The Book of Eels

The Book of Eels

Tom Fort

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2002. This updated William Collins edition published in 2020.

Copyright © Tom Fort 2002

Tom Fort asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007115938

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780007394692

Version: 2020-06-23

Praise

THE BOOK OF EELS

‘Fort is always readable, often spectacularly good …his research doesn’t read like the stuff that bulks up a book for no obvious reason.’

Independent

‘The strength of Fort’s book arises from the fact that he’s a fisherman, and writes like one. He approaches the eel as a mystery and loves the places it is found.’

Guardian

‘A fascinating, beautifully written and deeply peculiar book. It is more than a scientific detective story, it is a rich concoction of different genres, part social history and part autobiography, seasoned with culinary tips. But this book is also a lament for a vanishing way of life.’

New Scientist

‘In this wonderful book, Tom Fort elevates Anguilla anguilla from the lowly to the exalted, and along the way gives us a lot to think about. Fort has written a celebration of eel-lore, and you can ignore this book only if you are not interested in a multitude of insights about the way the natural world works. The Book of Eels is a delightful surprise; Fort does wonders with his esoteric and fascinating subject.’

Times

‘A charming examination of the genus anguilla. Fort’s enthusiasm for the mysterious eel is infectious. This is a cut above the staple non-fiction fare.’

Scotland on Sunday

‘What a joy, a whole book on eels. It’s a very good book too, and a very English book …What is really tremen dous is that it is a book in the English amateur tradition. The author knows his stuff but he is no scientist. He is an amateur. He is one of us. Because he is an amateur he can write a book that defies the normal professional and disciplinary boundaries, a book that leaves out the boring bits. I suppose it is inevitable that someone will call this book “enchanting”. Take no notice. Buy it anyway. Give it to someone you like or, for even more fun, to someone you don’t.’

Spectator

‘After Mark Kurlansky’s elegant and erudite Cod, there swims hot on the fins, the even more elegant and erudite Book of Eels. Readers will not fail to be awestruck …It should certainly be read by all those who are fascinated by the life we find underwater.’

Daily Mail

‘This is a fantastic and fascinating tale, told with a great sense of atmosphere, and I for one did not expect to be shedding a surreptitious tear at the telling of the eels’ Sargasso Sea odyssey. Unbelievably poignant.’

The Field

‘A celebration of the extraordinary natural history of Anguilla anguilla, the European eel, along with the richly sinuous weave of the eel’s relationship to man (not, perhaps, woman, unless the eel is offered filleted and utterly inert) …Tom Fort’s cameos of their shadowy, weedy water-world are beautifully written and often moving.’

Irish Times

‘Tom Fort has devoted years of research to his subject and the result – as with all his writings – is both impressive and entertaining …the Fortian persona …makes him the Alan Bennett of the angling scene.’

Literary Review

‘Has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster, and then some …the story that Tom Fort tells demands the broad canvas of the big screen …it’s got everything going for it: sex, exotic locations, a heartwarming saga of family values …The Latin name of this saline cheese straw is anguilla anguilla: so good they named it twice …It would be a pity if the story of the eel became the one that got away.’

Observer

‘This is a captivating study …Tom Fort is incapable of writing a dull sentence.’

Financial Times

‘Tom Fort tells the story of the eel in such a way that we cannot fail to share his passion …what an astounding story it is!’

The Tablet

FOR HELEN

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

PREFACE

ONE My eel

TWO A dainty dish

THREE By diverse means

FOUR Genesis

FIVE Searching

SIX Challenge

SEVEN Leaving

EIGHT Homecoming

NINE Babies

TEN Sweet Thames

ELEVEN Queen of the lagoon

TWELVE Racks and pots

THIRTEEN Fishermen of Neagh

EPILOGUE A lament

A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

ENDNOTES TO THE 2020 EDITION

INDEX

Acknowledgments

About The Author

By The Same Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

A long time ago I sat down to write a book about an extraordinary creature found in every part of Britain, across much of Europe and along the coasts of north Africa and North America, which most people have never seen and are unaware of. The result was The Book of Eels and I wrote a preface (slightly modified here) to explain why I had taken the trouble:

‘It is a creature of mystery, the freshwater eel, with few admirers and fewer friends. Yet for as long as I have been stirred by rivers and lakes and the life within them – which is as long as I can remember – I have been intrigued by this extremely common, little known and little understood fish. While working on this book that fascination became consuming, so that eels annexed my thoughts and infested my dreams. Whenever I crossed a bridge or glimpsed water from the road or train, I tried to picture the dark, slender shapes hugging the mud. But the images were indistinct. It is easy to see, in the mind’s eye, a salmon resting behind a rock, a trout sipping down an insect between two trails of green weed, a chub or barbel swaying in the current where the willow branches dip. With the eel, the best I could do was to say to myself, ‘I know you’re down there somewhere.’ At night, though, they came into the open. They slithered through my sleep, backs green and brown, bellies yellow and pearly silver, snouts questing, tails undulating, a restless presence in my rest.

In writing this book I have sought to share something of my own fascination, and to encourage some appreciation of this not-at-all-appreciated creature. I wanted to tell of its unusual physiology and highly individual life cycle and convey my own sense of wonder at its uniquely extended and perilous travels. I wanted to celebrate the qualities of its flesh and its high reputation among discerning chefs. Most of all I wanted to leave a record of our co-existence with it – how, as the eel has gone about obeying its biological commands, we through studying its patterns of behaviour have exploited it while doing it no harm.

There is a temptation in every age to see its changes as a taking of the wrong path, a turning away from values of proven worth, and to prophesy doom. Often those prophecies turn out to have been false. So I may be wrong – I hope I am wrong – in fearing that we are losing something irreplaceable in the dislocation between our all-consuming consumer society and the world around it.

It is not that we actively seek to corrupt or destroy it. It is that, not understanding enough about how it works, we do not know what we are doing. We clamour for more living space and ease of travel, so the countryside is devoured by houses and roads. We are told until we come to believe it without question that it is our right to have cheap food, so our farmland is despoiled and our livestock mutated into freaks. Then we wonder: where are the skylarks, where are the hedges, where are the water meadows and the water voles and the cod and the salmon? And we ask: how is that we – the richest, best-educated, most sophisticated in the history of our planet – seem so powerless to mend our ways?

Fish and fishermen are early casualties. Fishermen take what the waters provide and when they cease to provide the fishermen cease to exist. I have always been a lover of fish,and I have tried to educate myself about their world. But for me it is an amusement, albeit a consuming one, a part of my life; whereas for fishermen it is a way of life and a matter of survival. For thousands of years the freshwater eel was hunted and eaten because of its easy availability and because it is good to eat. There are still a few eel catchers left, the last in a long line, but they will be gone before too long and that relationship will be over.

For the sake of convenience as well as personal preference, I have largely confined myself to dealing with the two Atlantic species: the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, and the American eel, Anguilla rostrata. This is not because the other dozen or so species in the world are uninteresting or undocumented. But to attempt to do justice to the entire genus would require a work of Proustian proportions and run the risk of forfeiting the attention of even the most sympathetic of readers. In retrospect I am acutely aware of things I didn’t do, or couldn’t, which I wish I had. For instance, I wish I had been better as an eel catcher, and I wish very intensely that I could have looked into that strangest of birthplaces and graveyards, the Sargasso Sea. But there is only so much one can do – even for an eel.’

I think that still reads quite nicely, and I don’t have a great deal to add almost twenty years later. The Book of Eels was my third book and has been followed by several more. In many ways it remains my favourite, even though it cannot be said to have been a resounding commercial success. Those that liked it seem to like it very much indeed, and even today I occasionally encounter an admirer whose warm words make me glad that I took the trouble I did over it.

The broad thrust of the story has not changed at all. As well as accompanying eel fishers all over the place and immersing myself in the old books, I spent many arduous and intermittently rewarding hours poring over literally scores of scientific papers concerning the fish and its idiosyncratic ways. That scientific attention has been maintained, and the literature has grown even vaster. Some light has been shone and some misconceptions have been addressed, but the chief elements of the narrative are the same. The one drastic change to the eel landscape was its adoption onto the Red List of endangered species, and the consequent decision of the EU to ban exports of both infant and adults outside the union. Brexit is very likely to cause a further major upheaval, but that is for the future.

For this new edition I have taken the easy way and dealt with the changes and developments that seem to me noteworthy by means of endnotes. I have tidied up a few textual infelicities, corrected some mistakes and made some very minor cuts. The one significant change to the main text is at the very end, where I have rewritten the review of the plight of the American and European eel using research data from 2019.

Quite a number of those that I thanked for their help in the first edition are no longer alive, and I do not think I have to repeat those acknowledgements in full. I would like to express my gratitude to Thomas Nielsen, Peter Wood of UK Glass Eels, Pat Close of the Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Cooperative and Dai Francis of the Severn and Wye Smokery for their insights into the current state of the eel market – any mistakes are mine, not theirs. I would like to say thank you again to my agent, Caroline Dawnay, to Susan Watt, who was my editor at that time and who gave me wonderful support and crucial help and to my wife Helen, to whom the book was and is dedicated.

ONE My eel

I did not care for biology lessons. The classroom was dark and cold, the air still and musty, smelling of feet and adolescence and old dissections. One gowned pedagogue after another would stand before us, droning on about photosyndiesis or cell structure or some such stuff Occasionally we would be given slices of an apple to cut up. Along the corridor was the school museum, which contained – among a mass of mouldering and moulting examples of the taxidermist’s art – a cat with two heads and a duck with four legs. But I cannot remember our studies ever embracing animals, alive or stuffed. I can remember nothing beyond diagrams on the blackboard and bits of browning apple on my desk.

If only the fusty old fool had told us the story of the eel! It would have roused us from our preoccupation with our spots and blackheads, our gnawing and constant hunger, our almost equally disturbing anxieties as to whether we were likely to end up as homosexuals. But if he knew it, he kept it to himself, together with all the other marvels of the world about us. Consequently, as a boy, I remained ignorant of the veiled drama of this creature’s life. But I did, at odd moments, encounter the fish itself. On holidays, my brothers and I used to wander the high, nameless becks and burns of Lakeland and western Scotland, with fishing rods and tins of worms. There were always trout in these wild little waters: fierce, hungry fellows eager to dash at a bait and sweet just out of a frying pan. Very infrequently, the resistance to the lifting of the rod point was stronger than usual, and from the bubbly pool would emerge, not the spotted trout of desire, but something the length and colour of a black bootlace, and the thickness of a hosepipe, corkscrewing itself in mid-air with unnerving vivacity.

Such captures were not at all welcome. It is not easy to subdue a tangle of eel, hook, and slime-strewn line when one is balanced precariously on a rock in a rushing stream without the basic necessities for eel control: two free hands (at least), a newspaper or rough cloth, a sharp knife, a flat surface. No one who has not grappled with a live eel can have any conception of how impossible it is to hold it. The experience was likened by one Victorian wag to attempting to detain a pig by the tail ‘when it has been well soaped’.

I hope we did not abuse those little upland eels too much. There would have been profanity, and there may, I fear, have been some stamping upon them, perhaps even some kicking to assist them in their return to the water (they were far too small to be worth eating). Certainly there was no rejoicing over their capture. There are anglers who pursue eels with intent, but we were not among them.

However, there have been occasions when I have been grateful to the eel. Many years ago I went with my eldest brother to Loch Lomond in Scotland, the home of enormous pike which were rumoured – falsely – to be easily caught. At a village on the shore we asked the first man we met where the best place was to engage with these monsters. He hired us his boat, and directed us to a shallow, reedy bay – a place which, it transpired after we had fished it for a week, was favoured by the pike for their spawning, which had taken place two months earlier, and at no other time. So we caught no pike. But every now and then we found a bite-sized chunk missing from our herring baits, and, once we had worked out what was going on, we had some fun with the eels. However one does not travel four hundred miles to catch three-quarter-pound eels, so the experience was not repeated.

With the same brother and a friend I once took a boating holiday on the Fens. It was roastingly hot, and the water was like warm soup. Most fish will not feed in such conditions, but eels like them. One close and still night, I had left a little dead gudgeon out as bait, with my rod propped up against the rail, while we played poker and drank beer in the cabin. We were interrupted by the sound of line whizzing off my reel. I beat my way through the moths dancing in the cabin light to my rod, which was in the act of disappearing over the side. I grabbed it, and struck. After a few minutes of heaving, a huge eel broke the surface, thrashing in the beam of our torch. Somehow we netted it and somehow I killed it, as we had an idea it would provide relief from our diet of tinned baked beans and frankfurters. But I wanted to weigh it first, and we had no scales. A day later, in intense heat, we reached St Ives, where I bought a set of scales. My specimen weighed four and a quarter pounds, which is a big eel, and its body was as thick as my forearm. However, when I cut off its head, I was assaulted by an overpowering stench of decomposed entrails, and I hurled it back into the green water.

Holidays at my great-aunt’s house at the southern end of Coniston Water in the Lake District offered more opportunities to dabble with eels. The property was close to where the River Crake leaves the lake for Morecambe Bay and the sea. A little way down the river was a deep, still, black pool, fringed by reeds and spotted with bright green lily pads. It was a mysterious, slightly unnerving place, but powerfully suggestive of eels. In the evenings we would row down and lay night-lines, baiting the hooks with worms or the heads of perch we had caught in the lake. We would return in the early morning, when the mist was rising in curls over the black mirror of water. The lines came in with blobs of eel slime clinging to them. Sometimes there was a living resistance, and beneath the boat you could make out the pale belly of an eel twisting in the darkness. But these were always small, and more trouble than they were worth once we had finished sorting out the tangles. Once, though, my eldest brother caught a decent-sized specimen on rod and line. He killed it and chopped its head off, and left the corpse in a white enamel bowl outside the front door. When he returned a few minutes later, the bowl was empty. A general search was ordered, and the headless eel was eventually found half-way down the path leading to the water.

Many years later I was invited, with my friend Stephen, among others, to fish for trout on the River Test in Hampshire, which is perhaps the most famous trout river in the world. Generally one does not fish for eels on the Test any more than, having been invited to play golf at Carnoustie or St Andrews, one would delay teeing off to look for mushrooms. Our host’s face registered puzzlement when we appeared brandishing eel-fishing gear and asked if we could hunt for worms in his manure heap.

Sitting beside a pond waiting for the questing eel to find one’s bait is a slow business. But stalking them is stirring sport. You must look in the shaded places, where the water curls around the base of a willow, where you may spot a still, narrow head among the roots. Or you may make out a slender shape at the edge of a patch of green, a tail waving in imitation of the weed. Your little bunch of worms must land well upstream from the eel, a distance nicely calculated so that the current brings it to within a foot or two of the fish’s sensitive nostrils. Then – assuming the eel does not take fright and flee – a period of high excitement ensues. If the water is clear enough, you may see the tail quiver and the head move forward until your worms are no longer visible; then feel the line tremble between your fingers. As you tighten a touch, the sensation of munching transmits itself. You strike, lift the furiously writhing creature out of its element before it has time to wrap its tail around some root, lay it on the grass and consider its fate.

All that broiling July day Stephen and I hunted eels. The little ones we put back, the better ones – a pound or so – we consigned alive to a bucket. Our host reappeared, baffled, but happy that we were happy. Stephen lit a fire, then took the eels, stabbed them through the back of the head, nailed them to the door of the fishing hut, and, having made an incision around their necks, took a pair of pliers and with one smooth downward motion stripped off the slimy skins. The flesh beneath was blue-silver, dry and firm. Within a couple of minutes they had been gutted and tossed upon a piece of chicken wire laid over the fire, where they spat and sizzled as the fat ran out. Our host joined us again, peered momentarily at the trails of slime on the fishing hut door, and politely refused to take a fillet in his fingers. We were not so inhibited, and the warm evening air was suffused with the savour of eel meat and exclamations of epicurean delight.

In general, however, the eel favours the night. As darkness falls on the lake, it stirs. There is light at the surface, the light of the night sky, reflected gleams picked out by the ripples, enough to make out the shadows of the reeds and the trees, the trails left by the ducks, the hills dimly still, upside-down. But go down, and the darkness asserts itself. There, unseen, the creature is hunting. It glides across the bottom, its pale belly stroking the mud. Its body is serpentine, its slenderness belying its muscled strength. It slips sinuously through the tendrils of weed in its path, and they do not stir.

Its eyes are pebbles of black on the side of its pointy snout. They are not needed for this business. In front of each eye is an oval panel crammed with sensory devices to guide it on its trail. In front of them is a wide, thin mouth, opening and closing on the thousand and one nourishing organisms going about their obscure little lives in that obscure world. Most are minute and it is a night’s work to swallow enough of them to keep the creature from being troubled by hunger after it retires to its hideout with the rising of the sun. But sometimes, with a snap, it will take a whole little fish, which will satisfy it for two or three days. And once in a while it might find the fish too big to be swallowed whole. Then it fastens its little teeth into the meat, and spins on its own axis until a mouthful is torn free.

It is a creature of secret places, and its ways are discreet. It hides in the mud, under stones and beds of weed, in the roots of trees, in the holes left by voles and in the crevices of lock gates and old bridges. By daylight you are likely to search for it in vain, unless the water is unusually clear, in which case you may discern that snout protruding from a shadow, that tail waving below a patch of weed. But you may be sure that it is there, somewhere; in this lake and every other lake, in every river great and small, every rivulet and streamlet, pond, dyke, ditch, mere, everywhere from harbours and the estuaries of rivers up to the farthest-flung trickle.