Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843
INSCRIPTION ON THE FOUNDATION STONE OF THE NEW DINING-HALL, &c.,
NOW ERECTING FOR THE HON. SOCIETY OF LINCOLN'S INN
Stet lapis arboribus nudo defixus in horto
Fundamen pulchræ tempus in omne domûs.
Aula vetus lites legumque ænigmata servet,
Ipsa nova exorior nobilitanda coquo.
FREE TRANSLATION.
No more look
For shady nook,
Poor perspiring stranger!
Trees for bricks
Cut their sticks,
Lo! our salle-à-manager!
Yon old hall,
For suit and brawl,
Still be famed in story;
This must look
To the cook
For its only glory!
O.O.
SCROPE ON SALMON FISHING
Days and Nights of Salmon Fishing in the Tweed. By WILLIAM SCROPE, Esq., F.L.S. 1 vol. royal 8vo. London, 1843.
We have here a work of great beauty in a pictorial and typographical point of view, and one which abounds with practical information regarding the bolder branches of the "gentle art." Mr Scrope conveys to us, in an agreeable and lively manner, the results of his more than twenty years' experience as an angler in our great border river; and having now successfully illustrated, both with pen and pencil, two of the most exciting of all sporting recreations—deer-stalking and salmon-fishing—he may henceforward repose himself upon the mountain-side, or by the murmuring waters, with the happy consciousness of having not only followed the bent of his own inclinations, but contributed to the amusement and instruction of a numerous class of his fellow creatures. The present volume consists of no dry didactic dissertations on an art unteachable by written rules, and in which, without long and often dear-bought experience, neither precept nor example will avail; but it contains a sufficiency of sagacious practical advice, and is enlivened by the narration of numerous angling adventures, which bring out, with force and spirit, the essential character of the sport in question.
Great advances have been recently made in our knowledge of the sea-going Salmonidæ. Indeed, all the leading facts of primary importance in the history of their first development and final growth are now distinctly known, and have lately been laid before the public in the form both of original memoirs in our scientific journals, and the transactions of learned societies, and of more popular abstracts in various literary works. We ourselves discussed the subject in this Magazine, with our accustomed clearness, a couple of months ago; and we shall therefore not here enter into the now no longer vexed question of the nature of parr and smolts,—all doubt and disputation regarding the actual origin and family alliance of these fry, their descent from and eventual conversion into grilse and salmon, being finally set at rest to the satisfaction of every reasonable and properly instructed mind. We consider it, however, as a good proof of the natural sagacity and observant disposition of our present author, that he should have come to the same conclusion several years ago, regarding the habits and history of salmon-fry, as that so successfully demonstrated by Mr Shaw. Mr Scrope dwells with no unbecoming pertinacity on this point; but he shows historically, while fully admitting the importance and originality of that ingenious observer's experimental proceedings, that he had, in the course of his own private correspondence and conversation, called the attention of Mr Kennedy of Dunure as a legislator, and of Sir David Brewster as a skilled interpreter of natural phenomena, to various facts corresponding to those which have been since so skilfully detailed by Mr Shaw.
Our author, though well acquainted with the sporting capabilities of all parts of Scotland, here confines himself to the lower portions of the Tweed, more than twelve miles of which he has rented at different times. We in some measure regret that one so able to inform us, from his extensive experiences regarding the nature and localities of the first-rate though rather precarious angling for salmon which may be obtained in the northern parts of Scotland, should not have contrived to include an account of the more uproarious Highland streams and placid lakes frequented by this princely species. With all our admiration for the flowing Tweed, of which we have fondly traced the early feeble voice—
"a fitful sound
Wafted o'er sullen moss and craggy mound,
Unfruitful solitudes, that seem'd t' upbraid
The sun in heaven!"—
until, through many an intermediate scene of infinitely varied beauty, the expanded waters—
"Gliding in silence with unfetter'd sweep,
Beneath an ampler sky, a region wide
Is open'd round them:—hamlets, towers, and towns,
And blue-topp'd hills, behold them from afar:"—
we should still have rejoiced to find a twin volume devoted to those wilder and more desolate scenes by which the northern angler is encompassed. Meanwhile we accept with pleasure our author's "Days and Nights" upon the Tweed.
Salmon ascend from the sea, and enter this fine river, in greater or less abundance, during every period of the year, becoming more plentiful as the summer advances, provided there is a sufficiency of rain both to enlarge and discolour the waters, and thus enable the fish to pass more securely over those rippling shallows which so frequently occur between the deeper streams.
"The salmon," says Mr Scrope "travels rapidly, so that those which leave the sea, and go up the Tweed on the Saturday night at twelve o'clock, after which time no nets are worked till the Sabbath is past, are found and taken on the following Monday near St Boswell's—a distance, as the river winds, of about forty miles. This I have frequently ascertained by experience. When the strength of the current in a spate is considered, and also the sinuous course a salmon must take in order to avoid the strong rapids, their power of swimming must be considered as extraordinary."—P. 10.
We do not clearly see, and should have been glad had the author stated, in what manner he ascertained that his St Boswell's fish had not escaped the sweeping semicircles of the lower nets some days previous. We admit that there is a great deal of Sabbath desecration committed by salmon, but we also know that they travel upwards, though in smaller number and with greater risk, during all the other days of the week; and we are curious to understand how any angler, however accomplished, can carry his skill in physiognomy to such perfection, as to be able to look a fish in the face on Monday morning, and decide that it had not left the sea till the clock struck twelve on the Saturday night preceding.
"As salmon" our author continues, "are supposed to enter a river merely for the purposes of spawning, and as that process does not take place till September, one cannot well account for their appearing in the Tweed and elsewhere so early as February and March, seeing that they lose in weight and condition during their continuance in fresh water. Some think it is to get rid of the sea-louse; but this supposition must be set aside, when it is known that this insect adheres only to a portion of the newly-run fish which are in best condition. I think it more probable that they are driven from the coasts near the river by the numerous enemies they encounter there, such as porpoises and seals, which devour them in great quantities. However this may be, they remain in the fresh water till the spawning months commence."—P. 10.
We cannot think that a great instinctive movement which seems, although with a widely extended range in respect to tine, to pervade the entire mass of salmon along our universal shores, should in any way depend upon so casual an occurrence as an onslaught by seals and porpoises, or that fear rather than love should force them to seek the "pastoral melancholy" of the upper streams and tributaries. That seals are destructive to salmon, and all other fishes which frequent our shores or enter our estuaries, is undoubted; but we have no proof beyond the general allegation, that porpoises pursue a corresponding prey. Our own researches certainly lead to an opposite conclusion. The ordinary food of the cetacea, notwithstanding their enormous bulk, is minute in size; and we have never been informed, on good authority—that is, on direct testimony—that even herrings have ever been detected in the stomach of a porpoise. Yet we have careful notes of the dissection of these creatures, taken from specimens slaughtered in the midst of millions of herrings; and these notes show that the minute food with which the sea was swarming, and which formed the sustenance for the time of the smaller fishes, also constituted the food of the cetacea, which were merely gamboling through the herring shoals.
It is certainly, however, difficult to explain the motives by which the early spring salmon are actuated in ascending rivers, seeing that they never spawn till autumn at the soonest. We must remember, at the same time, that they are fresh-water fishes, born and bred in our own translucent streams, and that they have an undoubted right to endeavour to return there when it suits their own inclination. It may be, that although the ocean forms their favourite feeding-ground, and their increase of size and continuance in high condition depend upon certain marine attributes, which, of course, they can find only in the sea, yet the healthy development of the spawn requires a long-continued residence in running waters. We have ascertained, by experiment, that the ova of salmon, after being deposited, will make no progress in still water; and we cannot illustrate this portion of the subject better than by transcribing a paragraph from a letter, addressed to us in spring, (11th April 1843,) by Mr Andrew Young of Invershin, the manager of the Duke of Sutherland's extensive salmon fisheries in the north of Scotland:—"You are aware that it has been asserted by some of our wisest doctors, that salmon spawn in the sea and in lochs, as well as in rivers. However, as doctors are proverbially allowed to differ, I have this winter been trying to test the fact in the following manner: At the same time that I deposited the spawn from which I made my other experiments, I also placed a basket of the same spawn, with equal care, in a pool of pure still water from the river Shin; and I soon found that, while that which was placed in the running pools was regularly progressing, every particle put into the still water was as visibly degenerating, so that, by the time the spawn in the running pools was alive, that in the still water was a rotten mass. I must therefore say, from the above experiment, that rivers and running streams are the places fixed by nature for salmon to hatch their young." "I would also," says our correspondent in a subsequent portion of his letter, "mention an additional experiment on another point. It has been very generally asserted that intense frost injured the spawn of salmon; and in this opinion I was myself, in some measure, a believer. But as nothing but truth will stand a proper test, I turned my attention to this subject also. During the time of our severest frost, I took a basket of spawn, and placed it in a stream, where for three days it continued a frozen mass among the ice. I then placed the basket again in the running pond from whence it had been taken, and carefully watched the effect. I found that, although exposure to extreme cold had somewhat retarded the progressive growth, it had not in the slightest degree destroyed vitality. I am therefore satisfied, that unless frost goes the length of drying up the spawning beds altogether, it does not harm the spawn, further than by retarding its growth during the actual continuance of excessive cold. Thus fry are longer of hatching in a severe winter, than during an open one with little frost."
When salmon first ascend the Tweed, they are brown upon the back, fat, and in high condition. During the prevalence of cold weather they lie in deep and easy water, but as the season advances, they draw into the great rough streams, taking up their stations where they are likely to be least observed. But there the wily wand of the practiced angler casts its gaudy lure, and "Kinmont Willie," "Michael Scott," or "The Lady of Mertoun," (three killing flies,) darting deceitfully within their view, a sudden lounge is made—sometimes scarcely visible by outward signs—as often accompanied by a watery heave, and a flash like that of an aurora borealis,—and downwards, upwards, onwards, a twenty-pounder darts away with lightning speed, while the rapid reel gives out that heart-stirring sound so musical to an angler's ear, and than which none accords so well with the hoarser murmur of the brawling stream; till at last, after many an alternate hope and fear, the glittering prize turns up his silvery unresisting broadside, in meek submission to the merciless gaff.
Many otherwise well-principled persons believe that little more is required in angling than the exercise of patience. Place a merely patient man, acquainted only with pedestrian movements, upon a strong-headed horse determined to win, and give him the start at a steeple-chase, with Lord Waterford not far behind, and it will be seen before he has crossed much country, where patience is always as useful as it is praiseworthy. Place the same patient man, if he happens to have been picked up alive, and eventually recovers, in the midst of a roaring rock-bound river, and suppose him (a thing we confess, in his case, not quite conceivable) to have hooked a twenty-pound salmon at the tail of the stream, just where it subsides into some vast, almost fathomless, and far-extended pool, and that the said salmon, being rather of a restless disposition, and moreover somewhat disquieted by feeling an unaccustomed barb in his cheek or tongue, takes his 300 yards down the deep water at a single run, and then goes helter-skelter over a cataract, which had occupied him most of the preceding Sunday to ascend, after many a sinewy but unsuccessful spring! Will patience avail a man any thing in such a predicament, when he ought rather to run like an Arab, or dive like a dolphin, "splash, splash, towards the sea," notwithstanding the chance of his breaking his neck among the rocks, or being drowned while trying to round a crag which he cannot clamber over? Let us hear Mr Scrope's account of his third cast, one fine morning, when he came to Kingswell Lees.
"Now every one knows that Kingswell Lees, in fishermen's phrase, fishes off land; so there I stood on terra dura, amongst the rocks that dip down to the water's edge. Having executed one or two throws, there comes me a voracious fish, and makes a startling dash at 'Meg with the muckle mouth.'10 Sharply did I strike the caitiff; whereat he rolled round disdainful, making a whirl in the water of prodigious circumference; it was not exactly Charybdis, or the Maelstrom, but rather more like the wave occasioned by the sudden turning of a man-of-war's boat. Being hooked, and having by this time set his nose peremptorily down the stream, he flashed and whizzed away like a rocket. My situation partook of the nature of a surprise. Being on a rocky shore, and having had a bad start, I lost ground at first considerably; but the reel sang out joyously, and yielded a liberal length of line, that saved me from the disgrace of being broke. I got on the best pace I was able, and was on good ground just as my line was nearly all run out. As the powerful animal darted through Meg's Hole, I was just able to step back and wind up a few yards of line; but he still went at a killing pace, and when he came near to Melrose bridge, he evinced a distressing preference for passing through the further arch, in which case my line would have been cut by the pier. My heart sunk with apprehension, for he was near the opposite bank. Purdie, seeing this, with great presence of mind, took up some stones from the channel, and through them one by one between the fish and the said opposite bank. This naturally brought Master Salmo somewhat nearer, but still, for a few moments, we had a doubtful struggle for it. At length, by lowering the head of the rod, and thus not having so much of the ponderous weight of the fish to encounter, I towed him a little sideways; and so, advancing towards me with propitious fin, he shot through the arch nearest me.
"Deeply immersed, I dashed after him as best I might; and arriving on the other side of the bridge, I floundered out upon dry land, and continued the chase. The salmon, 'right orgillous and presumptive,' still kept the strength of the stream, and abating nothing of its vigour, went swiftly down the whirls; then through the Boat shiel, and over the shallows, till he came to the throat of the Elm Wheel, down which he darted amain. Owing to the bad ground, the pace here became exceedingly distressing. I contrived to keep company with my fish, still doubtful of the result, till I came to the bottom of the long cast in question, when he still showed fight, and sought the shallow below. Unhappily the alders prevented my following by land, and I was compelled to take water again, which slackened my speed. But the stream soon expanding, and the current diminishing, my fish likewise travelled more slowly; so I gave a few sobs and recovered my wind a little, gathered up my line, and tried to bring him to terms. But he derided my efforts, and dashed off for another burst, triumphant. Not far below lay the rapids of the Slaughterford: he would soon gain them at the pace he was going: that was certain—see, he is there already! But I back out again upon dry land, nothing loth, and have a fair race with him. Sore work it is. I am a pretty fair runner, as has often been testified; but his velocity is surprising. On, on, still he goes, ploughing up the water like a steamer. 'Away with you, Charlie! quick, quick, man—quick for your life! Loosen the boat at the Cauld Pool, where we shall soon be,' and so indeed we were, when I jumped into the said craft, still having good hold of my fish.
"The Tweed is here broad and deep, and the salmon at length had become somewhat exhausted; he still kept in the strength of the stream, however, with his nose seawards, and hung, heavily. At last he comes near the surface of the water. See how he shakes his tail and digs downwards, seeking the deep profound that he will never gain. His motions become more short and feeble: he is evidently doomed, and his race wellnigh finished. Drawn into the bare water, and not approving of the extended cleek, he makes another swift rush, and repeats this effort each time that he is towed to the shallows. At length he is cleeked in earnest, and hauled to shore; he proves one of the grey-skull newly run, and weighs somewhat above twenty pounds. The hook is not in his mouth, but in the outside of it: in which case a fish being able to respire freely, always shows extraordinary vigour, and generally sets his head down the stream.
"During the whole period of my experience in fishing, though I have had some sharp encounters, yet I never knew any sport equal to this. I am out of breath even now, whenever I think of it. I will trouble any surveyor to measure the distance from the Kingswell Lees, the starting spot, above Melrose bridge, to the end of the Cauld Pool, the death place, by Melrose church, and tell me how much less it is than a mile and three quarters,—I say, I will trouble him to do so; and let him be a lover of the angle, that he may rather increase than diminish the distance, as in good feeling and respect for the craft it behoves him to do."—P. 174.
On the subject of salmon leaps, most of us have both heard and seen much that was neither new nor true. Mr Yarrell, a cautious unimaginative man, accustomed to quote Shakspeare as if the bard of Avon had been some quiet country clergyman who had taken his share in compiling the statistical account of Scotland, confines their saltatorial powers only within ten or twelve perpendicular feet. We hold, with Mr Scrope, that even this is probably much beyond the mark. He thinks he never saw a salmon spring out of the water above five feet perpendicular.
"There is a cauld at the mouth of the Leader water where it falls into the Tweed, which salmon never could spring over; this cauld I have lately had measured by a mason most carefully, and its height varies from five and a half to six feet from the level above to the level below it, according as the Tweed, into which the Leader falls, is more or less affected by the rains. Hundreds of salmon formerly attempted to spring over this low cauld, but none could ever achieve the leap; so that a salmon in the Leader water was formerly a thing unheard of. The proprietors of the upper water have made an opening in this cauld of late years, giving the owner of the mill some recompense, so that salmon now ascend freely. Large fish can spring much higher than small ones; but their powers are limited or augmented according to the depth of water they spring from. They rise rapidly from the very bottom to the surface of the water, by rowing and sculling as it were with fins and tail, and this powerful impetus bears them upwards in the air. It is probably owing to a want of sufficient depth in the pool below the Leader water cauld, that prevented the fish from clearing it; because I know an instance where salmon have cleared a cauld of six feet belonging to Lord Sudely, who lately caused it to be measured for my satisfaction, though they were but few out of the numerous fish that attempted it that were able to do so. I conceive, however, that very large fish could leap much higher."—P. 12.
We believe that a good deal of the contrariety of opinion which prevails on this subject, arises from anglers and other men confounding an inclined plane with a perpendicular height. Salmon will assuredly overcome a prodigious force of descending water,—a roaring turmoil, which presents from below the aspect of a fall, but consists in reality of separate ledges massed together into one, when "floods lift up their voices." We are sorry to say, however, that the entire practice of angling is pervaded by a system of inaccuracy, exaggeration, and self-deceit, which is truly humiliating. There is consequently no period in the life of a young person which ought to be more sedulously superintended by parents and guardians, than that in which he is first allowed to plant himself by the rivers of waters. The most wonderful feature, however, in the leaping of salmon is not so much the height to which they spring, as the ease, elegance, and certainty, with which, while ascending small cataracts, they make their upward movements. For example, near Oykel bridge in Sutherland, there is a rocky interruption to the more ordinary current of the river, where the water is contained, as it were, in stages of pots or little caldrons, over the lower edge of each of which it dances downwards in the form of a short perpendicular fall. From a neighbouring bank by the river side, the movements of the aspiring fish may be distinctly seen. When a grilse has made his way to the foot of one of these falls, (which he never could have ascended before, although he must have descended it in childhood on his seaward way,) without a moment's doubt or hesitation he darts into the air, and throws himself head-foremost into the little basin above, to the bottom of which he instantly descends. Nothing can be more curious than the air of nonchalance with which they drop into these watery chambers, as if they knew their dimensions to an inch, and had been in the habit of sleeping in them every night. Now, from what has been ascertained of the natural history of the species, although the adult salmon of the Oykel must have previously made the leap at least once before, no fresh-run grilse could have ever done so; and yet, during suitable weather in the summer season, they are sometimes seen springing along with all the grace and agility of a troop of voltigeurs. Their object of course is to rest themselves for a short time, before leaping into the second range from the ground floor. But this innocent intention is too often interfered with; for a sharp-sighted Highlander, stationed on the bank above, immediately descends with landing-net in hand, and scoops them out of their natural caldron, with a view to their being speedily transferred to another of more artificial structure—the chief difference, however, consisting in the higher temperature of the water.
"Salmon," says Mr Scrope, "are led by instinct to select such places for depositing their spawn as are the least likely to be affected by the floods. These are the broad parts of the river, where the water runs swift and shallow, and has a free passage over an even bed. There they either select an old spawning place, a sort of trough left in the channel, or form a fresh one. They are not fond of working in new loose channels, which would be liable to be removed by a slight flood, to the destruction of their spawn. The spawning bed is made by the female. Some have fancied that the elongation of the lower jaw in the male, which is somewhat in the form of a crook, is designed by nature to enable him to excavate the spawning trough. Certainly it is difficult to divine what may be the use of this very ugly excrescence; but observation has proved that this idea is a fallacy, and that the male never assists in making the spawning place: and, indeed, if he did so he could not possibly make use of the elongation in question for that purpose, which springs from the lower jaw, and bends inwards towards the throat. When the female commences making her spawning bed, she generally comes after sunset, and goes off in the morning; she works up the gravel with her snout, her head pointing against the stream, as my fisherman has clearly and unequivocally witnessed, and she arranges the position of the loose gravel with her tail. When this is done, the male makes his appearance in the evenings, according to the usage of the female. He then remains close by her, on the side on which the water is deepest."—P. 15.
During this crisis trout collect below to devour such portions of the spawn as float down the river, and parr are frequently seen hovering in and around the trough. All these parr are salmon fry of the male sex, in a state of maturity; and if the old gentleman chances to be killed, or driven away, without having provided an assistant or successor, the "two-year-olds" perform the functions of paternity. This circumstance, though overlooked by modern naturalists till the days of Shaw, (not the old compiling doctor of the British Museum, but the more practical "keeper" of Drumlanrig,) was known and described by Willoughby in the seventeenth century. "To demonstrate the fact," says the more recent observer, "in January 1837, I took a female salmon, weighing fourteen pounds, from the spawning bed, from whence I also took a male parr, weighing one ounce and a half, with the milt of which I impregnated a quantity of her ova, and placed the whole in a private pond, where, to my great astonishment, the process succeeded in every respect as it had done with the ova which had been impregnated by the adult male salmon, and exhibited, from the first visible appearance of the embryo fish, up to their assuming their migratory dress, the utmost health and vigour."
So serious is the destruction of the spawn and fry of salmon, both by sea and fresh-water trout, that the Duke of Sutherland's manager would willingly, were it possible, extirpate the entire breed of these fish. "They commence," he informs us, in a letter of 15th May 1843, "the moment the salmon begin to deposit their spawn, and in the course of the spawning season they devour an immense quantity of ova. Indeed, at all other times of the year, they feed on the fry of salmon, and continue their destruction till the day the smolts leave the rivers. I have often cut up trout, and got smolts in their stomach; and last week a trout was opened in Mr Buist's fish-yard with four full-grown smolts in its belly. From these and other similar occurrences, you may judge to what extent this destruction is carried on, in the course of a single year, in such a river as our Oykel, where I have killed seven hundred trout at a single hawl." We understand that, some years ago, when Mr Trap, (a most appropriate name,) the fishmonger in Perth, had the Dupplin cruives, he got about 400 whitlings (or sea-trout) in one day, all of them gorged to the throat with salmon fry. The sea-trout of Sutherlandshire, like those of the Nith and the Annan, almost all belong to the species named Salmo trutta by naturalists. They scarcely ever exceed, indeed rarely attain to, a weight of five pounds; and such as go beyond that weight, and range upwards from eight to twelve pounds, are generally found to pertain to Salmo eriox, the noted bull-trout of the Tweed. The great grey sea-trout of the river Ness, which sometimes reaches the weight of eighteen pounds, we doubt not, also belongs to the species last named. It is rare in the waters of the Tay.
In regard to the seaward migration of salmon fry, Mr Scrope is of opinion that some are continually going down to the salt water in every month of the year, not with their silver scales on, but in the parr state.