The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  On the Susquehanna, shad economics had caused the Great Safe Harbor Shad War (upriver interests versus downriver interests), which was fought in the eighteen-fifties. In a book on the fisheries of Hunterdon County in New Jersey, Phyllis B. D’Autrechy mentions a widow who inherited shad (1860), and another widow, who inherited even more shad (1866), and a doctor whose bill was paid with shad, and a tailor who sold a garment for four shad. In 1867, Thomas De Voe published “The Market Assistant, Containing a Brief Description of Every Article of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.” Of American shad, De Voe said: “This well-known fish is a general favorite among all classes of persons, as its flesh is considered among the best, sweetest, the most delicate, as well as being the most plentiful when in season. Nothing but its numerous bones can be said against it.”

  In the eighteen-forties, a standard pork barrel held forty shad. By the end of the eighteen-sixties, the same size barrel held a hundred shad. In eastern American rivers, the species had seriously diminished not only in numbers but in size, as it would, cyclically, into and beyond the century to come. In Thomas Jefferson’s era, one shad would feed one poor family. By 1870, one shad was too small, and—la Bordage, Rôti en entier—too expensive. As the fish’s popularity had risen, ruthless and reckless harvesting had proceeded uncontrolled. While dams had shrunk the population so had widespread pollution. Across the years 1825 to 1875, the spring migrations of American shad declined by eighty per cent.

  The natural way to deal with something like that is to set up a government agency. In 1871, Congress established the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries. Various states had been establishing their own commissions as well. With respect to the American shad, which had become not only a domestic food of prime importance but also a major export, the cumulative result of the commissioners’ deliberations was to pin their hopes on Seth Green.

  For some years, Green had been having exceptional success in the artificial fertilization and subsequent hatching of the species. Where nature achieves one or two fry out of a hundred eggs, Green was hatching ninety-eight per cent. He stripped milt and eggs from living fish and combined them without first immersing them in water. The technique would become known as dry spawning. It has been described by the fisheries scientist and aquacultural historian Nick C. Parker as “the first significant contribution of Americans to the practice of fish culture.” Green was in business as well as science. He had begun his career selling fish at his own stall in a market in Rochester. He gave lessons in pisciculture for ten dollars an hour. For fifteen years, he did what he could to keep his dry-spawning method a trade secret. It didn’t help that his friend Thaddeus Norris pretty much spelled it all out in an article called “A Plea for the Shad” in the April, 1869, issue of Lippincott’s Magazine. Green had first tried his technique in Holyoke, where—in Norris’s words—he “expressed the spawn and milt from shad into tubs; and after stirring gently, and allowing the fecundated shad-seed to stand a while, has placed them in his hatchingboxes, which he anchored in the current. Placing ten thousand eggs in a box, so arranged as to keep them suspended and in motion by the action of the current passing through, his loss in hatching hardly averaged one egg in a thousand.”

  Green obtained a patent on the hatching boxes. Roughly a foot and a half square, they had wire-mesh bottoms and strips of wood fixed on a slant to the sides, affecting the flotation in such a way that the bottom screens were slightly tilted toward the current. This kept the eggs in constant motion, as they needed to be. In Holyoke, on the payroll of several New England states, he hatched forty million shad in a couple of weeks. As an upstate New Yorker and a New York fish commissioner, he went on to establish a large hatchery in the Hudson River at Coeymans, ten miles south of Albany. His boxes were in shallow water in rows of six. Forty-two of them show in a pen-and-ink sketch in Harper’s Weekly for April 27, 1872. On the riverbank, Green had a wall tent that would have looked like home to General Pickett. It was from Coeymans that Green took shad fry to California on the two-year-old transcontinental railroad, initiating a West Coast shad fishery that has far outgrown the runs of eastern rivers. Pennsylvania wrote to him asking to rent some hatching boxes for three years. That will be two thousand dollars, Green replied. With New Jersey’s help, Pennsylvania paid, and shad runs in the Delaware soon began to rise. Never again would he make the mistake he had made in New England, where he told commercial fishermen that his purpose was to make shad “cheap.” He paid the same fishermen to collect fish for him to strip, and they readily pocketed the money, but—according to Harper’s Weekly—they also enjoyed “flopping shad across Mr. Green’s face, stumbling over the boat and upsetting the pans of impregnated spawn, or dropping the lantern into the water at a critical moment.”

  “Shad are following in the wake of salmon in consequence of American energy of destruction,” Green and R. Barnwell Roosevelt wrote in 1879. Green on his own was routing the problem with his little boxes. “The fish for cultivation in American waters, the fish which nature has given us preeminently as one of its best gifts to man is the shad,” he and Roosevelt declared, as Green’s shadlings caused runs to burgeon and supply to outreach the highest demand. Restoring a diminished species, he was making it once again plentiful and cheap.

  In the eighteen-nineties, Rand McNally published an anthology called “American Game Fishes,” by twenty authors, including the preëminent American sport-fishing writers of the nineteenth century: Thomas Chalmers, Frank Forester (whose real name was Henry William Herbert), and Thaddeus Norris (known in the fishing world as Uncle Thad). “American Game Fishes” dealt sequentially with a great many species but not with shad. Although Forester, Chalmers, and Norris had all described casting for shad with fly rods, those were isolated virtuoso performances and did not bespeak a national recreation. Henry William Herbert was at least a century ahead of his time. In 1849, in “Frank Forester’s Fish and Fishing of the United States and British Provinces of North America,” he said of American shad: “This delicious and well-known fish, which is by many persons esteemed the queen of all fishes on the table, has been, until very recently, regarded as one that could be taken only with the net, and therefore of no avail to the angler. It is, however, now clearly proved that … American shad will take a large gaudy fly freely, and being a strong, powerful, and active fish, affords a great play to the sportsman … The flesh of the shad is perhaps the most delicate of any existing fish; and, though it lacks the lusciousness, as well as the glutinous fin of the Turbot, it is preferred to that fish by many judicious epicures, notwithstanding the drawback occasioned by its innumerable and sharply-pointed bones.” So literate was Herbert in his fishing pieces that he occasionally broke into sustained runs of untranslated French. His Swiss-born friend Louis Agassiz, discoverer of continental glaciation, was also a celebrated paleoichthyologist, and he contributed fish sketches to Forester’s research. Forester was an early craftsman in liminal advertising, e.g., “I can assure the fly-fisher that he will find much sport in fishing for the Shad … with a powerful Trout-rod, a long line, and such flies as he will procure in perfection at Conroy’s, in Fulton-street, New York.”

  Conroy, it seems safe to say, did not grow rich on shad flies. Almost fifty years later—in the eighteen-nineties-shad were still beyond the conversation of most sport fishermen, despite the magic spawnings of Seth Green and the replenishment of eastern rivers. State hatcheries had long since developed, and by 1896 commercial seiners were harvesting fifty million pounds of shad—“far and away the Atlantic Coast’s most valuable finfishery,” in the words of the historian Charles Hardy. So relevant was the shad to the economy of Connecticut that Johnny Flynn’s Market, in Hartford, sent its first shad each spring to the Old State House, and the governor had it for breakfast. The premier river, however, was then—as it is now—the Delaware, which accounted for one-third of those fifty million pounds. Fresh Delaware shad were sold off carts in Ch
icago. The zoologist W K. Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, called shad “the most remarkable of domesticated animals, for it is the only one which man has yet learned to rear and to send out into the ocean in great flocks and herds to pasture upon its abundance, and to come back again, fat and nutritious, to the place from which it was sent out. From this point of view the maintenance of the shad fishery by man is one of the most notable triumphs of human intelligence over nature.” Or, as Hardy has amplified the thought, “shad ranged free in the great plains of the oceans just as cattle grazed freely on the great inland ocean of the Plains.”

  Yet, as equity markets routinely demonstrate, there can be too much of a good thing. Steam winches were hauling in the fish. On railway spurs, freight trains were waiting to carry them to market. Seines were two miles long, three miles long. Charles Hardy calls this “a final cashing in on a once renewable resource,” and continues : “The shad renaissance … lasted perhaps forty years. After a peak harvest of more than sixteen million pounds at the turn of the century, landings in the Delaware plunged to only three million pounds in 1905. A resurgence to seven million pounds in 1906 was then followed by another plunge. In 1916, fishermen took the last million pound haul out of the river.”

  In the same year, in the “Transactions of the American Fisheries Society,” Charles Minor Blackford, M.D., of Staunton, Virginia, reported: “In the Chesapeake Bay, the nets extend out, in some cases, to a distance of twelve miles from shore, and the only chance that the fish have to get to their spawning grounds is to keep within the ship channels which are kept clear by the federal authorities.” Blackford suggested that in addition to all their other talents shad would do well to study federal navigation laws.

  By 1925, the drop in shad populations in eastern rivers had become so drastic that Herbert C. Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, called a conference to discuss the emergency. Two million pounds of Seth Green’s transplanted Alosa sapidissima, he pointed out, were being shipped east annually from California and sold as “fresh Atlantic shad.”

  ELEVEN

  ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE

  In stocking waders and cleated boots, I am standing in a clump of bushes that spend most of the year far out of water. Not to mention the trees. The water comes up to my waist. If I were to step a wee bit farther out, cops would pick up the body in Trenton. The river here is only one or two hundred feet wide, and the number of cubic feet per second going by is six times normal. If you like, you could call it a flood, but the Delaware gorge in the Pocono-Catskill plateau is so confined that the water is not pooling out all over the countryside but is concentrated in a silt-laden flume of what appears to be hurtling cement. All the sane people have long since quit and gone home. Stick around. There’s a challenge present. The fish are in the river, where else? They’re just as unhappy as you are. Out from the water’s edge, they can’t go much farther than you can.

  Toss into the river a twig or a leaf or anything else that floats. Watch it go. If there is some kind of eddy, it will find it. Cast a bright dart into the big current so that it swings into the seam of the eddy. Do not be discouraged by the fact that deer have been known to sleep where you are fishing. This situation is extremely marginal, and you will not have a banner day, but one fish caught under these conditions is worth sixteen in a low river with big schools. A guy in Hankins told me that high turbid water, within reason, “can even be good for shad”—from the angler’s point of view. They hit the darts more readily, he claimed, than they do in low, clear water. A local newspaper described fishermen using weighted flies for shad near the edge of the swollen river. There are things to be said for catching fish in a forest. The dart swings out of the brown-and-white turbulence into the haven shallows. Suddenly the line sticks fast to a five-pound two-ounce roe.

  May 22: Was out on a rock in the afternoon, the river down and clear. The event of the day was a weird, deceptive snag. It felt like river-bottom mononlament—the lost fishing line, mine and others’, that all of us so often get hung up on. It’s like a bungee with your hook in it. Snags of one kind and another are routine in shad fishing, because you generally fish along the bottom. I tugged at this one, and dragged it a little, hoping not to snap my rod. The burden at the far end kept coming—a slow, elastic dead weight. Then the line came up like a blade through the water and the surface of the river burst open. A roe shad the size of a blimp jumped and soared two feet in the air. Simultaneously, the dart came free. That huge roe shad had been sulking on the hook the way salmon do. Indisputably, she was the biggest shad anywhere in the river. I am off the mark, of course, in comparing her to a blimp. She was more like the Hindenburg. Beware. Nine snags will be snags, but the tenth will have a caudal fin.

  An AWOL is a shad absent without leave. AWOLs in shad fishing are numerous and inevitable and deserve to be in the statistics. They are shad that hook up and later get away—the ten-second shad, the ten-minute shad. Solidly, the fish hits the lure; and completely it gets away. How it gets away is the nature of the AWOL. Many are the result of very light hookings, and most hookings are very light—nicks in the front of the mouth. After a time, the hook pulls loose, and that is routine shad fishing. That is what it’s like. Fish on the line are by no means halfway home. Most of all, the shad you hook but don’t land are a part of your season—the hooking being in some ways more significant than the netting. In one ten-year span, I hooked up with a little over a thousand shad, and lost two hundred and ninety-eight. Roughly one in three. Most that get away are no-fault AWOLs. For example, the planer AWOL. Far out on the line, the shad comes to the river surface lying on one side. This is no spent shad. It skitters like a surfboard on the top of the river. There is nothing you can do except watch in wonder. The planing sometimes sets the fish free, even more than tail-walking and aerial somersaults. Selected examples:

  May 7: Around four-thirty, I hooked a shad that was on for three or four minutes before it shed the hook, jumping, and the dart flew back past my ear.

  May 13: Four AWOLs—one near the boat after twelve minutes. No mistakes.

  May 25: Spectacularly, a buck shad does three consecutive somersaults, high above the water, remaining on the line. Now comes somersault four. He ejects the dart in midair.

  Draped over the tip of the jaw, the hook may have penetrated—as the hook often does—the thin soft tissue that the anatomist Willy Bemis calls “the membrane of the maxillary recess.” After the hook has gradually widened the hole it makes in the membrane, the hook falls out.

  June 10: She leaped, leaped again, tail-walked, all over the river. The line was high and taut and the dart securely tied when, after five or ten minutes, she was gone. She expanded the penetration. She got herself away.

  When a shad goes AWOL, you often cannot tell if it’s your fault. You may have put on too much pressure. You may have used too little pressure. You don’t know. All you know is that the line is slack, the fish gone. The hookup may have been so tenuous that it had no chance of lasting. You don’t know. It may have been adequate but you tugged too hard, assuming an even firmer connection. Some shad are so securely hooked that there is almost no way to lose them. Most are hooked in such a way that the dart easily falls out when the line goes limp, whether the fish is in the water or in the net. You must assume that any fish is scarcely hooked. Shad fishing is a shrewd trade-off between handling and manhandling. Too much—she’s gone. Too little—she’s gone. That is one of the many reasons why you squirt adrenaline when they tail-walk or do somersault leaps. When they go AWOL, a choice is yours: to blame, or not to blame, yourself.

  There is a good deal less latitude when the cause is impatience or bumbling—faults of the failed fisherman. Me, for example. Such as the time I jabbed that incoming shad in the head with the net, dislodged the dart, and the fish vanished. Among AWOLs of embarrassment, humiliation, and shame, the lowest form is the unravelled AWOL. The line unties itself at the hook. This is even worse than the horse AWOL—a fish lost to impatience by being yanked in too f
ast. Little buck shad invite the horse AWOL. They are male and they lack character, dimension, determination, and eggs. For ever and eternity they are second class. They are not roe shad. So you see them in the water flipping out on the end of your line, and your tolerance contracts. You yank them up hard and they fly away. You are a bad fisherman.

  May 17: Two of my AWOLs were bucks that I lost beside the canoe because I muscled them too hard. I probably did that because I could see that they were bucks and was showing disdain for their sex and size. Little white males. I denigrated them because they weren’t females with roe. They deservedly escaped. I should be fined for contempt of shad.

  May 31: One of my AWOLs was a horsed buck. I was so irritated by him that I lost him-annoyed that he had the temerity to get on the line and flip and flap and wash and leap and execute complete somersaults while the females were patiently waiting their turn.

  Twice in one week in my chocolate canoe I pulled a buck shad straight up out of the water, and then in midair it shed the hook, and then—free as a basketball—it dropped into the net in my hand. Those two fish deserved something better than a slam dunk.

  May 12: Two AWOLs—one from another unravelled knot. I caught five or six fish on the dart and did not trouble to retie it; I got what I deserved.

  May 13: Two got away at the net, including a big roe. The dart fell out of her mouth as I leaned toward her and forgetfully released tension. Lefty, you’ve done it again.