Fishhook

“ This was called a fishing line, but was the only one of the kind seen. Fishhooks of the kind described, with a body of bone or ivory, which serves for a lure, armed with a spur or bent hook of metal, without a barb, seem to be the prevailing type amongst the Eskimo. In the region about Norton Sound (as shown by the extensive collections of Mr. Nelson and others) this is often converted into an elaborate lure by attaching pendants of beads, bits of the red beak of the puffin, etc. Crantz mentions a similar custom in Greenland of baiting a hook with beads.390
Fig. ”

“ In fly-fishing for large trout or bass the reel usually carries forty to fifty yards.
Hooks should be of the best quality to be had. Good hooks are still practically all made in England. Shapes which have received names are many, and most of them have advantages for particular kinds of fishing. Among the best are O’Shaughnessy, Limerick, Sneckbend, Aberdeen, and Sproat. The last-named we think will meet more 150kinds of need than any other one. As to size it should be remembered that the hook is to fit the bait, not the fish’s mouth; a very small fish can take any ordinary hook. ”

“ Fish-hooks are the other manufacture of Redditch. This has followed the needle in different stages of its development, from the crooked fish-bone to the crooked pin and from that to the present implement. In size and use they almost equal in variety the needle itself. Here are hooks for all waters and for all fish that swim in sea, lake, river, and meadow brooks—for sharks, cod, salmon, herring, trout, roach, and minnow. As there are more fresh-water fisheries in America than on all the other continents, a vast number of hooks go to the States and the British provinces. ”

“ The fish-hooks shown in our picture have been thought to be best adapted for, and really used in, capturing cod-fish in salt water, and perch and pike in inland lakes. The broken hooks I found were fully as large; and so the little brook that now ripples down the valley, when a large stream, must have had a good many big fishes in it, or the stone-age fishermen would not have brought their fishing-hooks, and have lost them, along this remnant of a larger stream. ”

“ A slick is the oil of the menhaden floating over the waves, and extended frequently by tide or current a long distance, attracts the bass, by suggesting to them that their prey is near at hand.{154}
Where the water is clear it is customary in rod-fishing, which is the only scientific mode, to use two hooks; the smaller, some two feet below the other is attached to a fine line or gut leader, and denominated without any apparent reason the fly-hook. Many of the best fishermen never use more than one bait, and where the fish are large and plenty, one is sufficient. ”

“ There was never a fish-hook [17] like it in the world before, and it was called “Ma-nai-i-ka-lani,” meaning “Made fast to the heavens.” He told no one about the wonderful fish-hook he had made for himself.
He had to get a different bait from any bait that had ever been used in the world before. His mother had sacred birds, the alae, and he asked her to give him one of them for bait. She gave him one of her birds.
Then Ma-ui, with his bait and his hook hidden, and with a line that he had made from the strongest olona vines, went down to his brothers’ canoe. ”

“ The selection of the hook depends mainly upon the fancy of the fisherman, and partly upon the locality of its destined use. If fish are scarce and shy, select one that will insure striking; if they are abundant, but strong and vigorous, choose one that will hold. In trout-fishing there are two that bear the palm in striking, the sneck bent and the Kirby bent Limerick; in holding a fish after he is struck, my preference is for Warren’s Lake-trout hook, which, however, does not make a handsome fly; for salmon-fishing, the O’Shaunessey Limerick is the general favorite. ”

“ The fisherman runs immediately to the bell, and finding thereby the particular line, hauls his prisoner in, but does not kill him; the hook being large, it generally catches him by the upper jaw, which is considerably longer than the under. He then pulls him out of the water, and puts a strong iron ring through his jaw, ties a few yards of cord to it, and fastens him to the shore, so he does with the rest. Very rarely one hook is found empty. ”

“ Some of the largest of these fish weighed quite up to 20 lbs., and were valued by the natives for their delicacy of flavour. They would always take a hook, but the Strong's Islanders seldom attempted to capture them in this manner, for their enormous, hard, sharp, and human-like teeth played havoc with an ordinary fish-hook, which, if smaller than a salmon-hook, they would snap in pieces, and as their mouths are very small (in fact the leather-jacket's mouth is ridiculous when compared to its bulk) , larger and stronger hooks could not be used. ”

“ The curved point approaches so closely to the shank that some persons have doubted their ever being used as fishing implements. It would probably be impossible to hook fish with hooks of this shape, but just such hooks have been brought from Pacific islands by travelers, who report that the natives are very successful with them in taking fish that bolt the hook instead of nibbling at it. No bait is used, as the hook itself looks somewhat like a worm. Twenty-eight dart-heads of bone and horn are here figured, most of which the author believes were armatures for fishing implements. ”

“ In fishing the Natural Minnow with two hooks, one of them must be large enough to pass through the body of the bait, going in at the mouth, and passing out at the tail; the other, rather larger than a May-fly hook, should go through the under, and pass out at the upper lip. In trolling with only two hooks, be careful to give your fish time to gorge, otherwise by striking too quickly, you will miss your prize by pulling the bait out of his mouth. With three or more hooks, which is termed fishing at snap, you cannot strike too soon as the fish is generally caught by one of the loose hooks. ”

“ The progressive order of hooks used by the Indians or their predecessors in title in North America was, after the simple device of attaching the bait to the end of a fibrous line, (1) a gorge, a spike of wood or bone, sharpened at both ends and fastened at its middle to a line; (2) a spike set obliquely in the end of a pliant shaft; (3) a plain hook; (4) a barbed hook; (5) a barbed hook combined with sinker and lure. This series does not exactly represent stages of invention: the evolution may have been affected by the habits of the different species of fish or their increasing wariness. ”

“ Sometimes the hook is used in shark fishing. The fishermen bait a hook, carry it out in a canoe in twelve feet or so of water, and bring the line back to land. Before very long a shark is nearly sure to seize the bait; and when the fish is fairly hooked, several men haul at the rope and drag the shark into shallow water, where it is allowed to flounce about until it is exhausted, and is then killed without difficulty. ”

“ When the bait used is one that presents two flat surfaces to the water, as would be the case with a strip of mackerel, a strong current will set it spinning round and round, thus causing the hook link to kink if it has not been fitted with a swivel, and the same effect is often produced by the spinning of a fish on the hook.
The employment of a suitable ground bait will often make a wonderful difference in the angler’s haul. It frequently attracts large numbers, keeping them near at hand for some considerable time, and apparently sharpens their appetite. ”

“ When two anglers have fish on at the same time, and in close neighbourhood, the excitement and fun are great. The tarpon's whole mouth, palate and jaws have not a suspicion of muscle or cartilage about them; all is solid bone, with only a few angles and corners where it is possible for the hook to take good hold. Unless the hook finds such a fold in the bones you are pretty sure to lose your fish—three out of four times. Probably by letting him gorge the bait you will get him all right, but it would entail killing him to get the hook out. ”

“ The other kind of hook is also made of mother-of-pearl, or some other hard shell: they cannot make them bearded like our hooks; but to effect the same purpose, they make the point turn inwards. These are made of all sizes, and used to catch various kinds of fish with great success. The manner of making them is very simple, and every fisherman is his own artificer: the shell is first cut into square pieces, by the edge of another shell, and wrought into a form corresponding with the outline of the hook by pieces of coral, which are sufficiently rough to perform the office of a file ”

“ The hook (made of bone or hard wood) is baited with salmon-roe. The Indians never use the roe fresh; dried in the sun it becomes extremely tough, and acquires a very rank oily smell. The fish take it greedily, and in this manner large numbers are captured.
Another bait equally fatal is made by cutting a small strip from the belly of a trout, and keeping the shiny part outermost—winding it tightly round the hook, from the barb, to about an inch up the line, securing it by twisting white horsehair closely round it. ”

“ Hooks without barbs and manufactured of such materials as pearl-shell and tortoiseshell may throw light upon the Homeric quotation "caught fish with the horn of the ox." In those far-off days, bronze wire rope, similar in design to the steel rope which is of common use in the present time, was employed. Ancient Greeks, though they anticipated one of the necessities of trade nowadays, depended upon fish-hooks resembling those just being abandoned by the Australian blacks. Fish are guileless creatures. ”

“ The tuna never jumps like the tarpon when hooked, he either rushes along below the surface or goes deep. There are 2000 fathoms of water round Avalon. His mouth is not hard like the tarpon, and the hook therefore goes well in; he apparently knows that he cannot shake it out by leaping in the air. Sometimes the hook tears out, but most fish are lost by breakage. It is perhaps more by the skill of the steersman and the quickness of the launch than by the merit of the fisherman that the capture is effected. When beaten, the fish is gaffed. ”

“ If the fishes are to be killed for our use, there is no way in which they are put to so little pain as in fly-fishing. The fish rises, takes your fly as though it were his ordinary food; the hook fixes in the hard gristly jaw, where there is little or no sensation. After a few struggles he is hauled on shore, and a tap on the head terminates his life; and so slight is the pain or alarm that he feels from the hook, that I have over and over caught a trout, with the fly still in his mouth which he has broken off in his struggles an hour or even half an hour previously. ”

“ When a salmon is seen the hooks are simply thrown beyond it, then gently dragged until they come immediately beneath; when a sharp click sends them into the soft under parts of the fish, which is then dragged out. As the pike, which is one of nature's poachers, is injurious to our interests as well as those of the angler, we never miss an opportunity of treating him in the same summary manner. Of course, poaching with click-hooks requires to be done during the day, or by the aid of an artificial light. ”

“ While he rushes away from and toward and around and under the boat, and while he is leaping from the water and turning somersaults with ugly shakes of his head, in efforts to dislodge the hook, there is at the other end of the outfit a fisherman, tortured by the fear of infirmity lurking somewhere in his tackle, and wrought to the point of distress by the thought of a light hook hold in the fish’s jaw, and its liability to tear out in the struggle. ”

“ A Woods and Forests' man on board told me he had recently caught a similar fish on a small fly rod; it weighed five pounds and leapt like a sea-trout, but no one apparently knows much about the possibilities of fishing here with rod and modern tackle. We then got a hand-line and a cod-hook from the engineer, and baited with squeezed bread, the size of a pigeon's egg, and fished on the bottom, and almost at once had on a heavy fish. It pulled tremendously and got a lot of line out, and wandered up and down the middle of the river; on a salmon rod it would have played long and heavily. ”

“ But the most interesting natural fish-hook known to me (found in Goodenough Island, New Guinea) is the thick upper joint of the hind leg of an insect, Eurycantha latro, furnished, however, only by the male, who is endowed with the long, stout recurved spur, suitable for fishing. The leg joints and therefore the hooks got from them (about 15⁄8 inches long) are supplied ready made by Nature: they merely require to be fastened to a tapered snood of twisted vegetable matter for immediate employment. ”

“ I once saw four splendid chub, all caught with similar hooks; and on several occasions I have caught good perch with roach hooks. If the novice will only remember not to allow slack line when playing a good fish on a small hook, provided the tackle is good and strong, a fish should seldom escape. Beginners often use hooks three times too big for the fish they are after, and it goes without saying, that the smaller the hook the finer the gut should be; for a small hook on thick, coarse gut is not to be thought of. ”