Читать книгу The Salmon: The Extraordinary Story of the King of Fish - Michael Wigan - Страница 6

I was in a party of river rafters on the Alaskan panhandle late one summer and we had finished taking apart our gear and were waiting to be picked up. We dawdled around a river-mouth where a multitude of salmon were swarming. Biologists had blocked the small river-mouth with a grid because enough spawners were already jammed in the river and more would overload the small rivers where they bred. Families with open pick-ups were backing onto the edge of the pool and the men were snow-shovelling palpitating salmon directly into the backs of the pick-ups. They filled the rear of their vehicles, pulled tarpaulins over the still-thrashing salmon and drove off. Winter food supply all sorted.

These biblical-scale salmon runs are not all gone. In fact, they continue. It was a year predicted by fishery scientists as likely to be low on spawners, and a multitude arrived.

The world of antediluvian excess, of passenger pigeons in numbers to darken the sky, of fish which break nets and pull trawlers under the waves, of buffalo whose thundering hooves made the American plains shake from far away, these examples of Nature’s gargantuan excess still exist in parts of the Pacific salmon domain. It is reckoned that in the southern edge of range, America’s Washington State and Oregon, only a tenth of the original runs survive, but north of that runs persist.

What is unknown is the degree to which hatchery efforts by Alaskan fish and game managers are reinforcing migrations. Only genetic testing from the annual runs, against a database of the genetics of salmon used in the hatcheries, would show this, and the record was not taken. There is an element of hybridisation in the run.

I was shown a tributary of the Campbell River on Vancouver Island where pink salmon waiting to spawn were stacked like sardines in a tin. The place was dense with vegetation and only as the fishing guide pushed aside the tree branches did I make out what was in the water. It was like looking into a wine rack where the bottle heads were fish faces. Having spent over a week seeking one lonely steelhead willing to engage with my fly patterns it was a trifle galling to see a stack of fish so dense it pushed water from the river onto the bank.

In July 2010 I was in Vancouver when the sockeye were thronging the bays around the city. Rod fishers were all over, filling larders for winter. There was some edgy banter, too, about whether these super-abundant fish should be returned or not. Conservation talk about perilously damaged fish-runs, even of a different salmon species, had altered public perceptions. The language of conservation and the more acute sense that wildlife values must from now on be looked after has hyped issues, and common sense can get lost. One species gets muddled with another in the public eye and the projection of fishermen as ruthless, greedy hunter-gatherers becomes lodged in the public mind.

Long ago in the history of fish management in western American and Canadian culture it was hard to make the case for the protection of migratory fisheries against the socio-economic advantages of industrial advance, timber-logging, and the power of hydro-energy. Nowadays, in instances of survival adequacy it is sometimes hard to make the case for a controlled take.

The point about the prodigious runs of salmon into western Pacific rivers is more significant, though. The salmon runs dictated human settlement; this can be shown compellingly. No one has applied this information to settlement history in Western Europe. Here the Atlantic salmon, not the Pacific species, was the bonanza of protein delivered by migratory evolution. It is known that the Phoenicians netted tuna in the open sea two thousand years ago. Anyone capable of doing that, and capturing very large fish which were also the fastest swimmers in the sea, could with comparatively little effort have trapped salmon. And they did.

Take the Pacific coast first. In his 2011 book comparing the New World and the Old World, entitled The Great Divide, Peter Watson examines the effects of a great climate shift. From around 6000 BC sea levels began to stabilise. Glaciers had been pouring fresh water into the seas, and land had been rising as the weight of ice lifted. This process eventually levelled out. Vast shoals of salmon began to swim up the pristine rivers. A harvest of fish arrived on the doorstep of tribes on river-mouths and it came every year, regular as the turning season.

Peter Watson’s evidence comes from the fish bones in riverside human settlement remains. There, human skeletons show signs of arthritis consistent with a diet consisting predominantly of fish. From about 3,000 BC shellfish were added to the menu. Middens grew in size and it appears clans and tribes began to become more permanent and less peripatetic. Cemeteries mark places where tribes wished not only to lay their ancestors’ bones, but also places to which they lay claim.

Peter Watson’s theory is that the New World, blessed with abundant game and a wagon-train of protein in the form of Pacific salmon arriving before the onset of winter to stock the larders, had no need to evolve and develop agriculture, as had happened in the Old World. Where societies in Asia and Europe lived on cereals and domesticated animals, in the Americas people were graced with abundant wild animals for food. Chief was salmon; north-western cultures used flounders, herring, cod, sturgeon and small oil-rich fish called eulachon too, but most important of all was salmon.

The key to the harvest is the nature of tidal rivers and migrating behaviour of salmon. When the tide fills a river-mouth the fish ride in on it, holding on to the top layer so as not to scrape their stomachs on stones. This way they ascend the river to ascertain whether to continue in the freshwater environment or return to the saltwater and wait for a better moment. But as they return the tidewater level is falling. There is less water to swim in. That is when a river-bed weir structure which had been below water level a few hours earlier suddenly becomes a barrier. There is no escape over the top of it and the unimpeded water flows back through small spaces in the weir. All that is left behind is the fish. They can then be speared or caught in dip-nets, or in a manner of other ways removed from the water. Easy as pie.

There is nothing smart about this: I have seen the same thing happening in Scotland about thirty years ago on the River Ericht, a tributary of the Tay. Stone Age isn’t dead! Village boys ran about amongst the rocks as the water levels fell during a dry spell, spearing and catching salmon marooned in pools. Some of them had lamps and flares the better to see the fish as dusk drew in. That scene, long ago called ‘burning the water’, could have been taking place at any point in the last thousand years. Technically illegal at the time, the occasion pre-dated the era when salmon were accepted as being rare and in need of protection from this primitive-style capture.

Yet the riotous melee had an atmosphere of folk revelry and abandonment to primal energy which somehow stirred ancient memories. Anyone prone to get too sniffy about inappropriate salmon-catching should be reminded that some late-eighteenth-century landowners in New England, unversed in the then-unknown delights of rod-and-line fishing, travelled distances to the Connecticut River to get their fun from salmon-spearing and gaffing salmon leaping at waterfalls.

In the Pacific Northwest the background to salmon capture was quite different. There the salmon was holy and the run was a phenomenon upon which survival hung. Unsurprisingly, the ingenuity, artistry and practical neatness of some of the artefacts developed to capture and process the fish harvest from the sea were astonishing. Salmon were the lifeblood of existence for these people and their fishing culture reflected it. The most famous artwork from the Pacific Northwest is from the Haida Indians, and some of their resplendent work consists of images of fish. Salmon equalled tribe survival and the cultural acknowledgement of this is a feature of the history of the north-west.

Catching salmon was taken to a level of high art in a practical sense. Cedar bark was twined into nets and split cedar boughs were used to make nets and traps. Cedar was deployed too to make lashings for constructing lattices for stopping advancing fish, and wild cherry was tough enough for attaching shafts to nets and fish-spears. Flexible boughs of hemlock and spruce were twisted into fish-traps formed like tunnels in varied designs.

The native people were assiduous in the harvest of their prime resource. The techniques and structures were impressively elaborate. In some of the fish enclosures constructed to hold fish as the tide receded, white clam shells paved the floor, better to show to those peering down what fish were held there. There were lattice mazes with intermittent posts driven into the tidal estuary to snare salmon drifting on the tides; looking for a way out, the salmon swam further in. Different designs were used for varying stream flows and different woods were separated into functions suited to their characteristics; for instance, willow was used for major weirs, being strong and flexible and abundantly available. Stakes held their position, being pointed at the bottom and driven into the stream-bed. On the longer weirs the fishermen built spearing platforms in tripod shapes which enabled them to spot the quarry. Spears were subtly designed with stop-butts to prevent the pointed spear sections being damaged on the bottom.

Plant knowledge had progressed far on this well-endowed coastline. The Indians discovered that the stinging nettle, which grew over head height in those parts, had a property which could be used for salmon harvest. The stalks were cut, dried, peeled, beaten, shredded and then spun into a two-strand twine of exceptional strength. The wood and bone spindles used to do this were in use up to the present time.

In preparation for her brilliant illustrated study, Indian Fishing, British Columbian writer Hilary Stewart tried out these techniques herself. Using plants and different woods she constructed weirs and traps and spears and every tool connected to the salmon harvest. She found it took time and skill to replicate the old toolkits – but they worked. In Europe the same knowledge existed and nettles were considered to make stronger twine than flax – in fact the word ‘net’ derives from nettle. Cedar and willow bark were materials for net construction too. The hoops of nets might be made of bent vine maple.

The north-west Pacific peoples used only materials they had at hand. There were no imported or traded tools or materials. Anthropologists today might term their salmon capture ‘organic’. Looking back from where we are now there is something delightfully clean and satisfying about a food provision entirely serviced from the clever utilisation of local plants. Thinking further afield, there are few societies of which this remained true until recent time. The Inuits in the Arctic are an example, and there may be others in Arctic Russia, but on the bigger landmasses, where travel in any direction was physically feasible, there are few. There were the northern Saami and variously named reindeer-herders of the Asian tundra and taiga who relied almost exclusively on reindeer. Generally, though, only societies on the rim of the habitable zone were reliant on a single migratory animal.

Salmon capture was taken to a high art. If the water was moving fast the salmon were swept into a fenced enclosure. The single exit was a grid shelf sloping upwards; escaping fish marooned themselves on the grid, struggling upstream as they attempted to reach flowing water again. Neat.

Snaring fish was a various art. Rocks on the river-bed were designed in hoops or ‘wing-dams’ with the open end upstream. There could be a series of these ring structures widening out with the river. On the ebb tide salmon fell back in the river-mouth and were stranded. The rock-traps can be seen in outline today, still in place even though modern techniques have rendered them obsolete. The top rocks have been swept away in centuries of spates, but the river-bed structures remain, jawbones from which the teeth have fallen.

They are as evident in western Europe as they are in the Pacific Northwest, but in the former place no one has been looking for them or trying to build a picture of Stone Age salmon capture. If you go to the Grimersta River on Lewis, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, a prolific salmon system, you can find the same primeval remains of what at one time supplied local Outer Hebrideans with their winter food supply. The most elementary aspects of food harvest have a tendency not to alter much.

Weirs were angled to guide fish towards a centre-pass where the trap would be positioned. I have seen salmon channelled this way in Canada for counting and stock assessment. It works unerringly and the flow of the water keeps the latticework or stake-fence in place. Sometimes densely foliated tree branches are used to fill the bigger gaps. All the system needs is salmon with the urge to go upstream and water pushing the other way. Usually the more delicate lattice structures were taken away after the salmon run and the basic structures, especially when of rock, were left in place. If necessary they were repaired and rebuilt in springtime.

Tricking salmon into net-ends or ‘bunts’ was a brain-teaser which produced ingenious contraptions. The Indians worked out that salmon could be deflected by the appearance of pendant vertical lines which, had they attempted, the fish could have swum through. But the salmon opted to go in the direction of the tidal current and could be fooled into the upper layer of the water even though the water below was a lot deeper. A loose cats-cradle of connected lines, kept in place by sinker-weights and buoys, was enough to direct the salmon to where spear-wielding fishermen awaited them.

Bunches of rye grass were tied to the floor of the loose cradle of line to create the illusion of a floor or river-bed. This kept the fish in the river’s upper level heading for the denser-woven net near the shore through which they could not escape. Guile and knowledge of the quarry were essential in the capture of this turbo-charged fish. A salmon can outswim any creature in the river, and indeed most in the ocean.

In some ways it is peculiar that the Indians never developed the art of rod-angling. In the Azores today medium-sized fishing boats go to sea to take tuna, armed with bunches of fishing poles which are fished manually by fishermen just as day-boat anglers jig for pollack and mackerel. Rod and line is simply the best way of catching tuna. Additionally, rod-caught fish remain clean and attract the highest prices in the market.

The Indians approximated to this with line-fishing by trolling. Trolling from canoes took place in the bays and inlets before the fish range was narrowed by the confinement of rivers. A witness at the time describes what the Nootka Indians did:

‘For slimness and invisibility the braided leaders were made from women’s hair, or in rougher water from the quills of birds or porcupines. A hook was baited with fresh sprat or herring, and the line was attached to the solo canoeist’s paddle. The whole rig was sunk with small sinker stones. As the oarsman moved his paddle back and forth a slow jerking movement of the hook attracted the salmon. The paddle was then handled in such a way that the salmon was boated.’

You may ask, what were the hooks made from in a culture without metal? It is ingenious. ‘Bentwood’, or wood of hemlock, balsam, fir or spruce branches were used, but taken only from the places there were knots. For knots were denser than ordinary wood and instead of floating, sank. This wood was shaved to the right slimness, then steamed and pressed into a hook-shaped mould. Deer tallow rubbed onto the hook before cooling prevented the hooped construction re-opening. The barbs, lashed on, were fashioned from bone.

The ways in which Pacific-coast salmon were utilised once extracted from their natural element were diverse. Presumably some were used to fuel the energies of hungry fishermen and trappers and eaten fresh. Summer diets consisted of berries and shellfish; salmon was a burst of marine protein. But the bulk of the harvest was preserved for winter by drying and smoking. Nineteenth-century photographs show Indians dip-netting, scoop- and bag-netting and catching salmon in a multifarious manner, with the racks of fish drying in the background. Just as the weirs were often enormous structures involving the use of entire trees, and very long and strongly built, the drying-racks could be structures bigger than houses. Fir boughs protected the fish from direct sun and racks were positioned to catch warm winds for drying. Anything near ground level would attract grizzlies, hence the structures were built aloft.

Weather was all-important. There were good seasons for curing and drying fish, which was ideally done outside. If it had to be done inside, as much of the salmon harvest as could be accommodated was brought in. But for the really large-scale curing, space was needed, and that relied on clement conditions. Complete failure to cure the winter food supply successfully could lead to local starvations. There are a number of peoples, like the Han of the Yukon River, who critically depended on salmon runs for their survival over winter.

The V-shaped drying-racks could handle hundreds of salmon sides. Caches for salmon were built on stilts both to catch the wind and to keep bears off, and they were considerable structures. Some were the size of residential log cabins. There is a photograph of a cache built on several different floors climbing a single tree and connected by ladders. The Indians had wooden tongs for lifting fish. Strainers for removing them from cooking-pots were constructed of seal-ribs. Knives were made of mussel shells, and fish skins were dried on triangular blocks designed to stretch them. The number of varying utensils created to manage the salmon harvest equals the refinement of a modern kitchen equipment range. But all came from at-hand natural products. Tube-like bottles were made from the hollow necks of sea-kelp fronds.

The salmon were not only used for preserved food and skins. On the Fraser River the oil was taken from decomposing salmon bodies which had been left in troughs in the sun to rot, allowing the oil to seep to the bottom. Oil was procured too from the livers of dogfish and cod, and also from the bodies of eulachon (small oily river fish captured in shoals). Salmon roe was hung separately on racks and eaten when decomposed. Alternatively, salmon roe was sunk in boxes below the tide and rotted there before being consumed. Perhaps this is no more strange than raw salmon or gravlax being eaten in Scandinavia today. To many people, gravlax is the best salmon preparation of all.

The importance of the salmon in north-west Pacific culture is reflected in the artistry which was devoted to decoration of the tools deployed in their capture. Salmon was regarded as a sacred food resource with sacramental and life-saving qualities and was accordingly a repeat symbol in the region’s famous art. A nineteenth-century French missionary staying in a Huron fishing village described the eloquence of local preachers whose job it was to persuade salmon to come into the nets and be caught. His sermons were theatrical performances attended by the village in a hushed silence. Salmon, remember, possess souls.

Ceremonies preceded the opening of the fishing season. It was believed that salmon would reappear again only if their spirits had been properly appeased. The Indians regarded salmon spirits as closely linked to the human ones which subsisted upon their bodies. Salmon were seen as possessing a conscious spirit and their returning presence to their natal streams viewed as a voluntary act rather than the gene-driven survival ritual identified by biologists today.

If salmon failed to come back, the Indians believed they had broken sacred taboos, or in some way offended the spirit of the fish. Indeed, instead of perceiving the capture of the salmon as the wily manifestation of the skilled hunter’s art, the captured salmon was seen as complicit in its own capture. A willing participant in the scheme of things, the fish was taken only with its own consent, and its capture was dependent on certain conditions being fulfilled. In this sense the link between the salmon migration and the peoples who relied on them was similar to the relationship between the Saami of northern Scandinavia and Arctic Russia and reindeer.

The first salmon caught triggered more ceremonies. On the Lower Fraser the Tlingit peoples take the first sockeye to the chief who in turn carries it to his wife. She thanks the salmon chief for sending this emissary. The whole tribe attends the ritual consumption of this first salmon following a rigid set of rules, cleansing themselves with a special concoction of plants beforehand.

The life-giving fish had returned and the rhythmic cycles of Nature are again underlined and confirmed. Instead of chewing the dried salmon cured in a previous year, people could again eat fresh salmon with the tang of the sea.

In addition, the returning silver salmon were seen as capable of dispelling diseases and sickness. Prayers reflected the belief that while the salmon were being eaten in the opening ceremonies their souls surveyed the proceedings from above. Is this why, without knowing it, the rod-angling fraternity hang salmon replicas on the fishing hut or the sporting-lodge wall?

Most tribes had a ritual involving the salmon bones being returned to the river or the sea. One tribe burnt the bones instead, although usually incineration was avoided. The purpose of the rituals was a new commitment to the cycle which would propitiate the salmon spirits and ensure their return in following seasons. There were ceremonies as the salmon was cut and prayers were intoned by senior citizens in the tribe. The fish was honoured. Not before this was done were other fishermen allowed to start fishing from the rest of the salmon run. Which of us Western rod anglers hasn’t toasted a first fish? Perhaps more often we have toasted lost fish, the expression on the face of the worsted angler being the most interesting. We observe remnants of old tribal manners without knowing why.

In one ceremony where the salmon is served on cedar planks the fish has to be handled so that the head is always pointing in the direction of the fish-run, or upstream in the river. The Lkungen tribe in Vancouver Island send their children to await the first salmon to arrive in the fishing boat. The children carry the fish up the beach and conduct a ceremony involving burnt offerings. Only children eat the first salmon, adults having to wait a few days for their share. Salmon bones may not touch the ground and in due course are returned to the sea.

Californian Indians of the Karuk tribe believed that the poles used to make the booth for keeping spears must be taken from the highest mountain or the salmon will see them, and also that they must be renewed every year. The reason is that otherwise old salmon will have told young salmon about them. This tale not only humanises salmon, giving them the faculty of human sight, but removes the distinction between dead or alive salmon. Breaches of tradition entail the failure of fishing effort; these were societies saturated with faith in the spiritual.

James George Frazer, recounting some of these beliefs in his early twentieth-century magnum opus, The Golden Bough, points out that in regarding salmon as having spirits equivalent to human ones the salmon-dependent tribes’ philosophy chimes with the modern view of the indestructibility of energy. Energy assumes new forms but does not vanish when one energy-vehicle is transmuted into another – as when fish becomes food. This makes sense of tribal beliefs in the immortality of animal souls as well as human ones.

Amongst tribes less reliant on salmon but more able to catch, say, halibut, the reverence and ritual are invested in that fish instead. But for the majority of the coastal cultures on this seaboard, one or more of the five salmon species were the principal food resource. Beliefs about salmon outnumber those of any other fish.

In her study of these subjects, Hilary Stewart records several salmon stories she encountered amongst the coastal tribes. One maintained that the first salmon to arrive were scouts. Correct treatment of the scouts ensured the bulk of the run following. Several tribes believed salmon were really people who lived in undersea communities. Some of the artwork reinforces this with, for example, a fish carving in an oblong piece of wood with a human in its stomach.

The readiness with which catch and release has been adopted in western European fishing circles surprises some people. Fishermen go misty-eyed. Seen as a spiritual enactment, it all makes more sense. Early people tried to ensure a salmon future spiritually, modern people try and ensure it biologically, but the two are in reality blurred.

Twin children in the north-west Pacific were believed to have a special rapport with salmon, and this was a widespread notion. If twins were born in the village, an unusually large salmon would arrive in the river afterwards. A wayward citizen could halt the salmon run by burying a salmon heart in a clam shell or in a burial ground. If salmon eyes were kept overnight in the house without being eaten, all the salmon would disappear. A shell knife had to be used in the ceremonial cutting of salmon or there would be thunder. Only old women past childbirth could work on, or repair, salmon nets. And because people enjoyed eating the sweet inner bark of springtime hemlock, salmon must too, and accordingly balls of it were adorned with feathers and sent downriver to satisfy the fish.

There were other taboos which required adherence if the salmon run was to carry on unimpeded. Freshly split planks could not be floated down the river and new canoes had to season before being floated. Hilary Stewart links this to the actual fact that extracts of fresh cedar are toxic to fish.

Rules abounded regarding the correct procedures for catching salmon. Children were not allowed to play with the sacred fish before they were cleaned. An offending child might even die. Salmon could not be taken up the beach from the canoes in a basket, but rather by hand. Anyone recently connected to birth or death rites should not handle or eat fresh salmon, risking the cessation of the run. The first salmon were not sold commercially in case the salmon hearts were destroyed or fed to the dogs, another potential risk to the run. A spear fisherman catching two fish with one thrust should not exhibit triumph, or the salmon already splayed on the drying racks would climb down and go back to sea.

The catalogue of means which the north-west Pacific cultures used for taking salmon could be continued. The tools and techniques they had for harpooning, spearing, jigging, snaring and ripping salmon are various and ingenious. They used whale baleen for snoods, bones for barbs, split roots for fish hooks. The subject is delightfully fruity.

Perhaps this is an anthropologist’s turf rather than mine. Where I think the key significance lies is in Peter Watson’s assertion that it was the abundance of the runs of Pacific salmon which has enabled the Pacific coastal peoples to continue lifestyles unadjusted to modern time in a way inconceivable without the extraordinary bounty of the salmon harvest. The various peoples who inhabited the lands around the Columbia River called the river ‘the great table’, where people could come at different times of year and get their slug of life-reviving sustenance.

Without that returning bonanza of fish which could so variously be prepared and cured and salted down, and preserved for use for over half a year later, the Pacific peoples would have had to trade, to open up avenues for the exchange of goods and generally interact with the rest of the continent in a different way. Their cultures would have changed long ago. The salmon harvest kept an undeveloped but environmentally benign culture in happy coexistence with the salmon runs for thousands of years. Up to a point, and we will revert to this later, it still does so now.

What has never been looked at is the degree to which human settlement was dictated by salmon runs. One might argue and even be able to prove that Vancouver, at the mouth of the Fraser River, was once used by native people as a salmon capture station. It is easy to imagine it; salmon are caught in Vancouver’s waterways now. Backed by the Rockies and without coastal roads and caravan routes trekking over open plains to the rear, maybe here, as was the case further north, a society existed for a long time in isolation from other trade centres, hemmed in by the mountains and living primarily on fish, most of which were salmon. Salmon were the cultural lynchpins. But maybe this is not only true in the Americas …

North European and Scandinavian cities are mostly sited on river-mouths. Mostly they were salmon rivers. Now that it is known that sea voyagers traversed the Atlantic long before Christopher Columbus, sea travel has an ancient pedigree. No one knows how, but 50,000 years ago humans crossed the water from Indonesia to Australia. Boats that could cross the ocean could cruise the coastline up and down. That may be so, but there is another reason why cities were built on river-mouths, and that is because the larder that needing filling was thus ideally located beside the conveyor belt containing the food. The food was migratory fish.

In the twenty-first century salmon cling to survival in a few rivers in northern Spain and in select French rivers down to the Spanish border. But even today the French have a delightful and powerful folk memory of ‘le saumon’.

One time I was sent by a magazine on a grayling fishing trip to a river in the south-west of France. It had rained stupendously, so my fishing guide and I forgot the fishing and enjoyed a repast in a dripping camping ground which was memorable for the wonderful goat’s cheese which his own flock had contributed. With little to do I looked at the rule book for local fishermen. At the back was a section on salmon fishing. To my surprise there was a long and detailed chapter delimning precisely how and when salmon could be caught and all the attendant rules. I expressed surprise to my guide that there were indeed any salmon in the river. He said casually that in fact there were not; the chapter on salmon was there to satisfy just such fishermen as myself, whiling away the time and dreaming of fish that might be – dreaming of fish that only existed in different places, where there were not hydro dams up and down the river, and where pollution had been addressed, and where water-flow permitted their existence. Perhaps only in France would you find that chapter about a fish from another place, but it rather enhanced the occasion for me.

Next day we got back to the action on the grayling and I thought several times of the possibility that somewhere on this river, sometime, there could be salmon again too. The concept had become embedded. The salmon as a cultural entity had a significance despite being absent as a living fish.

The Atlantic salmon has been a lifeline of survival for early Man since the Stone Age. As G.E. Sharp, counterpointing survival with angling, said in 1910, ‘The caveman’s necessity has become the rich man’s hobby.’ It has been, as for the north-west Pacific Indians, the most reliable source of returning protein of any. It swims into the larder voluntarily and, unlike the fleet-footed reindeer, need only be stopped from going out again. Seals are large lumps of meat easily overtaken and knocked on the head, but they only make landfall once a year for pupping and their meat is unsuitable for variable curing. No wonder some of the Pacific tribes enunciated heartfelt thanks for salmon’s bountiful re-appearance.

There is an intrinsic difficulty in firmly tying down what happened long ago in western Europe. It is known that Cro-Magnon man ate salmon from bones in middens on the River Dordogne. And the indigenous inhabitants of Scotland, the Picts, incised salmon on sacred stones, some of which survive to this day. But the food-remains legacy is not all that it might be.

One problem is that fish bones soften and disintegrate faster than animal bones; they are less durable. Where the middens full of clam and mollusc shells present an unarguable picture of shellfish consumption, salmon eating is much harder to ascertain from bone remains. Historians of Stone Age culture say that three-quarters of all animal bones were eaten by creatures, from deer down to voles, needing the calcium. This is prior to natural biological breakdown. We get only a whiff of what was consumed from rubbish deposits, even with animals and their harder bones. Fish bones are often long gone from recorders’ view.

Then there is a possible misinterpretation of the meaning of surviving bark and wicker artefacts. These are shown on the Pacific Northwest to have been used for fish capture. Stone Age historians on the east side of the Atlantic often imagine that these surviving creations were used for carrying things. They may, rather, have been used to trap fish. What were suitable materials for doing this on one seaboard may reasonably be assumed to have been suitable for the same purpose on another.

Then most of the evidence of a salmon culture determining settlement in western Europe may lie underneath the coastal cities which have grown where there were once river-mouth fishing villages. Of England’s cathedral cities, eighteen of twenty-five are on salmon rivers – either a coincidence, a practical matter relating to easier travel using water, or something to do with an easily obtained food resource. Who knows? My guess is that salmon presence played a part in human settlement locations. Salmon may have determined early settlement. If it is trouble to take the food to the people, take the people to the food.

If you deduce early diet from drawings and rock art depictions, fish appear as well as deer. Perhaps the fact that the hides of deer were vital for clothing made deer more integral to survival, but in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum there is a woman’s marriage coat described as of the Gilyak tribe from the lower Amur River in eastern Siberia, made of 60 Pacific salmon skins and dated to about 1900. On the upper back are appliqué semi-circular panels simulating fish scales. There are similar garments in other collections.

Not only were salmon skins used in ceremonial occasions, but Icelanders, inhabitants of the Gaspé Peninsular in Quebec, and the Ainu from the Kuril Islands off Japan, all used salmon skin for clothes and shoes. The Ainu used the tougher skins of spawned salmon for making winter boots. My wife, even, is in on the act. She had a business making fashionable items from salmon skins, with a customer base including celebrities. Of course she did! With its delicately inscribed, miniature, cupped ring patterns and very tough texture it is fabulous material.

Today most Atlantic salmon run rivers in only seven countries: Britain, Ireland, Norway, Canada, America, Russia and Sweden. But European rivers at one time mostly possessed salmon populations. Spain, Denmark, Portugal, France and Germany had rivers suited to salmon breeding, as did the countries round the Baltic. The Rhine, Seine, Loire, Douro, Gudena, Oder, Elbe and Weser hosted large populations of the silver visitor.

There is a dearth of statistical information about pre-industrial catches of salmon in Europe, but the few titbits which can be found conjure up a picture of abundance which is reminiscent of the north-west Pacific. A late-eighteenth-century Spanish study claims that 2,000 salmon a day were caught during the season in the province of Asturias. Another writer extrapolating from this considers that 10,000 salmon a day were landed every day in north Spain in the eighteenth century. Adding to this calculation figures for fishing rentals, which were high, Anthony Netboy in Salmon: The World’s Most Harassed Fish, written in 1980, says that the annual harvest in Spain might therefore have been up to 900,000 fish. Remember, Spain is a salmon country with some of the smallest salmon rivers. Human populations were low then. Salmon were a key ingredient of survival.

France has the shape and physiognomy of a major salmon location. Long winding rivers meander placidly through forests and farmland and course through verdant green valleys. When Caesar colonised Gaul in 56 BC the legions witnessed salmon leaping in the Garonne, and noted a fish-eating people. Salmon and mullet were the delicacies. Taking their cue from the natives, the Romans investigated salmon flavour and took the salted product back home.

The medieval period is perceived only from flashes of comment, but it is known that salmon were traded over long distances. Anthony Netboy says that by the thirteenth century salmon were being exported from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Berwick and Perth to England and the Continent. That is a fact that takes a while to fully appreciate. Salmon, then, was a major trade item from early time, like gold. By the time of the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the value of Scotland’s salmon exports was £200,000 – an enormous sum.

Better-detailed is the trade established by Glaswegian merchants sending salted-down salmon to Flanders, Holland and France in the eighteenth century. ‘Kippering’ was the name given to a method involving decapitating the fish, removing the insides, including any roe, and splitting it down the middle. The cure was dry, with the preserving agents, principally salt, being absorbed into the flesh. Saltpetre, brown sugar, even rum, might be added. The salmon would lie in this concoction for two days, after which it was dried either by heat from a kiln or by sunlight. Sun-drying could take five weeks. Smoking as done in those days involved the same initial process as today, with the fish in the round then being exposed to wood-smoke.

Pickling replaced salting and kippering, mainly because it was less labour-intensive. This entailed boiling in brine (30 minutes for salmon, 20 for smaller grilse), cooling, then topping with brown vinegar. The fish were exported in barrels to a variety of European ports in regions where salmon did not exist naturally. There were idiosyncratic recipes, as you might expect from a food-conscious time: added to the pickle were bunches of rosemary, slices of ginger, mace, lemon-peel, wine and, in the case of salmon emanating from Newcastle, beer.

London was distinct from European markets in demanding salmon that was fresh. Unadulterated salmon was unloaded in London from boats sailing out of Berwick-on-Tweed and Perth. Again, eighteenth-century Londoners were fastidious. Prices of salmon tumbled as the season wore on. Early-season salmon which travelled in cold weather fetched prices nearly two-thirds higher than later in May, by which time salmon were abundant and freshness was fighting higher temperatures. However, transport in ‘kitts’ (barrels of 30–40 pounds of fish) was quick: fast cutters of 60–70 tons could whack down from Perth on favourable north winds in 50 hours. When Londoners had to hold their noses the fish were pickled and sent abroad.

Although history recounts that the first salmon packed on ice travelled from Perth to London in the 1780s, Galen, the Roman writer, had reported fish being preserved in snow in the second century. Preservation in frozen water was hardly a sophisticated trick anyway; by the time full-scale salmon netting was underway in the eighteenth century there were ice houses at the mouths of many salmon rivers in Scotland. Winter ice was chopped and packed inside these stone-vaulted, partly subterranean buildings, then sealed off. Salmon were loaded in as and when they were caught.

The volume of trade can be established in some of the local details. The big rivers have clear records, at least of official catches. The Tay is Scotland’s premier salmon water. By 1807 the average catch of grilse and salmon was 56,000. Including its main tributary, the River Earn, by the 1840s these numbers had increased to between 65,000 and 80,000, and in the year 1842, to 111,000.

England’s Tyne, today the top salmon angling river by a clear lead, has an 18-mile estuary which, during the period of industrialisation, became horribly choked and polluted. But when Tyne waters ran clear, as they do again today, the salmon run was prodigious. Nets took 80,000–120,000 fish every year at one time. This was in addition to some 4,000 salmon on rods. Some days the nets managed to sweep up 2,000 fish, an almighty harvest by the standards of any Atlantic salmon rivers anywhere.

Netting and over-netting then took its toll on returning runs in different places at different times. The Tweed, which at the sea-end divides England and Scotland, had a salmon and grilse catch averaging 109,000 fish between 1811 and 1815, which had shrunk to a third of that in the early 1850s. That contraction had itself halved by the end of the century. Pollution, poaching, over-fishing and industrialisation began to hammer stocks of a fish which above all needed unadulterated water and a clear passage.

Brittany has a rocky coastline but French historians of the eighteenth century reckon that as many as 4,500 tons of salmon were landed in good years. Using an average weight of ten pounds per fish, this equates to roughly one million salmon. The 1789 revolution ended this happy state of affairs when landed assets, including fishing rights, were distributed amongst the population without safeguards for maintaining the harvest. Fishing was allowed above the navigable reaches of rivers and the waters were ransacked. Prior to that, sense had prevailed: mills were obliged in law to open their gates by night and on Sundays, and if salmon were held up in their passage to the redds in the headwaters, it was never for long.

Up until the French Revolution the monasteries and landowners had owned and managed the salmon runs. Peter Coates, in his amusing 2006 monograph, Salmon, describing the pivotal role of monasteries in medieval salmon capture, writes: ‘Salmon loomed particularly large in the worldly desires of religious men.’ Because wise use of the harvesting rate was properly understood, there are many examples of early conservation. One of Netboy’s sentences on the subject of early French conservation stops you in your tracks: ‘Until the eleventh century only fishing for salmon and eels was regulated.’ Early control of salmon extraction was evidently a feature of European culture a millennium ago. Scotland had salmon conservation law in place protecting fish preparing to breed by the end of August, by 1030. In England as well as Scotland there was what Netboy has called ‘a steady flow’ of laws to protect salmon as the lifecycle became better understood. Fixed net operations in rivers were outlawed, and weirs had to contain gaps for the passage of running fish. In 1285 England’s King Edward II produced more muscular protection, amongst other measures banning taking salmon fry for feeding to pigs.

Clearly, the lifecycle was properly understood a very long time ago. When you consider what violations have been perpetrated on this species in modern times it is a matter for amazement that anyone can pretend humankind gets any wiser! A law passed in Ireland in 1466 illegalised tipping the effluent from the leather-tanning process into the salmon-rich River Liffey. So they understood too.