A chapter extracted from A MEAN-MOUTHED, HOOK-JAWED, BAD-NEWS, SON-OF-A-FISH , first published in 1994.


 Enjoy thy stream, O gentle fish
and when an angler, for his dish, through
gluttony's vile sin, attempts, the wretch, to
pull thee out, *** give thee strength, O gentle trout,
to pull the bugger in . (#1.)


If the truth be known, a common and continuous thread runs through angling literature to its
earliest roots. This thread comprises two intertwining strands and their themes are this:
firstly we have a catalogue of unlikely accomplishments, surrounded by bizarre and
preposterous assumptions. A tradition of erudite buffoonery is well established and examples
there are aplenty. For, as David Profumo says: "Piscatory writing is par excellence the
literature of a fanciful curiosity ... we find fish copulating with goats, turning inside out and
going to church!"
He claims further: "All anglers are congenital liars, and uniquely in the animal kingdom, fish
enjoy a pronounced degree of posthumous growth. Hyperbole and a certain allowable
amplification of detail are indelible characteristics of most piscatory writing." (#2.)

No one who has read Longfellow's Hiawatha, your basic fishing-type tale, or Edmond
Gibson's 1695 account in Camden's Britannica, would disagree. He says: "In Paphlegonia many
fish are dug up in places not at all watery, and men there fish for them with spades."

And how about Aristotle's account in Historica Animilium (100 BC). "Eels are not
produced from sexual intercourse and [it] is the only animal which does not originate either in
sexual intercourse or in ova. They originate in what are called the entrails of the earth. This is
the mode of generation in eels."

Or Nicholas Cox, who informs us that the sargus [blacktail] "is a fish so lascivious that
when he cannot find mates enough in the sea, he will get ashore and cuckold a goat!" As if that
were not enough, Mr Cox goes on to document the most opaque account that has ever been
committed to paper. The words are precisely his: "In the year of our Lord 1180, near Orford in
Suffolk, there was a fish that was taken in the perfect shape of a man. He was kept in the
castle at Orford above half a year, but at length, not being carefully looked to, he stole to the
sea. He never spake, but would eat any meat that was given to him, especially raw fish when he
had squeezed out the juice." (#3.)

To cap it all, I refer you to Baron Münchhausen's immortal account of his experience
when travelling the East Indies with one Captain Hamilton:" some sailors who were fishing in
the long boat, which was made fast to the stern of the ship, harpooned an exceedingly large
shark which they brought aboard for the purpose of barrelling the oil, when, behold, they
found no less than six brace of live partridges in its stomach. They had been so long in that
situation that one of the hens was sitting upon four eggs and a fifth was hatching as the shark
was opened." (#4.)

Is it any wonder, then, that angling has always had its critics, from Plutarch, who held
fishing to be "a filthy, base, illiberal employment, having neither wit nor perspicacity in it," to
Lord Byron, who said of angling that it was "the cruellest, the coldest, the stupidest of
pretended sports". (#5.)

There are of course other views. A popular one holds that angling combines heroic
existentialism with poetical, sensitive expression. Fly-fishing in general, and trout-fishing in
particular, imputes for itself yet even greater nobility. Standing apart from, and rather above,
common or baiting techniques, it encourages and nurtures the myths that give it flesh.

The father of this modern trend is often, though mistakenly, thought to be Isaak
Walton. He, however, was little more than a Johnny-come-lately, hiding behind the skirts of a
confirmed plagiarist, Charles Cotton, who wove his idealised apology from threads that wind
back to the so-called cradle of civilisation itself. The Phoenicians and Sumerians were known to
tie and cast quite passable flies when not plucking papyrus and inventing alphabets. And ancient
Greeks, from Marrechia on the Adriatic to the farthest Mediterranean reaches, began that
most imprudent denuding of aquatic resources that our age systematically pursues today.

Yet popular sentiment still holds that angling is basically noble, that common bonds bind
the simple souls who seek solace and relaxation plumbing the essential nature and mystery of
water. But I figure that the motivation that drives men to take pleasure in the pursuit and
capture of a prey that is not required as food, and in many instances not even wanted, brands
proponents with the vestigial mark of the predator beast. These are primal urges, older and
stronger than family ties or human love. For popular sentiment, like law, is often an ass.

Yes indeed, too often is truth far removed from the romantic fictions. A taxonomy of
flyfishermen encompasses the broad diversity of order, class and species. And though I may be
accused of posing answers to unasked questions, I will attempt a brief illustration of this
esoteric fact. Our ancient forebears, in their seminal expression of raw emotion, set out to
show that art imitates life. And so, by Jove, it did. Ancient Grecian flies must have been
wondrous to behold, epitomising the ingenious use of natural material with infinite detail and no
embellishment.

But the old civilisations flowered, then withered, as civilisations will. We have come a long way
in the procession that followed. For now we live in an epoch where life has learned to imitate
art, and the ideals that steered us here are adrift. Indeed, we live at a time when not only do
flyfishermen have the gall to tie flies in preposterous shapes and outlandish colours, but the
fish themselves are faithless enough to ingest these monstrosities with quite unseemly gusto.

Even the fish, it seems, are adopting an anything-goes attitude. And the old-world
courtesy that once bound flyfishermen to the cabal is now little more than a relic, existing like
some endangered species only in isolated pockets, scattered here and there.

Betrayal was perhaps inevitable. For no matter how noble their driving sentiment, those
first early anglers knew no way to make the fish their partners without recourse to the deceit
of a cunning and viciously concealed hook.

"Aha", you might say, "but nature herself exists only by the grace of *** and the gift
of those selfsame principles, the principles of claw and camouflage, of stealth and ambush."
I agree, wholeheartedly and without reservation, for the fact is indisputable. But if trout could
talk they might ask: "Are you then no more than animals?" The angler might reply: "Yes, like
the otter and heron, like the leopard or the rat."

That would be a pretty good answer, but it is just as well that trout cannot speak. They
might otherwise ask the angler if he directs himself and his hooks with any measure of
nature's wisdom or natural respect, as do the other predators. Questions like that can be very
embarrassing and play merry hell with the comfort of myths. And times are tough enough
without a man, after five thousand years of tradition, still needing to moralise himself into a
stupor every time he wants some fish.



REFERENCES.

#1. With apologies to Ballad to a Fish of the Brooke, by Peter Pinder (1816)

#2. The Magic Wheel, by David Profumo (1985)

#3. Gentlemen's Recreation, by Nicholas Cox (1674)

#4. Gulliver Revived, by Baron Münchhausen, (1787)

#5. Don Juan, by Lord Byron (1819)