The Book of Eels

The generations of eel men learned of its habits, and handed down their knowledge: where and when to lay traps, cast bait, stick spears; the influence of the seasons and the moon. Theirs was a closed world, and they had no need to write any of this down, even if they could. But they did have to talk to each other. And that is all that is available to the outsider – the varied vocabulary of eeling.

Thus, on the Severn, in Kent and in Lancashire, the eel spear was known as a shear or shar, in Wiltshire as a sticker, in Humberside as a stang or stang gad, in Yorkshire as a dilger, in Fenland as a pritch, in the Borders as a glaive, glave or gleve. That other favoured method, used for centuries all over the British Isles and Continental Europe, in which a ball of worms woven into a looped length of worsted or wool was lowered into a likely eel haunt, and sharply raised when its motions suggested the entanglement of teeth is, in the English translation of Friedrich Willem Tesch’s dense and scholarly study, The Eel, rendered as naring. On Sedgemoor it used to be known as clotting – a term employed in several other eel regions – or rayballing. Variants include patting, tatting, totting, sniggling, snigging, bobbing, bebbing, babbing, bubbing and broggling. Permanent traps for intercepting migrating silver eels were kiddles, or – much later, and particularly on the Thames – bucks. Terms for movable, baited pots included grig, putcheon, hive and wheel.

To the naked eye, the American eel, Anguilla rostrata, is no easier to distinguish from its European cousin, Anguilla anguilla, than a citizen of Milwaukee from one of Birmingham or Düsseldorf. They look the same, they behave the same, they taste the same, and for centuries they were prized for the same reasons. In his study of one of the Native American peoples of Maine, Penobscot Man, the ethnologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck included an eyewitness description of a fishing party at work in the early years of the twentieth century. It happened in August, when the berries of the poke bush are at their most toxic, before the eels stir on their quest for the sea. Five families of Penobscot came to the river; men, women and children. For two days they dug the roots of the Indian turnip that grew wild along the streams and in damp places. They mashed the roots and the pokeberries into a pulp on flat rocks, which ran purple with the juice. When they had enough, they spread out along a mile of river. At a signal they waded into the water, casting the pulp across the surface and stirring up the muddy bottom with sticks. As the poison took effect, the Penobscot were driven ashore, where they applied plantain leaves to soothe their inflamed skins and waited.

Torpid eels began to appear upon the surface, and before an hour had passed the surface was spotted with the bodies of dead and dying fish, which floated belly up. The children of the party, having recovered from their hurts, were forced to enter the water and bring the fish ashore, where they were skinned and salted by the women. After this the eels were placed upon dead limbs and laid in the sun for two days. Then they were hung up in a tent and smoked until there was no drip from the suspended bodies.

It was the way of the Penobscot to avail themselves of everything the shores and hinterland provided. In the spring they netted alewives, shad, salmon and sturgeon. They planted corn, beans and potatoes to be harvested in late summer. In June they came down to the sea to hunt seals and porpoises, and to gather eggs, baby seabirds, clams and lobster. In October they took to the woods, setting traps for muskrat and hare. They feasted at Christmas, then hunted moose and caribou, and later otter and beaver.

The eel had three seasons: summer, fall and winter. In summer they trapped them in baskets of woven splints, and poisoned them. In winter they speared them through holes in the ice, using a weapon eighteen or twenty feet long with outer prongs of hardwood and a central one of bone, later iron. And in between, when the silver eels made for the ocean with the coming of autumn, it was time to man the weirs. Up to a dozen families would camp at the places where the traps had been maintained by generations past. They made fences of willow and brush running downstream at an angle from each bank. Where the fences met, three trays of willow rods, ten feet long by seven wide by a foot deep, were fixed, one on top of the other, the rods spaced so that the biggest eels were caught in the top and the smallest in the bottom. Somewhere close at hand a pit was dug and lined with salt, into which the eels were thrown to rid themselves of their slime and die.

The highly nutritious flesh of the American eel was a staple in the diet of the Penobscot as it was for their neighbours, the Micmacs of Nova Scotia. Archaeologists have found an encampment at the southern end of Kejimkujik Lake in Nova Scotia, which dates back five thousand years and which they believe was used for seasonal eel fishing. Indeed all the Native American tribes scattered across the virgin lands of New England and the basin of the St Lawrence had reason to be thankful for the eel and to study its habits.

Although their territories lay towards the northern limit of the species’ range, the immensity of the St Lawrence – its mighty tidal displacement, the tens of thousands of miles of suitable habitat it offered – made it the greatest wild eel river system in the world. Its abundance of fish – not just eels, but salmon, sturgeon, shad, alewives and others – dumbfounded the first white settlers. The possibility that it could ever be exhausted or cease to provide could not have crossed their minds, or the minds of those who lived from it.

A riddle confronted the Jesuit missionaries who were dispatched to Canada during the seventeenth century to spread the Word of God in territories claimed by France – generally on rather tenuous grounds – as conquests. The land they called New France had clearly been shaped by God and provisioned by Him on the most lavish scale; yet was inhabited and enjoyed by people for whom it could not possibly have been intended since they were not even aware of His existence. It was evidently their duty to annexe it spiritually in the name of the Christian God, just as it was the duty of the military to do so temporally in the name of the King of France. But at least some of them had the wit to realise that the manner in which the ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ lived from the land and the water had an ordained appropriateness about it, however inscrutable the divine purpose might be; and had the sense to observe without condemnation, and to learn.

The process of annexation initiated by Samuel de Champlain when he founded Quebec in 1608 was problematic enough, the writ of France being in practice restricted to a scattering of well-guarded settlements on or near the St Lawrence River. The spiritual mission, begun by Franciscans in 1615 and subsequently pursued with typical energy and zeal by the Jesuits, was at least as hazardous and strenuous. The fathers endeavoured to spread the Word among the Abenakis of Acadia (now Maine); the Montagnais and lesser tribes of the lower St Lawrence; the Huron and their enemies the Iroquois; the tribes beyond Lake Huron, including the Beaver and the Cree; and the Sioux who lived along the Mississippi. They strove and suffered. Some were captured and tortured, many died. Sometimes they were listened to, often they were chased and harried. Sometimes they baptised.

However limited the success of the Jesuits – and the matter is complex and controversial – and whatever view we may take of the pursuit of the missionary principle among native peoples, there is reason to be grateful to those fathers of the black gown who laboured so heroically so far from home. In the form of the celebrated Jesuit Relations, the written records of their missionary work compiled by successive superiors in Quebec to be sent back to the headquarters of the order in Paris, they left an amazingly detailed and revealing commentary on the alien world into which they had been delivered. Although the ostensible purpose of the Relations was to keep the order informed about the progress of the mission, a great deal else found its way into their narratives. Indeed, one suspects that – as the fathers settled themselves in their birch-bark wigwams deep in the boundless wilderness, surrounded by people they necessarily regarded as godless primitives – they often found it easier to describe the wonders of the land and the extraordinary customs and practices of its inhabitants than to give a wholly objective account of how well they were doing.

The first of the Jesuit missionaries was Father Pierre Biard, who was sent on the orders of Henri IV to the settlement of Port Royal, on the coast of Acadia. Although the native Micmacs seem to have paid little heed to him, certain aspects of their way of life clearly made a favourable impression on him. ‘Never had Solomon,’ he wrote, ‘his mansion better regulated and provided with food than are these homes and their landlords. But then a greater one than Solomon has made them.’ Father Biard ate seal – ‘as good as veal’ – and bear – ‘which is very good’. The inshore waters and streams swarmed with herring, smelt, salmon, sturgeon and eels ‘good and fat’. ‘Anyone who has not seen it could scarcely believe it,’ he marvelled. ‘You cannot put your hand in the water without encountering them.’

The Acadia mission was a failure, and Biard, who had actually arrived in 1611, the year after Henri’s assassination, was captured by English raiders, eventually making his way back to France. In 1632 French rule over Canada was confirmed by treaty with England, and a Jesuit mission was established in Quebec under the leadership of Father Paul le Jeune. Over the next ten years le Jeune composed and compiled ten Relations for his superior in Paris, Father Jacquinot, who responded to the growing public interest in the New World by having them published. Le Jeune had taken the trouble to learn something of the language of the neighbouring Montagnais, and studied their way of life. It is clear from the attention he gives the subject that the eels of the tidal St Lawrence, and of the lakes and rivers feeding into it, represented a crucial source of food:

In regard to eels, they fish for them in two ways, with a weir and a harpoon. They make the weirs very ingeniously, long and broad, capable of holding five or six hundred eels. When the water is low, they place these upon the sand in a suitable and retired spot, securing them so they are not carried away by the tide. At the two sides they collect stones which they extend out like a chain or little wall …so the fish, encountering the obstacle, will readily swim towards the mouth of the net. When the sea rises it covers the net; then, when it falls, they go and examine it. Sometimes they find there are one or two hundred eels …When the sea is rough many of them are taken; when it is calm, few or none.

The fishing with harpoon, or spear, took place at night:

Two savages enter a canoe – one at the stern, who handles the oars, and the other at the bow, who, by the light of a bark torch fastened to the prow, looks around searchingly for the prey, floating gently along the shore of this great river. When he sees an eel, he thrusts his harpoon down …There are certain ones who will take three hundred in one night …It is wonderful how many of these fish are found in the months of September and October. It is thought that this great abundance is supplied by some lakes in the country further north, which, discharging their waters here, make us a present of this manna.

Other brothers used the same term to convey what struck them as the miraculous nature of this supply. Franco Bressani, who preached among the Huron in the 1640s and 1650s, spoke of the eel as ‘a manna exceeding all belief. One or two men, he claimed, could catch five or six thousand in a night, which – smoked or salted – could be kept all winter and ‘are much better than any eels in France’. ‘To tell the truth,’ he enthused, ‘this country is the Kingdom of water and of fish.’

The fishing methods observed by the first pioneers, traders and missionaries – and described in such careful detail by Father le Jeune – had been in use for many centuries before they came. A Canadian archaeologist, Chris Junker-Andersen, carried out an examination of a midden uncovered at an Iroquois seasonal camp on a creek close to the northern side of the St Lawrence, near the present-day town of Morrisburg. Radio-dating of carbon showed the camp to have been in use for at least four hundred years, up to the time the Iroquois – for reasons still not wholly understood – vanished from the St Lawrence valley at the end of the sixteenth century. Peaks of activity occurred in the middle of the twelfth century, towards the end of the fourteenth, and in the middle of the sixteenth. Study of the fauna remains indicated that the diet of the Iroquois using the camp included ten species of freshwater clam, four of turtles, nine of snails, at least sixteen of birds, more than twenty of mammals, and twelve of fish. The single most common vertebrate was A. rostrata. Chris Junker-Andersen believes the camp was established specifically to exploit the migration of the silver eel, and that its occupation would have been generally restricted to the fall. While some eels were consumed there and then, most would have been dried and smoked and transported elsewhere, to be eaten over the winter. Smoked eel, like biltong in southern Africa, would have been ideal travelling food.

When the first French explorer of Canada, Jacques Cartier, sailed up the St Lawrence in 1535, he encountered Iroquois along the upper reaches and commented on their reliance upon smoked fish, including eels, to survive the winter. By the time Champlain revisited the area, the Iroquois had been supplanted by their traditional enemies, Algonquian-speaking tribes such as the Weskanini and the Montagnais (or Innu). But the exploitation of the eel by age-old means continued throughout the St Lawrence system as far as the western end of Lake Ontario, where the Niagara Falls presented a barrier insuperable even for this assiduous traveller. It embraced groups of tribes divided by ancient enmities: Iroquois, Huron, Algonquian. And, as Junker-Andersen has demonstrated, even Huron people living along Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay – well beyond the limits of eel distribution – habitually travelled east in order to take part in seasonal fishing.

The establishment of the first colonial settlements along the eastern seaboard presaged a struggle between the great European powers – England, France and Holland – which would consume the ‘kingdom of water and fish’ along the St Lawrence and across the virgin lands to the south and south-west for a century and a half. By the agencies of warfare and disease, this struggle brought catastrophe to those who inherited it. If any of the invaders or their descendants had moral qualms about the holocaust unleashed upon the Native Americans, they generally kept quiet about them. In the case of the French and the Dutch, the paramount consideration in dealing with the Indian tribes was trade, particularly in furs; for the English it was to obtain land for settlement. Both came with the impregnable assumption that the indigenous people were not really human, and that to exploit, trick, slaughter and dispossess them was to secure for the true inheritors of the earth what was rightfully theirs. But, although it was customary to deride the ‘savages’ for their brutish habits, aspects of their way of life – in particular their genius for hunting and fishing – often aroused a genuine, if condescending, wonder.

Travellers’ tales of the marvels and terrors encountered in this wilderness were – however fanciful or incompetently written – immensely popular. One notably inept example was an account published in 1751 by John Bartram of a journey up the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania, through the lands of the Onondaga, to the Oneida River and Oswego on the shores of Lake Ontario. On the Susquehanna, Bartram found the Indians ‘cut a stick about three foot long and as thick as one’s thumb, they split it about a foot down, and when the eel is gutted, they coil it between the sides of the stick and bind the top close, which keeps the eel flat, and then stick one end in the ground before a good fire.’ Further north, on the Oneida, Bartram met Onondagas of genial disposition:

These Indians were very kind to us …In the morning they catched some stout eels and a great fish two feet [sic] long, it was round and thick, they strike them with long slender shafts 18 or 20 feet long, pointed at the end with iron …the two splints of wood spreading each side directs the point into the fish, which at a great depth would otherwise be difficult to hit.

Eel fishing was evidently of great importance to the Onondaga, one of the Iroquois peoples spread across the lands to the south of Lake Ontario who together formed the political confederation known as the Hotmonshonni, or League of Five Nations. Two years after Bartram’s book appeared, two German missionaries, David Zeissburger and Henry Frey, were entertained by an Onondaga chief called Otschinachiatha. He told them about his fishing weir, explaining that ‘each one has his own place where he is allowed to fish and no one is permitted to encroach …A chief is appointed to each fishing place, and he has his people who belong to him.’

The two brothers went downstream from Lake Oneida, until they came to a weir which ‘quite closed the river’, where a number of Onondaga were fishing. An opening through the obstruction was made on the orders of Chief Hatachsocu, and the travellers were given some dried eels in exchange for flour. They reached the Seneca River and another weir ‘where there were also Onondagas, who were very friendly and gave us eels.’

A nineteenth-century traveller, Christian Schultz, reported that eels were found in Lake Oneida ‘in the greatest abundance and are the finest and largest that I ever saw.’ Schultz described the weir constructed below the outflow from the lake, and the setting of the basket at its apex:

I was present when one of the baskets, which had been set overnight, was taken up; it filled two barrels and the greater part of the eels weighed from two to three pounds each. I have always been prejudiced against eating eels on account of a rancid taste …but, being prevailed upon to taste of these, I must declare that I have never before tasted any fish so delicious, without excepting even the salmon. A family who live at the outlet of this lake depend almost entirely on this eel fishery. They salt down about forty barrels a year, and find a very ready sale for them at ten dollars a barrel.

The Native Americans were the great catchers and consumers of the freshwater eel, and with their expulsion from the major waterways and general decline, interest in exploiting the species waned. There were pockets of aficionados – witness a ditty quoted in the official History of the Town of Windham in New Hampshire, published in 1883:

From the eels they formed their food in chief

And eels were called the Derryfield beef

It was often said that their only care And their only wish and their only prayer

For the present world and the world to come

Was a string of eels and a jug of rum.

But, broadly speaking, as the United States developed into a city-based society, the habit of eating freshwater fish withered. With the development of the rail network, almost all the population centres located within the eel’s distribution range became accessible to supplies of fish from the sea, which were regarded as being tastier and generally more appealing.

The same thing had already happened in England. The railway lines crept to every corner of the land, enabling the ports to dispatch fresh sea fish anywhere and everywhere. In the course of the nineteenth century the middle classes abruptly forsook the mundane flavours of carp, tench, pike and eels, and they have never returned to them. And within a couple of generations the economic and social chains which had tended to anchor age-old traditions in their particular regions began to give way to new, more potent forces. Thus, the narrator of Graham Swift’s Waterland – son of a Fenland lock-keeper and eel-catcher – becomes a teacher in Greenwich. The life of the eelman was associated with slime and fish smells, toil, unsociable hours, uncertain and meagre incomes. As regional diversity was eroded by upward mobility and creeping social homogeneity, so those quaint old ways were lodged in the museum of folk memory, to be sighed over nostalgically as belonging to a past which – as it recedes ever further from view – seems, at sentimental times, somehow quieter and less troubled.

Nowadays, glistening on the supermarket counter under the watch of staff in striped aprons, bogus boaters and regulation disposable gloves, are fish hoovered up by factory ships from every distant ocean of the world; beheaded, betailed, scaled, filleted, spirited across continents to be laid on beds of sparkling ice. To this generation, brainwashed into believing that the only good food is food cleansed of any vestige of its mucky history, the slithery eel comes with an image deficiency so acute as to disqualify it from polite society. The wonder is that there are any English eel fishermen left at all.7

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