Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

58 INTRODUCTIONFor century after century the fishermen of the Isles havehanded down orally to generation after generation the Gaelicprayer with which they set out to sea.i" I will cast down my hook :The first fish which 1 bring upIn the name of Christ, King of the Elements,The poor man shall have for his need :And the King of the Fishers, the brave Peter,He will after it give me his blessing.Columba, tender in every distress.And Mary fair, the endowed of grace,Encompass ye us to the fishing bank of ocean,"And still ye to us the crest of the waves !The rarity—I have not met its mention—and curiousnature of a volume pubhshed at Frankfort in 1611, even ifmore than a century after The Boke of St. Albans, compelssome reference.ConjecturcB HalieuticcB by Raphael Eglinus consists of along dissertation based on the strange markings of threefishes (pictured on its title-page), two caught in Scandinaviaon the same day, November 21, 1587, and the third inPomerania on May 21, 1596, These markings, supposedlychronological, provide their author with a basis for variousprophecies and warnings of the evils to come in Central Europe,especially in Germany.As neither text nor type pecuHarly tempt to perusal, Ihave not found it easy to disentangle the disasters or aUot toeach country its individual woe. Deductions from Daniel,the patriarch Joseph, and of course the Apocalypse enableEghnus to establish definitely to his own satisfaction thefuture advent, in one or other of the Central Kingdoms, ofAntichrist.Nor, again, is it easy to gather whether a time-hmit is setfor his appearance, or whether the prophecies apply totwentieth-century events. Alas ! also, the data do notenable me with certainty from the very promising entries fromGermany, Austria, and Bulgaria to single out the precise1 Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gc^lica (Edinburgh, 1900), vol. i. p. 325.