David Thoreau and Hiram Leonard on a trip to the Maine camps in 1857. Leonard, who went on to perfect the six-sided split-bamboo fly rod, is presented by Black as the American frontier hero. “Leonard belongs to that great American series of heroic archetypes- the lineage that includes Johnny Appleseed and Horatio Alger, but above all Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo.” (13)
Well-to-do sportsmen visited rough camps from the Catskills to Maine, Thoreau was writing and lecturing on nature, and the conservation movement had begun. By 1860, on the shore of Ampersand Pond in the Adirondacks, the Adirondack Club had their shanty.
"Agassiz, of Cambridge, the genial and witty Tom Appleton, of Boston, Charles E. Norton, Emerson, Lowell, Judge Hoar, Judge Gray, John Holmes, and W.J. Stillman of The Nation, were among the company who made their resting-place under the shadow of Mount Seward. They had bought a tract of forest land completely encircling the pond, cut a rough road into it through the woods, and built a comfortable log cabin, to which they proposed to return from summer to summer. But the civil war broke out, with all its terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts; the club existed but for two years, and was abandoned." (14)
Over a million young men and women who served in the American Civil War did not return whole to their families, as more than 600,000 died from combat and disease, and another 450,000 returned home maimed. Nearly a third of all who served became war casualties as tradition-bound generals sent wave after wave of soldiers against industrial age weapons. Written in 1863 but with its publication delayed because of the war, the first truly American fishing book was published in 1865. In The American Angler Thaddeus Norris, “Uncle Thaddeus”, as he is known by fly anglers who revere him as America’s Dame Juliana, initiated the scientific study of fish and fisheries in America. In his introduction, Norris takes issue with earlier works that spoke of American angling,
"The best informed of those who have written on American fishes, have omitted many important species, and treated slightingly of others which are worthy of a more extended notice. …With a view to filling up the blank left by my predecessors, of correcting some erroneous ideas that have been imparted, not only concerning fish, but the adaptation of English rules and theories, without qualification, to our waters...I have devoted many spare hours to the following pages." (15)
Norris described a wide variety of anglers, each still recognizable today, and dozens of fish species. He decried the fish-hog, vilifying the fisher who takes his sport from spawning fish or who harvests every fish he catches to prove his prowess to neighbors or friends. He wrote of such fishers as less than anglers. While he had harsh words for polluters, farmers, loggers, and urban sprawl, he saved his sharpest tongue lashings for the would-be angler intent only upon harvesting the greatest number of fish. In his appendix “Dies Piscatoryae” he provided anglers with notions of sport which included the release of a significant portion of one’s catch. His anger flashed when he wrote of the fish-hog:
"There are no good fish here…. I have thrown in a dozen little fellows within the last ten minutes.…The last time I fished it was when that lean hungry-looking Scotchman came over here from Jim Henry’s; he had been sneaking through the bushes and poaching all the little brooks around, where the fish had run up to spawn…Poor fellow! His piscatory education must have been neglected, or he belonged to that school who brag only on numbers…Such fishermen are but one removed from the bark peelers I found snaring and netting trout in still water below here, last August. I can just see their shanty from here. “Instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret…” (16)
But, in the end, Uncle Thaddeus disappoints the modern angler focused on releasing wild fish. Norris’s solution to the depletion of sport fish was that of the hatchery manager, advocating hatchery fish as the ultimate solution to pollution, progress, overharvest, and habitat destruction. Norris blazed the trail from G.P. Marsh and “Man and Nature,” toward scientific management, with concepts of the conservation of resources that lead to Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt. A parallel path for sportsmen intent upon catching and releasing wild fish leads just as surely from Darwin’s Origin of the Species to the preservation of wilderness as essential to the spirit.
(1) Schullery, Paul, American Fly-fishing A History. Nick Lyons Books, NY, 1987, p.30.
(2) Barber, Lynn, The Heyday of Natural History, Doubleday and Company, Garden City, NY, 1980,p.25.
(3) Loventhal, David, George Perkins Marsh. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2000.
(4) Ibid.p. 308.
(5) An Angler, The Cincinnati Angling Club, The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, Skinner, J.S. (ed.), Edward Troye, Baltimore,
1840, vol. 3 no. 7, p.355.
(6) Schullery, Paul, Royal Coachman. Simon and Schuster, NY, 1999, p. 50-51, 68.
(7) Skinner, J.S. (ed.), The American Turf Rregister and Sporting Magazine. 1840, vol. 2no. 5, p. 241.
(8) Walton, Isaac and Cotton, Charles, The complete Angler. Wiley and Putnam, NY, 1847, p. ii, part II, p. 73, 133-137.
(9) Herbert, Henry, Frank Forester's Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provences of North America. Stringer and Townsend, NY, 1855, p. 17.
(10) Sides, Hampton, Blood and Thunder. Anchor Books, NY, 2006, p. 79.
(11) http://www.fullbooks.com/Wild-Northern-Scenes1.html
(12) Murray, William H.H., Adventures in the Wilderness. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, 1970, p. 62.
(13) Black, George, Casting a Spell. Random House, NY, 2006, p.7.
(14) Ampersand, Harper"s. July 1885, p.225.
(15) Norris, Thaddeus, The American Angler's Book. Derrydale Press, Lyon, ND, p. viii.
(16) Ibid. 580-581.