by Zane Grey
A huge fifteen-foot swordfish with a short bill and broad stripes has been seen by market fishermen. And a species of sailfish, different from those I was the first to catch in the Gulf Stream, on the Pacific Coast, and in the South Seas, has been taken by market fishermen. This sailfish has a dorsal fin that is highest at the forward end and slopes back to the tail. These three fish alone will make the fame of the Barrier.
The queen fish, a beautiful silvery dolphin-like leaper, is one of the greatest fish I have caught, equal to the gallo, or rooster fish, of the Mexican coast. The mackerel that occurs in large schools is a fine light-tackle fish for anglers who do not care for the strenuous work. There is also a sea pike, a big barracuda-like fish that grows to twelve feet and more and which would be wonderful game. Undoubtedly there are more and larger fish to discover around these reefs.
The future of Australian fishing is no longer problematical.
Marlin have been sighted off Sydney Heads every month in the year. Three days before I sailed on the Mariposa, August 16th, a market fisherman saw five Marlin riding the swells not far offshore. In winter! A few days before that one of my men, flying down from Newcastle, saw a school of huge tiger sharks, none, he claimed, under eighteen feet, attacking a baby whale and fighting its mother. The airmen circled lower and flew round and round, not only to observe the fight, but to make sure of what was happening; and they saw the tiger sharks tear the baby whale to pieces.
Another market fisherman quite recently saw a white shark much longer than his boat, which was twenty-two feet.
Then, as I have written about before, and wish to repeat, there are a number of cases where market fishermen were towing sharks too large to pull on board, and have had these huge white devils take them in one bite. A ten- or twelve-foot shark snapped off in one bite!
A thirty-nine foot white shark was stranded at Montague Island after swallowing a small shark that had been caught on a set line. A nineteen-foot white shark was shot and harpooned off the pier at Bermagui.
Dr. David Stead, of Sydney, a scientist of international reputation, corroborates my claim that there are white sharks up to eighty feet and more. If there are not, where do the white-shark teeth, five inches across the base, come from? These have been dredged from the ocean bed.
This matter of Australian sharks is astounding. The waters around Australia are alive with many species of sharks. Why not some unknown species, huge and terrible? Who can tell what forms of life swim and battle in the ocean depths?
I predict that if I myself do not catch one of these incredible monsters, some one else will. I believe there are eighty-foot sharks. Rare, surely, but they occur! I believed in the sea serpent before the English scientist, Lieut.-Commander R. T. Gould, collected his authentic data and made the myth a fact.
It takes imagination to be a fisherman — to envision things and captures to be. Every fisherman, even if he is a skeptic and ridicules me and any supporters about these great fish, betrays himself when he goes fishing, for he goes because he imagines there are trout or salmon or Marlin, and surely a big one, waiting to strike for him. If I had not had a vivid and fertile imagination I would not have been the first to catch sailfish and swordfish in different and unfished waters of the world.
Off Freemantle large tunny have been caught by marketmen and hundreds too large to hold have broken away.
Then the West Coast of Australia! Here will be found the grandest fish. For years I have known that the Indian Ocean contains the most marvelous unfished waters, and the greatest of fish in numbers and size. I have been on the track of the monster Indian Ocean sailfish for years. But never until I met the Danish scientist, Schmidt, world authority on eels, who had seen these sailfish, did I really believe the data I had accumulated.
“Sailfish?” he repeated after me. “Oh yes indeed. I have seen them like a fleet of sailing schooners.”
“And — how big?” I choked, now realizing I was on the eve of my most wonderful discovery.
“Thirty to forty feet, I should say. Their sails were easily ten feet high and fifteen feet long.”
Shark’s Bay, three hundred miles north of Perth, is known to contain schools of huge sharks.
Schools of sharks do not inhabit waters that are not full of fish. All the way up the West Coast to Darwin, these great fish I believe in and have been writing about have been seen.
I could fill pages with data I have collected. Some of it, most of it, is fact.
So I make my claim for Australian waters and reiterate it and will stand by it. So great is my faith that already I have enlisted the help of the Australian Government and my influential friends there, motion-picture and radio people, all of which, added to private resources and unlimited tackle, will be used to prove that Australia has fish and fishing which will dwarf all the rest known in the world today.
As for the dream and the color and the glory of such a romance, such an adventure, these are for the time being overshadowed by the immensity of the plan, and its scope, and its appalling difficulties. But these will pass and then there will come the joy of anticipation — of trolling sunny strange waters, of purple coral reefs and strips of white sand, and the shore haunts of the aboriginal — the myriads of shells, of weird birds and grand trees — and always the striving for the unattainable, whether it be a great fish or the ultimate beauty.
I have been ridiculed and criticized for claiming that Australia’s thirteen thousand miles of coast would yield the greatest game fish of any waters yet discovered in the world, and all the year round.
Years ago when I predicted seven-hundred-, eight-hundred-, and thousand-pound Marlin for New Zealand, I was laughed at, even in New Zealand itself. But I and my fishing partners caught black Marlin of these weights, and established the marvelous fishing that New Zealand has enjoyed for a protracted and waning period.
After five years of correspondence with Australian scientists, missionaries, market fishermen, and sportsmen, and seven months of practical and strenuous observation and fishing, I stake my reputation that Australia will yield the most incredible and magnificent big-game fish of known and unknown species that the fishing world has ever recorded.
Added to what I just wrote about Great Barrier fish, let me append one more fact.
I have located broadbill swordfish, the genuine Ziphias gladius, in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria, spawning on the white sand, as thick as fence pickets!
THE END
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Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
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<
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Series Two
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Zane Grey
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Charles Darwin
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Anthony Hope
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Saki
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Voltaire
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Adam Smith
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Series Eight
Anna Katharine Green
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Elizabeth von Arnim
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Ouida
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Theodore Dreiser
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Aldous Huxley
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Erasmus
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Molière
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The Harvard Classics
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Penny Dreadfuls Collection
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