Pike and perch

Front matter

BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

3^

Boston Public Library

Preface

The design of the Ftcr^ Feather^ and Fin Series is to present monographs, as complete as they can possibly be made, on the various English birds, beasts, and fishes which are generally included under the head of Game.

Books on Natural History cover such a vast number of subjects that their writers necessarily find it impossible to deal with each in a really comprehensive manner ; and it is not within the scope of such works exhaustively to discuss the animals described in the light of objects of sport. Books on sport, again, seldom treat at length of the Natural History of the creatures which are shot or otherwise taken ; and, so far as the Editor is aware, in no book hitherto published on Natural History or Sport has information been given as to the best methods of turning the contents of the bag to account.

PREFACE

Each volume of the present Series will, therefore, be devoted to a bird, beast, or fish. Their origin will be traced, their birth and breeding described, every known method of circumventing and killing them — not omitting the methods employed by the poacher — will be explained with special regard to modern developments, and they will only be left when on the table in the most appetising forms which the delicate science of cookery has discovered.

ALFRED E. T. WATSON.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Pike of Fable and Fancy ... 3

II. The Pike of Fact . . .- . . . 15

Chapter I

We may not deny the popularity of the pike, for there is no British freshwater fish better known amongst the masses. ' The classes ' of course place their salmon and trout first, and other species thereafter anywhere or nowhere, admitting the pike, nevertheless, very often as a sporting, if not a technically game fish. But the pike — or, as it is more commonly termed, the jack — is to our countryfolk in England still the fish of fishes. It may be different in the next generation, when the modern system of fish culture has had time to develop, and pike have been ousted to make room for something of more value as a rent producer. At present in rural districts the pike remains what it has been from time immemorial, the type of mastership and headship among the denizens of our lakes and rivers.

It would be vain to speculate upon the reasons

B3 for this distinction, for the pike is not now a favourite article of food and has no lovable qualities. Perhaps it is because he has none of the ordinary claims to popularity that he is held in a certain degree of respect, yet without affection or admiration. My own conclusion is that the eminence he enjoys is due not a little to the belief that he is the representative in water of the British bulldog on land; in other words, that in a way he reflects the national character of dominancy, tenacity, and pluck. He is the conqueror before whom all other fishes scatter in flight; the bold, predatory adventurer who keeps the tribes of smaller species in subjection. For these supposed commendable qualities his ferocity, unscrupulousness, and tyranny are overlooked or forgiven.

The pike is also a fish of some mystery, with an uncanny appearance and an ogreish reputation. The brilliantly marked perch, the silver-sided roach and dace swim in shoals ; and the village children love to watch them cruising in harmonious family parties among the water-lilies, evidently enjoying life to the full. But the long, sharp-nosed pike, lying low, with sinister eye almost on the top of its flat head, is all the difference between friend and foe ; it is a fish to inspire dread, not confidence. There are probably many readers of these lines who may remember after long years the sensation of fear arising in the boy angler at his lirst sight of a pike, prowling all solitary, in stealthy pursuit of a victim, past the bush by which he sits watching the float, which, like Joseph's coat, is of many colours.

This instinctive aversion is based very largely upon exaggerated tales of cruelty and prowess, but the bad name which the pike inherits, coupled with the known tendencies of its nature and the forbidding appearance characteristic of the breed, may well account for public opinion with regard to a fish which has been called a freshwater shark, a wolf, and a tiger. Nature, in fact, made the pike a predatory fish of the first order, and it must take the consequences of the evidence which true and false witnesses have combined to heap upon its name. To be known as a devourer of ducks, moorhens, rats, and every kind of fish, and to be suspected of assaults upon quadrupeds and mankind itself, are sufficient to make the name bad indeed. Punch's pike which flew at the immortal Briggs and barked like a dog was, after all, but an embodiment of the simple faith of many generations.

That the disappearance of the smaller wild- fowl is caused by pike admits of no question, and dear old Izaak Walton was not perhaps so very credulous when he accepted the stories of older writers now discarded. Better naturalists than he heard without scepticism that two geese had been taken at one time from the interior of a pike, that a swimming dog was not safe from it, that a maid washing clothes in a pond had her foot seized by a pike, and that a mule, lowering its head to drink, was held prisoner by one which hung on with such grip that it was drawn out of water by the quadruped.

The old local history books furnish the materials for many of these narratives of ferocity, and some of them are very circumstantial. Sir John Hawkins, for example, repeats, from a London paper of 1705, an account of the draining down of a pool in Shropshire. It had not been fished for ages, and, as a suggested consequence, a gigantic pike of upwards of 170 lb. was discovered, and hauled up by a rope in the presence of hundreds of spectators. It was ' thought to be the largest ever seen.' To this statement was added as an anti-climax that some time previously the clerk of the parish was trolling in the pool and was jerked into it by the sudden force of the strike at the bait, ^ and it doubtless would have devoured him also had he not by wonderful agility and dexterous swimming escaped the dreadful jaws of this voracious animal.' Had there been a fish of such weight, and the rod and tackle sufficiently strong, the occurrence would not have been absolutely improbable ; the story would, therefore, be naturally converted into a country legend and passed down from father to son.

History honours the pike more perhaps than any other of its freshwater congeners, more than the Salmonidae and more than the carp, which is understood to have been introduced into England during the Middle Ages, and finds frequent mention in Elizabethan times. Historical footmarks, however, are often somewhat uncertain, and must not be taken for more than they are worth.

In matters of this kind one always turns to the Rev. C. D. Badham, M.D., who so frankly announces {' Prose Halieutics, or Ancient and Modern Fish Tattle') that his aim is to treat of fish ichthyophagously, rather than ichthyologically, and to give, not fish science, but fish tattle. Let it therefore be noted that, in his chapter on the Esocidae or pikes, he broaches the conjecture that the sacred fish, the oxyrhynchus of the Nile, supposed to spring from the wounds of Osiris, was the true ancestor of the pike ; hence an Egyptian sect w^hich w^ould not touch any fish taken by a hook, because they paid special deference to the oxyrhynchus. The pike has evidently been made a subject of mystery and wonder from the beginning. Did not a famous Goth die of fright, mistaking for the head of a person whom he had killed a pike's head on the table ?

Leland, it is true, states that a monster pike came out of Huntingdonshire in the year 958, during the reign of King Edgar, and it appears as a marketable article, priced a little higher than the salmon, in the time of Edward III. Yarrell seems to imagine that, although pike existed, they were very rare in England, though it is he who first began to point out that the fish was held in good estimation in the latter part of the thirteenth century, when the Edward above-named, as the father of his good people, fixed the prices of the different sorts of fish then brought to market, and ranked the pike not only above salmon, but as being ten times more valuable than the best turbot or cod. It is Yarrell who calls Chaucer into the witness-box, with his :

Full many a fair patrich hadde he in mewe, And many a Breme and many a Luce in stewe.

An Act of the sixth year of Richard II. relative to the fish of the market mentions the pike, and among the annals is an account of the great feast given by George Nevill, Archbishop of York, in the year 1466, pike being one of the dishes served up. Yet the species might have been fished out to some extent in the reign of Henry VIII., for the same authority tells

US that a large pike sold for double the price of a house lamb in February, while a pickerel was more valuable than a fat capon. All this may mean that the pike of the Merrie England of that date had suffered from the condition of affairs to which the Reformation put an end. With so many abbeys and monasteries in the country the fish had become a monopoly, and thus were looked after by the good people who every week had reason for singing 'to-morrow will be Friday.' The monasteries were at any rate grateful, as the arms of Calder Abbey, largely endowed by the Lucy family, included a pike as its leading idea.

If there is a fish which we may reasonably suppose to have been indigenous, we should say the pike had as fair a chance as any to the distinction ; indeed, among the ingenious speculations which writer after writer has indulged in to explain why the fish is called the pike, is one that it was derived from the Saxon word *piik,' signifying sharp-pointed. Dr. Day — who, until a better man takes up the study, must remain our standard authority on the British freshwater fishes — mentions 'hacod' as being the Anglo-Saxon name, and this is probably why a large pike in Cambridgeshire used to be called 'haked.' It will be enough if we regard the fish as an old English friend, for the familiar lines have been passed on by generations of authors to prove that Ausonius, even before the days of Edgar, wrote :

The wary luce, midst wrack and rushes hid, The scourge and terror of the scaly brood. Unknown at friendship's hospitable board. Smokes 'midst the smoky tavern's coarsest food.

When we descend to the debatable land of fancy we find the pike figuring in a variety of ways, and in considering the various pike stories that have been told and credited, I may be allowed to suggest that some of the legends, for all we can prove, may be facts. We cannot disprove them. This is a matter, however, on which the reader must exercise his individual judgment. The yarn that has probably most attracted the attention of all who have read fishing literature is that of the wonderful pike which is the Jack-the- Giantkiller object among fish yarns :

I am the fish which was first of all put into this lake by the hands of the Governour of the Universe, Frederick II., Oct. 5, 1230.

This is the central face of the Greek inscription on the flattened side of a brass ring said to have been found attached to a grisly old pike in Kaiserweg Lake, where you are required to befieve it had lived to the age of 267 years. This fish and its

THE PIKE OF FABLE AND FANCY ri

ring have served the printing page so faithfully since at least a black letter copy of Gesner, published in Fleidelberg in 1606, that we may for the moment treat it seriously. Besides, did not Mr. Cholmondeley Pennell, in his * Book of the Pike,' give a facsimile of the ring, inscription and all, as found by his friend Frank Buckland in a copy of Gesner ? But it need scarcely be said that it is not everybody who has swallowed the story that the ring, and the skeleton of the pike, measuring nineteen feet in length, were during long years preserved in the Cathedral of Mannheim. Unfortunately, an anatomist who knew what the bones of a fish should be was mean enough to enter into a cruelly scientific calculation, with the result of proof that the relic had been artificially lengthened to coincide with the statements. The legend is that in his career of two and a half centuries the monster had arrived at the decent solid weight of 350 lb.

Amongst the fishes of fancy are a brown pike that embodies the Evil One ; a phallical pike with golden fins ; a pike begotten by the west wind ; and students of totemism find the pike amongst the traditions of the Red Indian tribes.

The medicinal properties of the pike may without offence be included in this chapter, the reader as before being left to take his choice as to whether it is history, fancy, or fable. How could the idea, for example, have arisen that the eyes of a pike turned into powder were useful as a cosmetic ? We are gravely told that a stone like crystal is found in the brain of a pike ; that the jawbone beaten up into dust is healthful for pleurisies and other complaints ; and that the heart of the fish is a remedy against paroxysms.

Some reader may be shocked if amongst the doubtful records is here included the once universal belief as to the relations between the pike and the tench. For centuries it was asserted, and evidently received as gospel, that the tench was really the pike's physician. This was apparently based upon the assumption that the predatory fish never attacked the more modest tench, and even in modern times one is occasionally confronted with the statement that no instance is recorded of a pike attacking a tench. I have, however, myself caught a pike with a light-coloured tench used as a live bait. I know that many anglers have made the experiment in the hope of disproving the old-fashioned notion, and have failed to tempt the pike into seizing a tench. The very latest work on pike fishing, 'John Bickerdyke's,' deals with this subject, and he states on the authority of a well-known taxidermist that several large tench, weighing between two and three pounds each, were taken from the stomachs of pike sent to him to stuft.

The pike, for reasons doubtless satisfactory to himself but unknown to us, will not attack a tench if there are other fish to be found. Of the freshwater fishes that he has the pleasure of chasing the tench is probably in most waters the most unfamiliar. The pike of four or five pounds which I caught with a small tench, somewhat more goldenhued than is usually the case, was taken in what in Lancashire is called a 'lodge,' where the fish live under very artificial conditions, and it was the fact that the majority of the fish in this rectangular reservoir or tank were tench. These fish, moreover, are supposed to lie very low, if not in the mud, during the winter, and are seldom seen except during the spawning time, when they come to the top of the water.

The supposition of all ancient and some comparatively modern authors that the tench is furnished with a sort of curative slime or saliva is pure, if pretty, fancy, and it may be ranked with the old idea that the fish had the extraordinary gift of healing humanity. Camden is responsible for the story of a pike whose bowels were ripped open being instantaneously healed by the touch of a tench. The tench is a very dark-coloured fish, at certain times of the year it is as slimy as a bream, and the whole story probably simply comes to this, that the pike does not ' hanker after ' such diet. When hard set we may be certain that the pike will not stop short at any living thing within its range of snap. The story as to the tench at any rate gave Moses Browne the opportunity of working his ideas up to the following outburst :

The Pike, fell tyrant of the liquid plain,

With ravenous waste devours his fellow train ;

The tench he spares — a medicinal kind ;

For when by wounds distrest and sore disease,

He courts the salutary fish for ease.

Close to his scales the kind physician glides,

And sweats a healing balsam from his sides.

Chapter II

The legendary treatment of pike has, it might not inaptly be said, become a habit with us. The fish story has not a little unjustly become a synonym of impudent mendacity. But there is no need to enter into an inquiry as to why this misfortune should be fastened upon a class of sportsmen who, on the authority of sweet-natured Izaak Walton, are all honest men. , One reason, of course, is the large margin left for speculation by circumstances over which we have no control. The lost fish is always forsooth —and very properly — the biggest, and there need be no limit within reasonable bounds to the dimensions of the monster that breaks away from your line. The pike is a most convenient fish for the exercise of imagination. He is frequently caught unexpectedly on tackle wholly unsuited for the work, and so abruptly severs the bonds that hold him.

In a recent number of the ' Field,' for example, there was a story of a lad who, fishing for perch in Ireland with a light trout rod and float tackle, hooked a pike, which in a very clever manner he killed, and it was of the decent dimensions of 15 lb. Had that pike got away, as it might have been expected he would have done, we should certainly have had another legend of a 40- or 50-pounder lost.

Presuming then that there is some excuse for the stories of monster pike, I will here assure the friendly reader that it is not my intention to enter into the very vexed question of large pike. The speculation is always profitless. The subject is treated of in every angling book that treats of the fish, and periodically we have controversies upon the matter m the weekly press. The late Lord Inverurie exhibited keen interest in the whole question, and tried very earnestly to reduce the records of big pike to something like order; the young nobleman took immense trouble to collate such materials as he could get as solid foundation for some worthy confession of faith. They were necessarily incomplete, for it would be a matter of impossibility without visiting every considerable country house to speak with fulness. I myself and my friend John Bickerdyke once strove diligently to obtain facts, and our conclusion was that there was no evidence, which could be considered beyond dispute, of any pike of modern times that exceeded the weight of 40 lb.

There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence, however, to warrant one in believing that fish of 50 lb. or 60 lb. do exist, and will some day be clearly produced. There must be some leviathans in the loughs of Ireland. There have been such often reported from that country, but attempts to sift the rumours always leave some uncomfortable gap in the evidence. When one reads an airy statement that there was a 90-lb. pike taken in Ireland many years ago, the only evidence being that of the narrator who says he saw the fish weighed and that it brought the scales down at this weight, one's duty is to put it aside as a thing possible but not probable.

Two or three years ago there was what seemed to be a categorical story of a S3-lb. pike that had been caught as usual across St. George's Channel. Evidence was invited as to details of the capture, with special reference to (i) where was the fish weighed? (2) how was it weighed ? and (3) who witnessed the weighing ? To none of these questions was there a satisfactory answer, and, in a word, the generality of large pike are found upon inquiry to be of this dubious category.

Lord Inverurie begins his list with a fish of 49J lb.

c weight, caught in 1784 in the month of June in Loch PetuHche, Scotland, by Colonel Thornton. That is definite so far as it goes, but the entire story is surrounded with suspicion, though a drawing of the fish appeared in the ' Sporting Magazine ' of the year mentioned. The Colonel, however, was not quite the man to swear by in matters of sport. It is stated in the Inverurie list that the fish was caught by trolling ; but I have read in another place that it was taken on a night line, and in yet another that it was caught with a fly. As the gallant Colonel, however, states that from Lochaber a pike of 146 lb. was taken, we may put down his authority as doubtful.

A very much discussed monster is the famous Kenmure pike immortalised by a succession of writers, and worthy of some consideration. The fish was started at 72 lb., was reported from Loch Ken in Galloway, a not unlikely water for a big fish, and is referred to rather strangely by Stoddart as having been taken with a rod and fly. The head of the fish was, and probably is still, preserved in the castle at Kenmure, and Mr. Cholmondeley Pennell made personal inquiries into the records. The Hon. Mrs. Bellamy Gordon forwarded to him an interesting account of the pike and its record, written on the spot by the Rev. George Murray, of Balmaclellan, and

Mr. Pennell himself states that the width of the fish across the back of the head was nine inches. Instead of being taken with the fly, as Stoddart (also an authority) alleged, the account sent to Mr. Pennell made it clear that the pike, whatever weight it might be, was captured by spinning. Strangely enough, in the last year of the century this very fish was discussed in some of the London papers.

The 96-pounder from a lough near Killaloe was mentioned by a writer now almost forgotten, Mr. William Hughes, a barrister, and author of 'The Practical Angler,' published in 1842 ; and the story is that this pike was so long that it was carried suspended from an oar by two men. That is a suspicious way of putting it ; for on two occasions, once in the west and once in the north of Ireland, boatmen described to me gigantic pike which they said they had seen borne home in precisely the same way. It seemed to be a favourite poetical expression — viz. that the pike was so immense that an oar had to be passed through the gills and the beast dangled midway between two bearers shouldering the oar. A go-lb. pike was also stated in the ' Field ' some years ago to have been killed in the Shannon in somewhat the same district as the other, but careful efforts to obtain assured evidence were as disappointing as ever.

There is no need, however, to labour the pomt as to these big fish, and we may for the moment return to Lord Inverurie's compilation. Against the year 1797 is set a 40-lb. fish caught in Hertfordshire by a person not known and by a method not stated, but we are informed that a 4-lb. tench was taken out of this pike. The period is too remote. Then we have one of 47-lb. taken two years later from a private lake in Li-ncolnshire, the explanation being that a sheet of water was emptied and the fish stranded.

There are plenty of pike in English waters between 20 lb. and 30 lb., but the largest of modern times that were until recently absolutely accepted as authentic were the 3 7 -lb. fish caught by Mr. Jardine in a Buckinghamshire lake, and a slightly larger specimen sent over from Ireland in 1896. In these days an i8-lb. pike is, after all, a very good fish indeed, and anything over 20 lb. should set the fortunate angler, if he values trophies, thinking about the taxidermist. x\ 34-lb. fish was authenticated from East Anglia in the winter of 1899- 1900, and in the 'Angler' of March 31, 1900, Mr. A. R. Matthews published a list of the big fish of the season, which included, besides the Norfolk pike, a 33-lb. specimen caught in Lough Mask. Two or three 3 7 -lb. Irish fish were reported in the spring of 1900.

Mention is also made of a somewhat mysterious 42-lb. dead pike that was left high and dry ashore on the bursting of a lake in Sussex ; but here again convincing details have yet to be supplied. It has come to my knowledge in one or two instances that captors of undoubtedly large fish had urgent reasons for keeping all particulars a secret, and it comes therefore to this, that 40 lb. may be put down as a modern maximum, and that there is no reason why the pike should not attain a much greater size, though questions of age and rates of growth are, as might be expected, matters of surmise rather than positive demonstration.^

We have, however, kept the pike himself waiting somewliat too long, and may now pass from the realm of legend, fancy, and doubt to that of fact. It would be interesting to know how the Lucius of the ancients acquired the name of ' pike ' in England, or when it was first so called. According to Dr. Day, in Anglo-

^ When these pages were printed, and just in time to give me the opportunity of a footnote, the Fishing Gazette announced the receipt, from Ireland, of two large pike: (i) 4o| lb., length 50 in., girth 27^^ in. ; (2) 35^^ lb., of the same length, but 25I in. girth. The larger fish, however, was full of spawn. The weights were verified in London days after the fish had been taken on lines baited with small perch. Details appear in the Fishing Gazette^ May 19, 1900, and the same issue contains correspondence respecting a 53-lb. pike. — W. S.

Saxon the fish is hacod^ and the learned Doctor says that it was first termed a jack in this country, then a pickerel^ and then a luce. In Lowland Scotland it is the gedd or gade^ in Northumberland gullet^ and according to Halliwell a large pike was called

An inquiry of this kind would have great interest for the Rev. J. J. Manley, and he discusses it at some length in his fishing book. Discarding the theory that lucius (from which came the luce of heraldry) was, because of certain phosphorescent properties displayed by the fish in the dark, from luceo to shine, Manley holds to the opinion that l2mus was a reference to its character of wolf. As to ' pike,' the authorities differ, and I rather accept Dr. Day's suggestion that it is derived from the Saxon word signifying sharp pointed. Just as sensible would be the French lerochet or lerocheton^ lance or lance?^on^ and becquet. These names, indeed, admirably hit off the form of our fish, with its spit-like shape of body, the darting speed with which it pursues its prey, and the distinctively duck-like termination of the head.

Some people are continually puzzled in their endeavours to fix a boundary between the jack and the pike, but there is none. As has been remarked before, in country districts the word ^ jack ' includes both great and small, but colloquially a fish under 3 lb. or 4 lb. is called a jack and over that weight a pike. Amongst modern anglers, especially from the towns, the word 'jack' is seldom used, save on Thames-side. Pickerel is seldom heard in conversation, and the baby form of the breed is, as often as not, called pikelet in these days.

Some persons, also, would object to a pike being called a handsome fish, but his vesture in the middle of winter, when he is at his best, is nevertheless richly handsome. It varies in colour from an olive green to a golden brown, and upon this the yellow and white mottlings have a fine ornamental effect of pattern. The white underclothing is also a good setoff against the darker tinting of the sides. These colours vary greatly, however, according to the season and the condition of the fish. Just after spawning the colouring is decidedly sickly, and the gold fades to a dirty white. I have caught old fish that in darting through the water looked the colour of Spanish mahogany, and others that gleamed like old gold.

There is little symmetry in the form of a pike. The depression of the head, the deep setting of the eyes on the top of it, the cruel-looking mouth, with its rows of large teeth and interior serrated in the most terrible way, are repellent, and the body is long and narrow, without the graceful curvature that characterises the Salmonidae ; the setting back of the dorsal fin to neat the tail, in correspondence exactly with the anal fin, which is abnormally large, is a further point of disfavour. The following technical description I quote by permission of the publisher (Horace Cox, Bream's Buildings) from Day's ' British Fishes,' volume 2, page 140 :