Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 9/Sharks and congers
SHARKS AND CONGERS.
It is not long ago that I was staying with a friend at the Land’s End. We had taken a little house about a quarter of a mile from Sennen Cove, and had tried most of the sports of the place, such as fowling, shooting, and fishing in the bay or from the rocks, but we had not yet been able to have an expedition against the larger fish, for which these waters are famous. They are only fished for at the dead tides, as they inhabit such deep water, and the currents are so strong at the edge of that branch of the Gulf stream, that it would be impossible for the leads to reach the bottom or a bite to be felt. The weather had been roughish for a month, but was tolerably calm now, and meanwhile our imagination had been inflamed by wonderful tales told by the Cove “sea-dogs” in their languid Cornish drawl, while we all sat or lay on the shingle smoking and longing for an east wind. They had told us of horrible sounds heard through a fog, which at last rolled away in the moonlight and showed a whale attacked by threshers: one had been chased by grampus, a “school” of which clumsy fish had insisted on following his boat, probably meaning to have a game of play with it, till he thought of throwing out some bloody water and insides of fish, which frightened them off. Another man had gone to fish by the Longships Lighthouse, and in the shallow water saw fish twenty feet long, “speckled and spotted, and with snouts and long saws on their noses,” chasing the cod and coal-fish. Then we had long heard of boats coming back from a night at the Seven Stones, laden with congers to the gunwale, for the Seven Stones are a favourite haunt of the big fish, which find abundant food in the seaweed round these granite columns, which rise far above the surface in forty fathoms of water.
There are several columns of rock like the Seven Stones in these parts, round all of which there is abundance of fish. Not to dwell on the seven rocks, on the highest of which stands the Longships Lighthouse, or the small rock near them called the Shark’s Fin, there is the celebrated Wolf Rock, nine miles out, on which they are attempting to raise a lighthouse, and which had once a huge bronze wolf with open mouth upon it, which was to warn sailors by the roars and bellowings of the wind in its throat. The Seven Stones are twenty-one miles from the shore, but amply repay a long sail to them. A gentleman lately there came back with 112 congers of different sizes. Another fisherman is said to have come back with his boat perfectly full, which would hold about two tons of fish.
My friend C unluckily could not come that day; but I started off for the bay, with my roughest clothes and a thick great coat, carrying a basket well stocked with beef, whiskey, and tobacco. There, as I had been told, I found all hands “lying like great pigs in the sun,” and determined not to fish that day: for, unless it is such fine weather as to drive them for very shame, they do not go out till there is nothing in the cupboard at home. Partly, however, excited by the prospect of meat and spirits, partly by finding that one of their number had all along secretly determined to try his luck, one Billy Penrose and his sons prepared to come with me, on condition that if it got rough I was to be content with catching one conger and then go home. When one started the rest were all activity, for in Cornwall, where a joke lasts a long time, it would never do to give one man a chance of crowing over the rest for the next few years. About one o’clock p.m. we all started, with as much shouting and swearing as if the whole Channel fleet were called out for active service at half an hour’s notice. As we danced over the waves with full sail, Billy took the opportunity of praising his two sons, who were then fighting at the other end of the boat. “Them’s two nobble lads, sir, and I’ve giv them so much learning as a fayther should do, sir; but (be still lads!) so careless they would kill a man in a minute, and never think no more about it at all, sir—that’s what they be.” The noble lads were rather a bore sometimes, when they would fight just at the wrong moment, but they certainly understood their trade well enough. When we were about nine miles from land we anchored, and fished for bait; the water being deep and having a sandy bottom, was a good place for gurnards, and also, unluckily, for dog-fish. These last pestered us not a little, snapping off the gurnards sometimes just as they were near the surface: so that after pulling up 200 feet of line, one got only the head of a “tubb” or a “soldier.” The tubbs are the large gurnards, with blue wing-like fins, the soldiers are smaller fish, with scarlet backs and white bellies. By the time the sun was low on the horizon, we had about a hundred fish for bait, besides “dogs” large and small, and a peculiarly unpleasant-looking fish called a “nuss.” This is a sort of dog-fish, not bluish-grey, but yellow, with brownish spots all over it, and without the sharp claw or spine on the dog-fish’s back. The clouds were gathering and the breeze was rising, and Penrose and sons wished to return, but I was determined to hold to my bargain and catch at least one conger. They held out fearful prophecies of having to beat about in the Channel for a day or two, and steer for Scilly or Penzance according to the wind; but finding that I really wanted to fish, they prepared for work. While we are sailing along a few miles to the nearest conger-ground, I may say a few words on the fish itself. There are two varieties at the Land’s End, the black and the white, but this seems to arise only from the difference of their habits. The black conger is never found in more than fifteen fathoms water, and this is also the limit of the large oar-weed. Those fish which hunt under the shadow of these weeds are black, those which live in the deep water (which averages forty fathoms from Land’s End to Scilly) are pale brown on the back. The people catch a good many at the entrance of bays with the “spillers,” and I have myself caught a fine fish on some spillers which we had laid down in the sandy bay for turbot and plaice.
The young congers hang about the rocks, which are bare at low tide, and in dabbling about for “whistlers and pettifoggers” one is often surprised at pulling out from his hole a vigorous young conger. Perhaps people in general do not know what whistlers and pettifoggers are: they are the different species of rockling, the whistlers or four-bearded rockling averaging about six inches in length, and being of a dark colour; the pettifogger sometimes reaching eighteen inches, and of a pale reddish colour, with spots. This last is a preternaturally ugly fish, but, like his brother the whistler, is most delicate eating, when fried. They are caught at low water, when the waves are just keeping the holes under the rocks full. You must find a rock with a free passage under it to the sea, and with a dark hole. Thrust in a withy-stick with a crab-baited hook, and you may catch a succession of these fish, who catch hold of the worsted round the bait, and if they drop off before you get your basket under them, will come again with a greedy rush to get before the small fry, which nibble the bait, such as gobies and blennies, and what they call there the toad-fish.
After this digression, we may return to our fishing twelve or thirteen miles out, with the sky black in the west, and a breeze inclined to get up. Down went the lines, forty fathom of thick cord, bound round for six feet above the two hooks with copper wire: the hook itself was of enormous size, and baited with half a bream twisted round it. After one or two false alarms I felt a good tug at mine, and hauled: up came a brace of very large cod. There are, besides the common cod, the ground or silver cod and the red cod, but not in any great numbers. The cod about there are not of much value, seldom running above an average of thirteen pounds, and being rather coarse in flesh; they are not much sport to catch, except near the shore with small tackle, when, unless you coax them very gently up to the gaff, they flap their tail and go with your tackle. In a minute or two young Penrose got a bite, and lost the fish: this shows that they are difficult to catch, for he is a first-rate fisherman, and understands the fish’s ways as well as most. Then a little pull at my hook,—very faint: I struck hard, and pulled in a couple of fathoms.
“What is it, Billy? Conger, cod, or skate?” handing him the line.
“That ’m a dog, sir; they’ve found us out, worse luck!” was the answer.
However, I hauled in hard, and was delighted to find no dog-fish, but a “handy conger,” that is, about sixteen pounds weight.
The weather was now clearing up, and we lit pipes, took a pull at the brandy, and made up our minds for work.
Young Billy caught a ling next, a fish which is very good to eat in steaks, but is not very nice to look at: it has a very unpleasant smell, and looks like a cod-fish in a consumption and pulled out long. After this we began to catch fish in good earnest, pulling in cod, conger, and ling, till all of a sudden I felt a tremendous jerk, and began to pull up with the utmost difficulty. That quarter of an hour was certainly hard work, kneeling at the end of the boat, pulling the line in over the gunwale, and cutting the skin from the inside of one’s hands. The others came round and looked on with great interest.
“I can’t tell what it is,” I gasped; “just feel the line, Billy!”
He took it in his hand, and shouted:
“Pull away, sir, I know; heave ’m up, heave ’m up, I know what the beast is!”
Then a flash through the water, and a sight of some monster, like an enormous mackerel, darting from one side to the other, and nearly pulling one’s arms from the sockets. It was a blue shark, nearly nine feet long. Billy fetched a small axe and a knife, and we had a most exciting struggle with him, now getting a cut at his head, now holding on while he darted round the head of the boat. In the end, we got him in, mashed a good deal about the head, but still flapping hard with his powerful tail. This was one of the finest sharks they had seen about there lately: for though there are much bigger ones about, they cannot be caught with the conger-lines. Once the fisherman got hold of some enormous fish, whether large porpoise, shark, or some skate, like that caught by the Eddystone, which weighed a quarter of a ton, he of course could not tell; but three men could not move it, and at last the creature gave a steady pull, and went off with line, hook, copper wire, and all.
These sharks are by no means so uncommon about our coast as many people suppose. Not only are they seen at Land’s End (where I have noticed a huge back-fin working along quite close to the shore), but along the South Devon coast. We have heard this year of a regular family of sharks hanging about the Isle of Wight, and occasionally one has ventured near enough to the Brighton beach to frighten ladies from their morning dip. Not long ago, at Exmouth, a friend of mine caught a small shark on the spiller-lines, and managed to kill him and bring him home, after nearly capsizing the boat.
There are several different sorts of sharks occasionally seen by Land’s End. The huge basking-shark, which has attained the length of twenty or even thirty feet, according to the books, though his proper home is further up St. George’s Channel, sometimes floats about in these waters: but, as he only feeds on jelly-fish, and does not break into the nets or chase away the other fish, he is not much hated or noticed by the Covemen. Then there is the blue shark, our old friend, who is very destructive to the fish, and drives them from the baits; the fishermen hate him very hard, and refuse positively to eat a slice of him. This is the worst insult they can pay any creature, for I believe they do or would eat any other. I told one of them how sailors are often rather glad to try a slice of shark beef, and he replied with profound disgust:
“Sir! I would just so soon eat a slice of the old devil!”
And I believe him. However, I never saw them torturing one deliberately, as the Welsh fishermen will put pins or thorns in the eyes of a dog-fish, and turn him out, or as these very men treat the skates; they dislike these last for being very heavy and very profitless, besides entangling all the lines with their struggles. When the skate comes up at last with his nose out of water, sighing and grunting, they as often as not cut the hook clean out of him, and let him sink or swim away if he can.
Besides these there are the Fronken shark, the Porbeayle or Beaumaris shark, the fox or ape shark (a rare fish, with one flap of his tail prolonged out of all proportion), and the usual small fry of dog-fish, of various kinds, among which are the small spotted dog or nuss (corrupted from its Scotch name Robin Huss), the large spotted dog, the shark-ray or monk or angel, the blackmouthed dog, and the tope or miller’s dog (le milandre of Cuvier). These, of course, are much smaller, though I have caught a grey dog more than five feet long; and though, in the narrow seas, a fish of nine feet seems very large, yet he is a mere baby compared with the tropical sharks, the Port Royal shark, the enormous hammer-head, or that still more monstrous creature which was caught near Aden not long ago, I mean one which was hauled in by all hands on a steamer bringing back soldiers from Pekin, and which was said to measure forty-one feet.
After we had killed our shark, the dead of the tide came on, in which very few fish bite. The bait hangs quietly at the bottom, and, even if a fish touch it, hardly moves: so that at this time of the night it requires a very practised hand to recognise the gentle vibration caused by some large fish playing with the hook. Of course, unless one does make sure somehow, and without striking hard, the fish blows the bait out of his mouth when the hook pricks him, and comes no more. Even at other times it is sometimes impossible to tell if the fish is on, as a large conger will swim up with the bait, and only begin to kick when close to the surface.
It was very dark now, and we were obliged to keep a sharp look-out for steamers. We carried a lantern and lots of candle-ends, not wishing to be run down by some Liverpool vegetable-steamer, or Frenchman. The fishermen say that they are sometimes in great danger from the neglect of the sailors, who do not attend to the shouting and the light in some rather foggy nights. They told me that they liked American vessels least and the French best of all they saw; because the Americans, they said (unfoundedly, as I suppose), would occasionally tie their helm and go to sleep; they liked the French, because they often stopped to buy fish for money or grog.
The Land’s Enders have an idea that few English and no French can catch fish at all like them, and if you want to provoke their scorn, tell them of Welsh or French conger-fishers. Foreigners, they say, they cannot abide, and by foreigners they mean especially Welsh, Irish, Manxmen, and French. Of these they hate the Welsh most, since they enter into competition with them sometimes in the mines and other rough work across the Channel. The Welsh do not like Cornish labour being brought in to reduce the price, and try to make their life a burden to them. They go over to Ireland for the herring fishery, and have an amusing idea of the dirt of Ireland. One of them gravely assured me that he had to drag his new Jersey frock behind his boat from Kingston harbour to Land’s End, to clean it. I tried to express deep sympathy and joy that it was not spoilt by the remedy or its cause. They get on much better with the Manxmen, who do not, however, mix much with their Cornish visitors; but they look with a friendly eye on the French sailors. I heard one with great pride telling how he had sold a skate, of a hundred weight, to a French ship, at a halfpenny a pound, whereas the whole fish was hardly worth bringing back to their village, being at most worth sixpence, as they do not value the London dish of crimped fins of skate. Some fishmonger might possibly make a good thing of buying up these skates for almost nothing, as the railway comes within eleven miles of the village. They have evidently not heard of the Breton conger fishery, as I heard a story (solemnly vouched for) of two French fishers who caught a conger, and were in bodily fear of their lives at the other end of the boat, thinking they had caught some water-devil, till the beast jumped out, when they cut the line and gave up fishing for evermore.
I was sorry not to catch more than one sort of skate that night, as there are here, I believe, two species of skate, besides the ray, and what is called the Calbijana ray. I do not know what this last is. The fishers do not get the rays as large as the skates, which run from one to two or three hundredweight, and occasionally, as in the Eddystone skate (to which I alluded before), to a still larger size, reminding us of stories of krakens and live floating islands in the North Seas, with which Bishop Pontoppidan and many a Norsk fisherman regale us. The Land’s Enders are too practical to have belief in many sea-superstitions; to them seals are seals,—not enchanted princes, as in Irish legends, or mermaidens, as in Norse folk-lore,—and a “school” of porpoise or grampus is not there eagerly mistaken for a sea-serpent playing on the surface. Like other sailors, they have a wholesome dread of “Davy Jones” and “Old Nick ;” but there is nothing like Nipen the fog-spirit, Mölnir, the demon in the surf, or Uldra, the water-spirit, who must have victims from time to time.
I think most of the wild superstitions that remain in Cornwall are connected with the mines, where “the Jews are heard knocking” with the old flint and deer-horn tools, which are found sometimes. The legend is, that after the taking of Jerusalem many thousand Jews were sent to work the mines, some of which (as Botallack) were then at work. People quote the name of Marazion, or Market-Jew, as meaning “the bitterness of Zion,” and others say that Perran-Zabuloe (i.e., in sabulo) is a Hebrew word. Be that as it may, there are many legends about the Jews among the people, which may be accounted for by the fact that the Jews in early English times certainly flocked here to trade in the tin and copper.
The inhabitants of Sennen Cove have fewer legends of any sort than those of the surrounding villages, which arises probably from this, viz., they are said by the others, and hardly deny the accusation, to be a mixed colony from other parts with many un-Cornish elements among them, e.g., Flemish, from the time that a Flemish colony was planted in Pembrokeshire; nevertheless they have many fine old Cornish names among them, such as Penrose, Pender, Trewhella, Trudgeon, and others: these no doubt are old native families. Though I have shown that there is not much real folk-lore to be picked up among them, nor yet much historical legend,—for they keep no dim remembrance of the days when Cornish insurgents, led by a Land’s Ender, fought the King on Blackheath for young Perkin Warbeck, A.D. 1497; nor of the song of Trelawney; nor the loss of Sir Cloudesley Shovel and the British fleet at Scilly; not even whence came the cannon in the sand of the Cove over which they run their boats to the sea,—yet they will tell many a story of more modern life, as you sit smoking on the beach, or at the slack tide out at sea. Then is the time to hear for the hundredth time the story of the wreck on the Brissons, when they took out the life-boat from the Cove, and to have it explained by the actors in that scene how the captain’s wife was dragged through the water at the wrong moment and drowned, and how any of them would have done it better and saved her life. Then you hear how an India ship broke up on the shore, with all hands lost, and how they were buried close by in the turf, by some very apocryphal Government order. Or how all the fishers were caught in a storm and driven to Scilly for three days, while the women in the Cove were mourning the loss of all their husbands and sons at once; how son Billy took the old shag’s nest, or caught a loon, and another was dragged along by a huge sunfish in the net. All this and more of fish-talk and sea-stories pass the time very pleasantly, till some big fish sets you all to work again. So it happened when we were out this night, for I was lucky enough to hook a very large conger, which thoroughly woke us all up. In hauling up I was inclined to think it was another shark from its weight, but the pull was too steady. A shark gives quick darts from side to side, and acts in the water (as if he were what he resembles a little) like a magnified mackarel. A skate, when he first takes the bait, scuds away among the rocks at the bottom, and, to judge from the jerks of the line, must have a hard time of it below bumping over the stones; but when the skate is some way from the ground, then his resistance is indeed desperate. He keeps himself flat against the water so as to offer the greatest possible amount of resistance, occasionally giving a rush back, and giving the fisherman hard work to recover the lost ground. A conger, on the other hand, gives a long steady strain, occasionally, as I have said, swimming up rather faster than you are pulling. This particular Grandfather of congers, after pulling frightfully hard for a long time, came rushing up at last to the surface, and leaped about there. In the general excitement the fisherman had neglected to bring the big knife from the other end, and there was not time to get it, for our fish might give a great leap and get the hook out or break the line. Between us we got him in, but he instantly knocked over the fisherman with his tail, and left me holding on to his throat and the line, about a foot from the mouth. Of course the fish and I fell down in the boat, the fish dashing about, and I holding on to prevent a leap, and carefully holding his head away as far as possible. These congers have terrible jaws, and a large one like this could have bitten off a man’s arm. I must do them the justice to say that they only seem in a horrible fright, and not at all disposed to attack; but I have seen men’s hands very nastily torn, who got too near a conger which had been left for dead. Billy soon came up with the knife, and released me from the slimy embrace, and we got the beast’s head down on a thwart and cut through the back-bone. This conger was the biggest which they had seen for some time in those parts; it measured exactly six feet six inches in length, and was very thick, being about twenty inches round the neck. The weight was about one hundred pounds.