Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

2NETS—" THE MILLION-WORKER " 459wonder and of our space. " Fishermen (we are told) used toput the hair of small monkeys on the four corners of theirnets, by which means they succeeded in taking large numbers.It is said that the fish seeing the hair were attracted towardsit, as a man to embroidery " ^!The infrequent mention of what was probably the oldestfishing implement of Palaeolithic man, the Spear, admits ofno satisfactory explanation. For some reason the Chineseseem to have employed the Spear-harpoon but rarely.Pictures of fishing in T'u shu Encyclopcedia (extracted froma work of the sixteenth century a.d.) confirm this view. Ifnumbers be any test, the Spear found least favour—it is representedbut once—while the Rod appears four, and the Netseventeen times.Lu Kuei-meng, the Izaak Walton of China, in his book ofthe ninth century a.d., does, it is true, include spearing [ch'aiyu) with a four-pronged weapon among other fishing methods,such as shooting with bow and arrow {she ch'ien) and drivinginto shallow water with the aid of a wooden rattle [niing lang)for stockade work. A curious variation of the spear-harpoon(hsien) was an iron instrument having at the end of a bambooa cock's spur, which was used for iguanas.The Chinese were evidently familiar with our Otter, i.e. aline carr3ang hooks at short intervals, and fastened at eitherend. The Yo Yang feng t'u chi, a work of the Han Dynasty(about the time of the Christian era)expressly states that thismethod, with the Kne made fast across a river between twoboats at anchor, accounted for many big fish.But enough evidence has, I beheve, been adduced toprove that the Sinitic piscator had little to learn of his craft.He apparently lacked Oppian's pantomimic but scarcelyaromatic method of clothing himself in the skin of a she-goat,probably because he lacked its victim, the salacious Sargus.If he knew not ^Elian's pneumatic device of capturing the eelby the aid of a sheep's bowels, he was no ignoramus of thehabits of the MurcenidcB, for he watched carefully and waited1 Ibid., p. 251.2 Ch 'u hstieh chi. Ibid., p. 281.2 H