Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

MEXICO 21To any claim for precedence of the former over the latter, achampion of the Net demurs on the ground of climaticconditions, which he not unreasonably urges prevent anyproper analogy in this respect being drawn between them andour Cave Men.Touching the similarity of the Tasmanian to the Troglodyte,Ling Roth amplifies, especially as regards the material, etc.of the Spear, the evidence contained in Tylor's already quotedsentence. This in conjunction with Captain Cook's earlierstatement that the Tasmanians, while experts with the Spear,were ignorant of the use of a Hook, and, according to Wentworth,of a Net, would have gone far in helping our quest andin establishing the precedence of the Spear.Unfortunately the evidence of Lloyd and others that theseaborigines speared fish as a pastime, coupled with the factthat while they consumed crustacece they abstained (probablyfrom reasons of tabu or totem) from eating scaled fish, sharplydifferentiates their KuUur from that of our prehistoric fishermen" at whose bellies hunger was gnawing." iFrom Mexico, and especially from the representations inYucatan, I had hoped for new factors helping to solve ourproblem. First, because these had so far escaped the meticulousexamination of the Madelainian, and second, becausethey were the product of an ancient people, the Mayas, whoranked fish as an important item of their diet, and pursuedfishing with the Spear and the Net.With the Aztecs, who in the thirteenth century inheritedthe Maya culture, now dated as regards their architecture backto the first three centuries a.d.,3 the hook arrives, or ratherappears. Aztec skill in fishing stands well attested. Theirartificial fishponds or vivaria, and the importance which they^ Cook's Third Voyage, Bk. I. ch. vi. W. C. Wentworth, A Statistical,stc. Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, London, 1819,p. 115 ": They have no knowledge whatever of the art of fishing " ; the onlyfishing was done by women diving for shell-fish. G. T. Lloyd, Thirty-threeYears in Tasmania and Victoria, London, 1862, pp. 50-52. Ling Roth,op. cii., p. 75.^ No Maya hook has as yet been brought to light, although this wasemployed by practically all the races aboriginal or other from Alaska toPeru.' Cf . T. A. Joyce, Mexican Archcsblogy, London, 1914.