The Book of Eels
Tom Fort

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2002. This updated William Collins edition published in 2020.

Copyright © Tom Fort 2002

Tom Fort asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007115938

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780007394692

Version: 2020-06-23

Praise

THE BOOK OF EELS

‘Fort is always readable, often spectacularly good …his research doesn’t read like the stuff that bulks up a book for no obvious reason.’

Independent

‘The strength of Fort’s book arises from the fact that he’s a fisherman, and writes like one. He approaches the eel as a mystery and loves the places it is found.’

Guardian

‘A fascinating, beautifully written and deeply peculiar book. It is more than a scientific detective story, it is a rich concoction of different genres, part social history and part autobiography, seasoned with culinary tips. But this book is also a lament for a vanishing way of life.’

New Scientist

‘In this wonderful book, Tom Fort elevates Anguilla anguilla from the lowly to the exalted, and along the way gives us a lot to think about. Fort has written a celebration of eel-lore, and you can ignore this book only if you are not interested in a multitude of insights about the way the natural world works. The Book of Eels is a delightful surprise; Fort does wonders with his esoteric and fascinating subject.’

Times

‘A charming examination of the genus anguilla. Fort’s enthusiasm for the mysterious eel is infectious. This is a cut above the staple non-fiction fare.’

Scotland on Sunday

‘What a joy, a whole book on eels. It’s a very good book too, and a very English book …What is really tremen dous is that it is a book in the English amateur tradition. The author knows his stuff but he is no scientist. He is an amateur. He is one of us. Because he is an amateur he can write a book that defies the normal professional and disciplinary boundaries, a book that leaves out the boring bits. I suppose it is inevitable that someone will call this book “enchanting”. Take no notice. Buy it anyway. Give it to someone you like or, for even more fun, to someone you don’t.’

Spectator

‘After Mark Kurlansky’s elegant and erudite Cod, there swims hot on the fins, the even more elegant and erudite Book of Eels. Readers will not fail to be awestruck …It should certainly be read by all those who are fascinated by the life we find underwater.’

Daily Mail

‘This is a fantastic and fascinating tale, told with a great sense of atmosphere, and I for one did not expect to be shedding a surreptitious tear at the telling of the eels’ Sargasso Sea odyssey. Unbelievably poignant.’

The Field

‘A celebration of the extraordinary natural history of Anguilla anguilla, the European eel, along with the richly sinuous weave of the eel’s relationship to man (not, perhaps, woman, unless the eel is offered filleted and utterly inert) …Tom Fort’s cameos of their shadowy, weedy water-world are beautifully written and often moving.’

Irish Times

‘Tom Fort has devoted years of research to his subject and the result – as with all his writings – is both impressive and entertaining …the Fortian persona …makes him the Alan Bennett of the angling scene.’

Literary Review

‘Has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster, and then some …the story that Tom Fort tells demands the broad canvas of the big screen …it’s got everything going for it: sex, exotic locations, a heartwarming saga of family values …The Latin name of this saline cheese straw is anguilla anguilla: so good they named it twice …It would be a pity if the story of the eel became the one that got away.’

Observer

‘This is a captivating study …Tom Fort is incapable of writing a dull sentence.’

Financial Times

‘Tom Fort tells the story of the eel in such a way that we cannot fail to share his passion …what an astounding story it is!’

The Tablet

FOR HELEN

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

PREFACE

ONE My eel

TWO A dainty dish

THREE By diverse means

FOUR Genesis

FIVE Searching

SIX Challenge

SEVEN Leaving

EIGHT Homecoming

NINE Babies

TEN Sweet Thames

ELEVEN Queen of the lagoon

TWELVE Racks and pots

THIRTEEN Fishermen of Neagh

EPILOGUE A lament

A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

ENDNOTES TO THE 2020 EDITION

INDEX

Acknowledgments

About The Author

By The Same Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

A long time ago I sat down to write a book about an extraordinary creature found in every part of Britain, across much of Europe and along the coasts of north Africa and North America, which most people have never seen and are unaware of. The result was The Book of Eels and I wrote a preface (slightly modified here) to explain why I had taken the trouble:

‘It is a creature of mystery, the freshwater eel, with few admirers and fewer friends. Yet for as long as I have been stirred by rivers and lakes and the life within them – which is as long as I can remember – I have been intrigued by this extremely common, little known and little understood fish. While working on this book that fascination became consuming, so that eels annexed my thoughts and infested my dreams. Whenever I crossed a bridge or glimpsed water from the road or train, I tried to picture the dark, slender shapes hugging the mud. But the images were indistinct. It is easy to see, in the mind’s eye, a salmon resting behind a rock, a trout sipping down an insect between two trails of green weed, a chub or barbel swaying in the current where the willow branches dip. With the eel, the best I could do was to say to myself, ‘I know you’re down there somewhere.’ At night, though, they came into the open. They slithered through my sleep, backs green and brown, bellies yellow and pearly silver, snouts questing, tails undulating, a restless presence in my rest.

In writing this book I have sought to share something of my own fascination, and to encourage some appreciation of this not-at-all-appreciated creature. I wanted to tell of its unusual physiology and highly individual life cycle and convey my own sense of wonder at its uniquely extended and perilous travels. I wanted to celebrate the qualities of its flesh and its high reputation among discerning chefs. Most of all I wanted to leave a record of our co-existence with it – how, as the eel has gone about obeying its biological commands, we through studying its patterns of behaviour have exploited it while doing it no harm.

There is a temptation in every age to see its changes as a taking of the wrong path, a turning away from values of proven worth, and to prophesy doom. Often those prophecies turn out to have been false. So I may be wrong – I hope I am wrong – in fearing that we are losing something irreplaceable in the dislocation between our all-consuming consumer society and the world around it.

It is not that we actively seek to corrupt or destroy it. It is that, not understanding enough about how it works, we do not know what we are doing. We clamour for more living space and ease of travel, so the countryside is devoured by houses and roads. We are told until we come to believe it without question that it is our right to have cheap food, so our farmland is despoiled and our livestock mutated into freaks. Then we wonder: where are the skylarks, where are the hedges, where are the water meadows and the water voles and the cod and the salmon? And we ask: how is that we – the richest, best-educated, most sophisticated in the history of our planet – seem so powerless to mend our ways?

Fish and fishermen are early casualties. Fishermen take what the waters provide and when they cease to provide the fishermen cease to exist. I have always been a lover of fish,and I have tried to educate myself about their world. But for me it is an amusement, albeit a consuming one, a part of my life; whereas for fishermen it is a way of life and a matter of survival. For thousands of years the freshwater eel was hunted and eaten because of its easy availability and because it is good to eat. There are still a few eel catchers left, the last in a long line, but they will be gone before too long and that relationship will be over.

For the sake of convenience as well as personal preference, I have largely confined myself to dealing with the two Atlantic species: the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, and the American eel, Anguilla rostrata. This is not because the other dozen or so species in the world are uninteresting or undocumented. But to attempt to do justice to the entire genus would require a work of Proustian proportions and run the risk of forfeiting the attention of even the most sympathetic of readers. In retrospect I am acutely aware of things I didn’t do, or couldn’t, which I wish I had. For instance, I wish I had been better as an eel catcher, and I wish very intensely that I could have looked into that strangest of birthplaces and graveyards, the Sargasso Sea. But there is only so much one can do – even for an eel.’

I think that still reads quite nicely, and I don’t have a great deal to add almost twenty years later. The Book of Eels was my third book and has been followed by several more. In many ways it remains my favourite, even though it cannot be said to have been a resounding commercial success. Those that liked it seem to like it very much indeed, and even today I occasionally encounter an admirer whose warm words make me glad that I took the trouble I did over it.

The broad thrust of the story has not changed at all. As well as accompanying eel fishers all over the place and immersing myself in the old books, I spent many arduous and intermittently rewarding hours poring over literally scores of scientific papers concerning the fish and its idiosyncratic ways. That scientific attention has been maintained, and the literature has grown even vaster. Some light has been shone and some misconceptions have been addressed, but the chief elements of the narrative are the same. The one drastic change to the eel landscape was its adoption onto the Red List of endangered species, and the consequent decision of the EU to ban exports of both infant and adults outside the union. Brexit is very likely to cause a further major upheaval, but that is for the future.

For this new edition I have taken the easy way and dealt with the changes and developments that seem to me noteworthy by means of endnotes. I have tidied up a few textual infelicities, corrected some mistakes and made some very minor cuts. The one significant change to the main text is at the very end, where I have rewritten the review of the plight of the American and European eel using research data from 2019.

Quite a number of those that I thanked for their help in the first edition are no longer alive, and I do not think I have to repeat those acknowledgements in full. I would like to express my gratitude to Thomas Nielsen, Peter Wood of UK Glass Eels, Pat Close of the Lough Neagh Fishermen’s Cooperative and Dai Francis of the Severn and Wye Smokery for their insights into the current state of the eel market – any mistakes are mine, not theirs. I would like to say thank you again to my agent, Caroline Dawnay, to Susan Watt, who was my editor at that time and who gave me wonderful support and crucial help and to my wife Helen, to whom the book was and is dedicated.

ONE My eel

I did not care for biology lessons. The classroom was dark and cold, the air still and musty, smelling of feet and adolescence and old dissections. One gowned pedagogue after another would stand before us, droning on about photosyndiesis or cell structure or some such stuff Occasionally we would be given slices of an apple to cut up. Along the corridor was the school museum, which contained – among a mass of mouldering and moulting examples of the taxidermist’s art – a cat with two heads and a duck with four legs. But I cannot remember our studies ever embracing animals, alive or stuffed. I can remember nothing beyond diagrams on the blackboard and bits of browning apple on my desk.

If only the fusty old fool had told us the story of the eel! It would have roused us from our preoccupation with our spots and blackheads, our gnawing and constant hunger, our almost equally disturbing anxieties as to whether we were likely to end up as homosexuals. But if he knew it, he kept it to himself, together with all the other marvels of the world about us. Consequently, as a boy, I remained ignorant of the veiled drama of this creature’s life. But I did, at odd moments, encounter the fish itself. On holidays, my brothers and I used to wander the high, nameless becks and burns of Lakeland and western Scotland, with fishing rods and tins of worms. There were always trout in these wild little waters: fierce, hungry fellows eager to dash at a bait and sweet just out of a frying pan. Very infrequently, the resistance to the lifting of the rod point was stronger than usual, and from the bubbly pool would emerge, not the spotted trout of desire, but something the length and colour of a black bootlace, and the thickness of a hosepipe, corkscrewing itself in mid-air with unnerving vivacity.

Such captures were not at all welcome. It is not easy to subdue a tangle of eel, hook, and slime-strewn line when one is balanced precariously on a rock in a rushing stream without the basic necessities for eel control: two free hands (at least), a newspaper or rough cloth, a sharp knife, a flat surface. No one who has not grappled with a live eel can have any conception of how impossible it is to hold it. The experience was likened by one Victorian wag to attempting to detain a pig by the tail ‘when it has been well soaped’.

I hope we did not abuse those little upland eels too much. There would have been profanity, and there may, I fear, have been some stamping upon them, perhaps even some kicking to assist them in their return to the water (they were far too small to be worth eating). Certainly there was no rejoicing over their capture. There are anglers who pursue eels with intent, but we were not among them.

However, there have been occasions when I have been grateful to the eel. Many years ago I went with my eldest brother to Loch Lomond in Scotland, the home of enormous pike which were rumoured – falsely – to be easily caught. At a village on the shore we asked the first man we met where the best place was to engage with these monsters. He hired us his boat, and directed us to a shallow, reedy bay – a place which, it transpired after we had fished it for a week, was favoured by the pike for their spawning, which had taken place two months earlier, and at no other time. So we caught no pike. But every now and then we found a bite-sized chunk missing from our herring baits, and, once we had worked out what was going on, we had some fun with the eels. However one does not travel four hundred miles to catch three-quarter-pound eels, so the experience was not repeated.

With the same brother and a friend I once took a boating holiday on the Fens. It was roastingly hot, and the water was like warm soup. Most fish will not feed in such conditions, but eels like them. One close and still night, I had left a little dead gudgeon out as bait, with my rod propped up against the rail, while we played poker and drank beer in the cabin. We were interrupted by the sound of line whizzing off my reel. I beat my way through the moths dancing in the cabin light to my rod, which was in the act of disappearing over the side. I grabbed it, and struck. After a few minutes of heaving, a huge eel broke the surface, thrashing in the beam of our torch. Somehow we netted it and somehow I killed it, as we had an idea it would provide relief from our diet of tinned baked beans and frankfurters. But I wanted to weigh it first, and we had no scales. A day later, in intense heat, we reached St Ives, where I bought a set of scales. My specimen weighed four and a quarter pounds, which is a big eel, and its body was as thick as my forearm. However, when I cut off its head, I was assaulted by an overpowering stench of decomposed entrails, and I hurled it back into the green water.

Holidays at my great-aunt’s house at the southern end of Coniston Water in the Lake District offered more opportunities to dabble with eels. The property was close to where the River Crake leaves the lake for Morecambe Bay and the sea. A little way down the river was a deep, still, black pool, fringed by reeds and spotted with bright green lily pads. It was a mysterious, slightly unnerving place, but powerfully suggestive of eels. In the evenings we would row down and lay night-lines, baiting the hooks with worms or the heads of perch we had caught in the lake. We would return in the early morning, when the mist was rising in curls over the black mirror of water. The lines came in with blobs of eel slime clinging to them. Sometimes there was a living resistance, and beneath the boat you could make out the pale belly of an eel twisting in the darkness. But these were always small, and more trouble than they were worth once we had finished sorting out the tangles. Once, though, my eldest brother caught a decent-sized specimen on rod and line. He killed it and chopped its head off, and left the corpse in a white enamel bowl outside the front door. When he returned a few minutes later, the bowl was empty. A general search was ordered, and the headless eel was eventually found half-way down the path leading to the water.

Many years later I was invited, with my friend Stephen, among others, to fish for trout on the River Test in Hampshire, which is perhaps the most famous trout river in the world. Generally one does not fish for eels on the Test any more than, having been invited to play golf at Carnoustie or St Andrews, one would delay teeing off to look for mushrooms. Our host’s face registered puzzlement when we appeared brandishing eel-fishing gear and asked if we could hunt for worms in his manure heap.

Sitting beside a pond waiting for the questing eel to find one’s bait is a slow business. But stalking them is stirring sport. You must look in the shaded places, where the water curls around the base of a willow, where you may spot a still, narrow head among the roots. Or you may make out a slender shape at the edge of a patch of green, a tail waving in imitation of the weed. Your little bunch of worms must land well upstream from the eel, a distance nicely calculated so that the current brings it to within a foot or two of the fish’s sensitive nostrils. Then – assuming the eel does not take fright and flee – a period of high excitement ensues. If the water is clear enough, you may see the tail quiver and the head move forward until your worms are no longer visible; then feel the line tremble between your fingers. As you tighten a touch, the sensation of munching transmits itself. You strike, lift the furiously writhing creature out of its element before it has time to wrap its tail around some root, lay it on the grass and consider its fate.

All that broiling July day Stephen and I hunted eels. The little ones we put back, the better ones – a pound or so – we consigned alive to a bucket. Our host reappeared, baffled, but happy that we were happy. Stephen lit a fire, then took the eels, stabbed them through the back of the head, nailed them to the door of the fishing hut, and, having made an incision around their necks, took a pair of pliers and with one smooth downward motion stripped off the slimy skins. The flesh beneath was blue-silver, dry and firm. Within a couple of minutes they had been gutted and tossed upon a piece of chicken wire laid over the fire, where they spat and sizzled as the fat ran out. Our host joined us again, peered momentarily at the trails of slime on the fishing hut door, and politely refused to take a fillet in his fingers. We were not so inhibited, and the warm evening air was suffused with the savour of eel meat and exclamations of epicurean delight.

In general, however, the eel favours the night. As darkness falls on the lake, it stirs. There is light at the surface, the light of the night sky, reflected gleams picked out by the ripples, enough to make out the shadows of the reeds and the trees, the trails left by the ducks, the hills dimly still, upside-down. But go down, and the darkness asserts itself. There, unseen, the creature is hunting. It glides across the bottom, its pale belly stroking the mud. Its body is serpentine, its slenderness belying its muscled strength. It slips sinuously through the tendrils of weed in its path, and they do not stir.

Its eyes are pebbles of black on the side of its pointy snout. They are not needed for this business. In front of each eye is an oval panel crammed with sensory devices to guide it on its trail. In front of them is a wide, thin mouth, opening and closing on the thousand and one nourishing organisms going about their obscure little lives in that obscure world. Most are minute and it is a night’s work to swallow enough of them to keep the creature from being troubled by hunger after it retires to its hideout with the rising of the sun. But sometimes, with a snap, it will take a whole little fish, which will satisfy it for two or three days. And once in a while it might find the fish too big to be swallowed whole. Then it fastens its little teeth into the meat, and spins on its own axis until a mouthful is torn free.

It is a creature of secret places, and its ways are discreet. It hides in the mud, under stones and beds of weed, in the roots of trees, in the holes left by voles and in the crevices of lock gates and old bridges. By daylight you are likely to search for it in vain, unless the water is unusually clear, in which case you may discern that snout protruding from a shadow, that tail waving below a patch of weed. But you may be sure that it is there, somewhere; in this lake and every other lake, in every river great and small, every rivulet and streamlet, pond, dyke, ditch, mere, everywhere from harbours and the estuaries of rivers up to the farthest-flung trickle.

It hunts by night and it travels by night. The extraordinary journeys that occupy the first and last stages of its life are undertaken away from our seeing eye. And in between, when it is never further away from us than the nearest piece of water, it keeps itself to itself. Were you minded to look, you could find it anywhere from Iceland, around Scandinavia, through the Baltic, down western Europe to the northern coast of Africa as far east as the west coast of Turkey; and on the other side of the Atlantic from Greenland and Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico and Venezuela. Millions of people live within a bicycle ride of its home and know nothing of it. Even those moved to investigate its secrets find them extraordinarily hard to crack. There are mountains of learned papers dealing with the most recondite aspects of the eel’s physiology and behaviour, but while much is now known, many mysteries remain.

What we do know about this extremely common creature stretches credibility. I am well aware that the same is said of many of the inhabitants of the world about us. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’ we exclaim at our television sets as the professional haunter of rainforest or tropical reef lays bare the means by which some furry tree-dweller secures its foodstore or some gristly mollusc ensnares its prey. But the fate of tiny hedge beasts and flashing reef fish, the birds of marsh and moor, even the soft-eyed, warm-blooded mammals of the sea, does not directly affect our lives, because they do not figure in our diets.

We like to think that we know most things about the animals we have admitted to our food chain (although, as BSE demonstrated, never enough). Through studying their habits we have subjugated them to our ends. We have learned to make them bigger, leaner, more fertile, not fertile at all – anything to suit our convenience. We rearrange the genetic composition of cows to equip them with udders so huge they cannot walk. We mutate the chicken into a beakless, shackled, egg-producing machine. We imprison pigs in the darkness, and make monsters of them. We cram the silver salmon – born to roam the seas – into cages, feed them on the processed flesh of other fish treated with dye to make their flesh pink, dose them with cocktails of virulent chemicals to discourage sea lice from eating them alive, then try to convince ourselves that we are giving ourselves a ‘natural’, ‘healthy’ form of nourishment.

But, although the flesh of the freshwater eel has been prized ever since Mesolithic man first loped through the forest to the water’s edge and stabbed down his three-pronged spear on its twisting form, the species has never been enslaved. It is true that in Japan the eel has been reared in captivity since the late nineteenth century, and that eel farming has been taken up on an extensive scale in the Far East and in several European countries.¹ But, despite all the efforts of skilled geneticists, it has proved impossible to persuade the eel to breed in captivity. So those who would continue to enjoy its sweet, immensely nutritious flesh depend on the creature’s own capacity to renew itself.

Regrettably, those places where the eel’s exceptional calorific and culinary qualities continue to be properly esteemed do not include my own country, where, over the past half-century or so, it has disappeared from the list of dietary staples. An edition of Mrs Beeton’s cookbook of the 1930s included recipes for eel soup, jellied eel, boiled eel, stewed eel and fried eel. Twenty years later Constance Spry considered the fish worthy only to be potted into a paste. The contemporary equivalent of those two ladies, Delia Smith, has nothing to say on the subject, beyond allowing smoked eel to be ‘almost on a par with smoked salmon, in my opinion’. In general, we British no longer eat any freshwater fish, with the exception of rainbow trout, which are reared in cages and fed on pellets made from other fish and taste of the squeezings from old dishcloths. A limited domestic market for eels does survive though, kept alive by the surviving eel and pie shops in east London and the eastern suburbs, the jellied eel stalls, and a small but growing smoked eel sector.

Matters are very different in Continental Europe. To this day, the ritual of Christmas Eve in traditional Italian households includes a dish of capitone arrostito – roasted eel. The Dutch adore them smoked, and have developed a significant eel-farming industry to satisfy their appetite. The Germans love big eels, stewed or smoked. The Danes have an ancient tradition of eating them, as do the Swedes, the Finns, the Belgians and the Swiss. Several of the great restaurants of France continue to offer complex testimonials to the qualities of the eel, and it is cherished by those most fervent of fish-eaters, the Spanish and the Portuguese.

The eel may be fried, roasted, grilled, broiled, boiled, steamed, stewed, smoked, pickled. Whatever the method, the characteristics of the white flesh are its sweetness and its richness. Jane Grigson wrote: ‘I love eel …Sometimes I think it is my favourite fish. It is delicate but rich, it falls neatly from the bone.’ For Grigson, its culinary apotheosis was Monsieur Pasteau’s matelote d’anguille, which she held to be the chief reason for visiting the town of La Chartre-sur-le-Loir, the little Loir whose waters help feed the great Loire, the foremost French eel river. Another English writer, Quentin Crewe, paid his homage in the village of Passay, on the edge of the great Lac de Grand-Lieu near Nantes, where he questioned one of the last of the traditional eel fishers, Monsieur Andre Baudray, about his methods, and savoured Madame Baudray’s matelote, eel stewed for two hours in red wine, with Malaga grapes and prunes from Agen.

The eel is – of course – a finned, cold-blooded vertebrate which breathes through gills; in other words, a fish. But its habits, and, more particularly its appearance, set it apart from other fish. Its shape is against it, for – although we have learned that it is right to love, or at least tolerate, snakes – the serpentine form still taps into deep-rooted instincts of revulsion. Take into account the eel’s muted colouring, its snoutiness, its thick coat of viscous slime, and its convulsive writhings when it is removed from its element into ours, and you have a creature with a tricky image problem. Add to that its entirely false reputation as a scavenger of decomposed flesh, and a smattering of biological data – the toxicity of its blood (sufficient to kill a dog), its hermaphroditism, its unnerving capacity to continue squirming after what one callous biologist referred to as ‘skin removal, brain destruction and sectioning of the posterior nervous system’ – and you have a demon of the watery sphere.

Usually, the mere mention of its name is enough to provoke a shudder of revulsion, and the suggestion of an encounter with a living specimen is liable to bring on an attack of the vapours. Even among anglers, who cherish water and most things that live in it, its reputation is low. This prejudice is attributable partly to the eel’s looks, and partly to its habit of taking baits intended for other species, and the terrible mess that tends to ensue when it does so. The writer and poet Patrick Chalmers, a generally genial and tolerant soul, displayed this unthinking antipathy to the full when he described a tussle with an unwanted eel: ‘I offered it, with a shudder, my new bait …the eel came sinuously to it …it opened a yellow and reptilian mouth …the ghillie looked at the eel as though it was the Accuser of the Brethren …He beat it to death …he kicked the corpse into a whin bush.’

Even the greatest and wisest angler of my lifetime, the late Richard Walker, became a barbarian when dealing with eels. In his book Still-water Angling, first published in 1953, he alleges – quite baselessly – that ‘ducklings, moorhens and even cygnets are pulled under screaming’ when big eels are about. Having offered some serviceable advice on how to catch them, he deals at some length with a greater challenge – subduing them:

You have to assault the eel …the best plan is go for the brute bald-headed, armed with a newspaper, a stick and a stout knife. First, try to get the eel to roll itself up in the newspaper …this is your chance to get it a blow with the stick, either on its nose or about three inches from its tail …you can stick the knife through it just in front of the pectoral fins, aiming to sever its vertebrae; this kills it …Since eels are so inimical to every other kind of fish, and even to wildfowl, it is probably best to kill every one caught.

It is curious that a man with such tender feelings towards carp and roach should have considered any fish deserving of treatment more in keeping with a Quentin Tarantino movie than ‘the contemplative man’s recreation’. But Walker’s complete ignorance of the eel’s eating habits – and consequent brutality – were widely shared. The eel’s status as an inferior form of fish life legitimised the use of any method, the cruder and more barbaric the better. Francis Francis, the chief angling expert of the high Victorian era, recommended ‘sniggling’ for them, a technique requiring the use of a stick of ash, alder or hazel with a length of cord tied to one end. At the other end, said Francis, a ‘large darning needle’ should be ‘lashed on crossways’, with a worm threaded over it. The bait having been taken, the sniggler should wait for the fish to swallow worm and needle, then give a slight pull to turn the needle ‘across his gullet’. Thus attached, the wretched creature was ‘easily captured’. Even more amusing was the technique referred to by Francis as ‘stichering’, in which ‘an old sickle …roughly toothed’ was tied to a twelve-foot pole, and employed to levitate eels from the drains of the water meadows on the bank. ‘An unskillful sticherer,’ says Francis with lumbering humour, ‘will sometimes chop off his neighbour’s ear or poke out his eye, which doubtless lends excitement to the sport.’

As I have mentioned already, I have caught one big eel in my life. But, to be honest, I did not appreciate at the time what a thing I had done. That was more than thirty years ago, when four-pound eels – indeed eels of all sizes – were much more common than they are now. I wanted very much, in the course of researching and writing this book, to catch or at least do battle with a big eel; to have a monster eel story of my own to tell.

But big eels are like the elders of any species. They have not become big by being foolish and impetuous. They do not take a bait readily, and on the occasions they do, the tackle must be strong and the angler resourceful, to coax them into the net. The pursuit of big eels demands a considerable commitment in time. Nor is that time likely to be packed with incident. The eel specialist must be prepared to sit as still as a sleeping heron, for nights on end (for big eels are generally nocturnal feeders), beside some still, black pond, mere or canal, sustained during the vigil by inner strength and quiet passion.

There are groups dedicated to this unusual form of self-denial. I once heard the secretary of the National Anguilla Club – an organisation dedicated to studying and conserving eels, as well as angling for them – being interviewed on the radio about his calling. He had the air of a mystic about him as he talked, quietly and soberly, about his obsession and the demands it made of him; of the countless hours he had spent, watchful, unmoving, waiting for the buzz of his electric bite alarm, for the rustle of line disappearing from his reel into the blackness before him, for the upward sweep of his rod and the heavy, living resistance somewhere in the depths. He revealed, as if it were a trivial matter, that he had spent an entire season after eels without, as he put it, ‘banking a single specimen’. There was a pause while the interviewer digested this. ‘Some people, Jim [or whatever his name was], might say that you were completely mad.’ ‘Some people have indeed said that to me, Nick,’ replied the eel man in untroubled tones.

Myself, I own that I do not have that kind of dedication. Moreover, it was the thought of having caught the monster that appealed to me more than the actual catching. I was not entirely comfortable with the mental picture of myself alone, in the dark, the water at my feet lashed to a froth by a thing almost as long as me and as thick as my leg, jaws agape. So I began to modify my ambitions. I realised that a leviathan was almost certainly beyond me, and that I should be prepared to settle for eels of manageable proportions caught by any reasonably humane means. One thing I was firm about: avoiding the night. Unlike the eel, I am not a nocturnal creature, and all my experiences of fishing at night – encompassing being washed away on a Thames millstream, being stranded by the receding tide on the shores of a remote Scottish sea loch and standing on a brother’s favourite trout rod – had been unsuccessful and generally unhappy. I am at ease with dusk, as long as some pale gleam from the departing sun flickers on the surface, and I can manage the twilight that precedes dawn. But it is my strong opinion that the ‘witching time of night’ is best left to the bats and the badgers.

I was anxious to try an ancient and humane method in which worms and worsted are wound into a ball which is lowered into eel territory and raised once the prey’s teeth become properly entangled. These days its practitioners are rarely met. But Jim Milne, an old fisherman from Epney on the Severn who showed me how elvers – or baby eels – were caught, had done a good deal of it in times past, and at the mention of it his hunter’s interest perceptibly quickened. He spoke of paddling quietly across the sandbanks where the eels foraged, of the insistent nibbling at the squirming ball, of eels by the half-hundredweight, eels by the barrel. I said I would provide the worms. Jim promised the boat and the expertise. That was in April. By early September – prime time for patting, as Jim called it – wiser and more cautious counsels had prevailed in the Milne household. My suspicion was that Jim’s wife, Ruth, was more than a little reluctant to see her octogenarian husband adrift on those capricious waters with a tyro such as myself, and in such a cause.

I would have tried spearing, although it hardly belongs in the code of angling and is entirely illegal. But, as far as I could ascertain, most of the eel spears were in museums or on collectors’ walls, and the spearers in the ground. My thoughts turned to nets. One of the most effective ways of taking eels is by using a train of connected mesh funnels known as fyke nets. These strings of traps, linked by walls of netting, are not baited, but are placed at an angle to the routes taken by eels as they roam in search of food. The theory is that the eel follows its way through the funnels until it reaches the last, known as the cod end, from which there is no escape except the way it came, a manoeuvre generally beyond eelish intelligence. I had seen fyke nets in use on the Thames Estuary, and I felt that I might be able to manage them myself. The obvious place to try was Coniston, where what had been my great-aunt’s lakeside house could be rented through her family. I booked it for the following August, and plotted the attack.

I approached the Environment Agency for permission to use fyke nets. ‘This is a most unusual request,’ said the lady at the Agency’s office in Penrith. But she was helpful, and I received a lengthy document authorising me – subject to a multiplicity of conditions – to use nets for one week ‘for research purposes’. So, one brilliantly sunny late summer’s day, I went to Morecambe to borrow Dick Langley’s gear. I drove along the seafront from the north, with the unbroken line of hotels and boarding houses on one side, and the grey mud and the grey sea on the other. Holidaymakers strolled up and down the promenade, enjoying the warmth. But to me nothing, not even such a gorgeous day, could disguise the down-at-heel dinginess of this most unappealing of seaside resorts. ‘People always come back to Morecambe,’ Dick Langley said with a throaty laugh. ‘They can’t believe what they saw the first time.’

In normal circumstances, Dick makes a typically erratic fisherman’s living, catching eels, bass, codling and other species out in the bay. He has a licence to fish for elvers in the rivers running into the bay, and to take eels from various lakes and tarns. But these were not normal circumstances. Foot-and-mouth disease had swept through Lakeland. The fields were empty, the grass long and lush, the farmers out of sight. The only work was cleansing the farms, and Dick was one of those doing it, making better, regular money than the eels could ever provide. ‘Every cloud and all that,’ he commented with a tight, humourless smile. He had many friends among the farmers and shared in the tragedy that had blighted the fields and fells.²

I spent three days as a Coniston eel fisher. The weather was benign and, in the absence of wind and with the help of my brother Matthew on the oars, it was surprisingly easy to feed the stack of netting over the stern of the boat so that it lay stretched out on the bottom. I used two strings of nets, which were held in place by metal weights attached to either end. At one end there was also a buoy, a piece of white polystyrene that was reassuringly visible from our landing stage.

At first we were very excited. Matthew and I speculated gloatingly about the scale of the catch, and discussed how we would dispose of it. He is a food writer and an exceptionally accomplished cook, and I was keen for him to work his way through some of the classic eel dishes; perhaps starting with the matelote d’anguilles before progressing to something more intricate, perhaps anguille durand, eel stuffed with pike and poached in a mirepoix bordelaise. We need not have worried. The total harvest from the exertions of three days was three small eels, a host of tiny perch, and two or three miniature pike. I was bitterly disappointed. Dick Langley said he had heard dark tales of the south end of the lake being fished out by a family of rogues and poachers from Flookburgh, a few miles away. When I suggested to the lady at the Environment Agency that the dearth of eels might warrant investigation, she replied that their ‘sampling’ showed there was a healthy population, and intimated that I had been either unlucky or – more probably – inept.

Chastened, I had one hope left. I have a friend called Chris Yates, a tall, slender, bony, softly and slowly spoken, balding, impoverished father of four, who is a remarkably skilful fisherman and a remarkably talented chronicler of the joys and absurdities of the angler’s life. Chris’s speciality is catching huge carp (he used to hold the record, a mighty fish of fifty-one pounds), and he had told me that his current favourite carp lake contained something else: enormous eels. He had taken them up to four pounds while carp fishing, and there were tales, he said, of giants, of fish straightening out cod hooks in the night, of quantities so vast that they had been netted and fed to the dogs. I very much liked that touch – fed to the dogs.

Chris’s carp lake is shaped like a fat sausage, and is concealed by ancient woods of oak and beech in a valley in Wiltshire. The place is called Fonthill, a name still tinged with notoriety on account of the extraordinary follies of one of its owners of old, William Beckford (curiously enough a previous proprietor, the second Earl of Castlehaven, who was executed in 1631 after being convicted at a trial of his peers of sodomy). The lake was already here when Beckford inherited the estate and an immense (though often exaggerated) fortune on coming of age; as was a mansion built by his father on a scale so overwhelming in its lavishness that it was dubbed Splendens. Beckford disliked it and had it flattened, preferring to commission the fashionable architect of the day, James Wyatt, to build him a sham Gothic abbey with a soaring octagonal tower at its centre. Close by, he had another lake dug, so that he could view his abbey reflected in moonlight, an obligatory experience for those of extreme Romantic inclination.

Poor Beckford! Had he taken up fishing and been sent to a good school, something might have been made of him. As it was, his father died when he was young and his mother kept him at home, spoiling him grotesquely. The wayward and precocious youth developed into a wayward and precocious young man, given to wandering around Europe behaving badly. He achieved sudden fame at the age of twenty-four with the publication of his Oriental fantasy Vathek, which he is reputed to have written – in French – in three days and two nights. Subsequently, his reputation ruined by the almost certainly unfounded accusation that he had debauched an aristocratic youth, Beckford lived a generally sad and solitary life at Fonthill, shunned by his neighbours and society at large. The building of the abbey and its tower, and the shaping of the grounds to a suitably poetic echo of Paradise, took twenty years, and consumed the greater part of Beckford’s wealth. He sold Fonthill to a Scotsman, John Farquar, a gunpowder millionaire known, on account of his personal habits, as Old Filthyman. Three years later, in 1825, Wyatt’s tower fell down, and a few months later Farquar died of apoplexy. Beckford himself lived – in reduced but by no means straitened circumstances – for another twenty years, but did not revisit Fonthill.

History hangs heavy over the place, and so did the weather the day of my visit. It was mid October, late in the year for eels, but extraordinarily warm, with grey cloud pressing down on the valley, suffusing the still air with damp. They were conditions that might have been tailored for the occasion. To begin with, Chris and I fished at the shallow, northern end where, he maintained, the big eels were supposed to hunt. Apart from a certain eeliness in the air, which may have been auto-induced, we met no sign of them. Several large carp passed by, tracing spearheads on the surface, and Chris caught a handsome trout on his bunch of maggots. The shadows lengthened and deepened as dusk crept in. Chris said we should try a deep hole by the dam, an infallible spot. And, sure enough, just before half-past seven, with full darkness almost on us, I felt a chewing at my worms, struck, and felt my eel. After a brief tussle, Chris scooped his big net under the fish’s silvery belly and lifted it up. It was not large, maybe a pound or so, hardly a cause for elation. But I felt mildly relieved to have had something, and in gratitude we unhooked it and let it depart in peace.

Later, in the local pub, the Beckford Arms, I met the source of the Fonthill eel stories, the estate’s former keeper. It was true – they had fed fish from the lake to the dogs, as an alternative to rabbits. And there had been eels among them, although the great majority were perch. And it was true about the cod hooks. The keeper’s brother-in-law, who hailed from some cod-blessed seaside place, had put night-lines out, and in the morning they had been retrieved clogged with slime, with the hooks straightened out – but never an eel still on the end. The keeper himself used to spear eels from the bridge at the top end of the lake and sell them locally. But his motives appeared to have been entirely commercial, and he neither ate eels himself nor had any lively interest in them. Having waited in vain for some stirring account of monsters slain or glimpsed, wildfowl engulfed, wanderers met by night wriggling through the fields, I finished my second pint and left the pub. Outside, the night was still warm and heavy with moisture. It was a night made for eels, and I wished with a fierce, futile intensity that we had stayed by the lake and fished on into the darkness.

TWO A dainty dish

In a good season – that is to say, in times past – Brendon Sellick would catch plenty of eels. But you wouldn’t call him an eel fisherman, just a fisherman; and you would not mistake him for anything else. There cannot be many of his sort left anywhere, and in his immediate vicinity there are just him and his son, who helps him out on the mudhorse. This unusual mode of conveyance is essential to Brendon’s way of fishing. Indeed, without it there would be no fishing. And I doubt that, when he is gone – he is in his late sixties, and has been at it for more than fifty years – there will be any fishing.

Brendon’s cottage, and the ramshackle shed from which he sells his catch, are set back a little way from a defensive barrier raised in 1939 to discourage any German landfall at Bridgwater Bay in Somerset. On the map, the bay is a bulge of blue on the southern side of the Severn Estuary. A mile or two to the east of Brendon’s place, it is fed by two lethargic channels leading from the damp and reedy flatland of Sedgemoor, the rivers Parret and Brue. Beyond is the once fashionable resort of Burnham on Sea, where pleasure-seekers took to the waters – and may do so still – even though the bluest of skies is needed to disguise their brown colour. The mighty tides that sweep up and down the estuary dictate a ceaseless, shifting balance of power between the sea and the banks of sludge and silt laid there over the ages by the rivers of the marshes. When the tide is out, the water is reduced to a channel so distant that it appears in danger of being obliterated altogether. Mud is in the ascendant, a sticky, glistening, quaking, grey expanse, streaked with lines of greasy, soapy rocks. It is a world of its own, requiring special techniques from its residents and visitors. The wading birds do nicely, and so does Brendon on his mudhorse.

Although he is a fisherman, he has no boat. His nets are fixed in the mud, strung out along lines of blackened stakes arranged at angles across the routes favoured by the fish as they move in to forage with the rising tide. At the height of the tide, when the bay is filled, the nets are invisible. As it recedes, the stakes appear like watery sentinels, until it is time for the mudhorse. Some of the nets can be reached on foot, but others – generally the most productive – cannot. So Brendon lies face down on the mudhorse – a low wooden platform on runners, resembling a toboggan – and with his hands and feet propels himself across the flats, plucking the catch as he goes.

There are eels, flounder, dabs, whiting, a multitude of shrimps, the occasional bass, the very occasional salmon. It is an extraordinarily simple, not to say primitive, way of fishing, no different in its essentials from that carried out along this coast for centuries (remains of medieval fixed nets have been found at Minehead, not far away). It is the kind of fishing that has absolutely no place in the modern world; its ‘inefficiency’ providing enough for the fisherman’s own needs and a modest surplus to sell or barter, and no more. Brendon Sellick does it because, in the world he was born into, you did what your father did, unless compelling circumstances intervened – and his father was a mudhorse man. But times had changed, as he explained to me in his piping burr. The nature of the revolution was, for him, illustrated by his last holiday – a three-week cruise with his wife to Egypt, Israel and the Greek islands. ‘Dad wouldn’t have believed it,’ he said, hardly seeming to believe it himself. The idea that the son of a Sellick who had cruised the Greek islands would be content to eke out a living gliding over the mud of Bridgwater Bay on his belly, extricating flapping fish from nylon netting, was clearly absurd.

To my disappointment, I did not see the mudhorse out of its stable. When I visited Brendon, the tides were too small to expose the more distant nets. So I followed him on foot, in waders. To our left, half a mile away, was the huge, squat, concrete mass of Hinckley Point nuclear power station, with the low line of the Quantock Hills behind. Every so often the screech of the gulls was drowned out by the roar of steam being released from one of the massive chimneys. Brendon told me that before Mrs Thatcher’s time, someone had had the idea of utilising the warm water from the power station for an experimental eel farm. A million pounds was invested, and the eels did very well, growing large and – according to Brendon – slightly blue. They were taken off by tanker to Germany, until the order came from on high – Brendon thought from Mrs Thatcher herself – that Hinckley Point was to be sold off, which meant no more money was to be frittered away on fattening blue eels for Germans. ‘I liked her,’ Brendon mused. ‘She turned the country round, you know. But that was a shame about the eels.’

We sloshed along the accessible nets. In the last, their beaky little heads stuck through the mesh, were two smallish eels, the only ones. ‘It’s been a terrible year for them,’ Brendon lamented. ‘Terrible. I don’t know why, haven’t a clue. Not enough eels, I suppose.’ We talked about the migration. ‘And they say it comes all the way from – what do they call it? – the Sargasso, and then all the way back again. Amazing, innit?’ I wondered if he believed ‘them’. He told me that one day before the war, his father had caught a sturgeon in the nets weighing nearly a hundred pounds. ‘Seven foot long it were. Amazing. No, I’ve never seen another one.’

Back in his shed he filleted a cod for me, and packed up a bag of juicy, freckly shrimps. Chickens wandered through the clutter of nets, dilapidated lobster pots, perished rubber boots and plastic bags, helping themselves to fragments of shrimp scattered on the floor. Brendon thought he would have the eels himself, stewed then left to cool so a jelly formed around the chunks. ‘I likes ‘em,’ he said with relish. ‘Mind, there’s not many does.’³

When Brendon has eels in any quantity he sells them to Michael Brown, a former journalist, long-distance walker and elver fisherman now turned eel smoker. This is the eel in a socially acceptable form, with head, slimy skin and awkward bones removed: a moist, rich, flavoursome and manageable fillet, made more delicious still with a dab of sauce made from the horseradish growing in the fields around. Brown’s smokery is housed in an outbuilding on a farm deep in the Somerset Levels, a mile or two from the ruins of noble Muchelney Abbey, where a millennium ago the monks received six thousand eels a year from their fisheries. Next to it is a little restaurant where you may eat eel warm from the smokery, with boiled potatoes. A fyke net is strung from the ceiling, and on the wall is a testament from one Ernie Woods to the huge eels of Chard Reservoir, which ‘barked like dogs’.⁴

Another of Michael Brown’s suppliers – as unlike Brendon Sellick as a bass is a flounder – is a former teacher at Christchurch Grammar School in Dorset, Roger Castle. Whereas Sellick is no more than vaguely curious about eels and enjoys telling tales about their unaccountable habits, Castle has long been gripped by the strange architecture of their life cycle, and has carried out a long, unfinished investigation into it. He was born in Poole and as a boy lived on a boat in Poole Harbour, a prosaic name for a considerable inland sea now encircled in the clasp of suburban sprawl, but still – with its creeks, channels, islands and mudbanks endlessly swept by the restless incoming and outgoing of the sea – a wild and lonely place demanding respect, even from those who know it well.

Castle took a degree in physical education and biology at Loughborough University and wrote a learned paper called ‘The Life History of the European Eel’ for his general science course. Aside from a scholarly reworking of the standard accounts of the eel’s life cycle and migrations, it contains an interesting account of the eels of Poole Harbour which – back in the 1950s – were present in enormous abundance (Castle talks of being able, on warm summer evenings, ‘to catch the fish as fast as you can get a line to them’). He deduced that the harbour eels comprised a resident saltwater population, sustained at a high density by an inexhaustible supply of small crabs, shrimps and prawns, and worms.

In the 1970s the buoyant price for adult eel stimulated a concerted assault by local fishermen on the Poole eels. Roger Castle became involved, although he encountered fierce animosity from the locals when they could spare the time from hauling in the eels. The fishing was completely uncontrolled, and after a few years catches plummeted. Somewhat bruised by his experiences, Castle sought more peaceful pastures. He began fishing the two rivers that debouch into the harbour at Christchurch, the Avon and the Stour. These are like two cousins from branches of a family very much divided in their fortunes: the Avon much the more refined, draining much of Wiltshire and flowing in a stately fashion through Hampshire, once – though no more – one of England’s premier salmon rivers; the Stour slow and sluggish, murky and reedy, ambling its way through the eastern part of Dorset, never much of a river for salmon and now without them altogether, but renowned for its pike and perch. Both rivers were good hunting grounds for the eel, and using fyke nets through the summer, shifting from one location to another (for they soon become alert to the predator in their midst), Castle was able to satisfy his yearning for involvement with eels and to contrive for himself a useful income. In the early 1990s he persuaded the Bournemouth and West Hants Water Company to let him install an eel trap, or rack, at Longham on the Stour. He was thus able to extend his season into late autumn by catching the cream of the harvest, the silver eel.

When not in use, Castle’s eel rack – which resembles a giant fire grate – is tucked up underneath a brick outhouse built over part of the river’s flow. On those moonless autumn nights when the eels are wont to run, it is lowered into position, and the sluice gate upstream adjusted to increase the volume of water through it. It is a most ingenious and impressive apparatus, even though on the night I inspected it, only one eel came in. Nor was Castle much more successful with the fyke nets he had set on the Avon a couple of miles away. It was late in the year, and he suspected that the unusually high water levels of the previous weeks had sent the silvers on their way when he was unable to work his trap. Either that, or – for their inscrutable reasons – they were waiting.

He was filled with gloom about the creature’s prospects. Over the past ten years he had experienced a steady decline in catches – noticeable on the Avon, steep on the Stour. Castle believed the spread of toxic silt beds had fouled the mouth of the Stour, persuading the incoming elvers either to choose the cleaner, more alkaline flow of the Avon, or to stay in the estuary.

Roger Castle is the only eel fisherman on the Stour and Avon. He is proud of that singularity, and of the knowledge and understanding of this most enigmatic of fish which he has accumulated as a professional fisherman. As a consequence he is apt to be impatient with those – the fishery officers of the Environment Agency – who issue his licences, restrict his freedom to operate, and question his experience. More than that, he is fearful for his eels; fearful that, having been the only eel fisherman, he will be the last – not because it is a tough and demanding occupation, although it is, but because there will be no eels left.⁵

As with so much else, it was the Greeks who first found the words to sing the praises of the eel. The curiosity of their intellectuals – most notably Aristotle – about the creature’s life cycle clearly reflected an established epicurean enthusiasm. In Aristophanes’ The Archanians, the hero Dicaeopolis, upon learning that a smuggler has secured for him fifty of the succulent eels of Lake Copais, bursts forth: ‘O my sweetest, my long-awaited desire.’ In another of his plays, a sausage seller shouts: ‘Yes, it is with you as with the eel-catchers; when the lake is still they do not take anything, but if they stir up the mud, they do; so it is with you when you disturb the state.’

In about 330 BC, a Sicilian Greek known as Archestratus wrote a popular satire on the hedonism of the age called The Life of Luxury, in which he referred to the eel as ‘the undisputed master of the fishmonger’s stall’ and noted that ‘the eels of the Strymon River and Lake Copais have a formidable reputation for excellence thanks to their large size and wondrous girth’. Archestratus essayed a feeble joke about eels being more valuable than gods – ‘since prayer is free and at least a dozen drachmas is required to secure an eel’ – before paying this tribute: ‘All in all, I think the eel rules over everything at the feast and commands the field of pleasure, despite being the only fish with no backbone’ (another translation has this as ‘no scrotum’ – my ancient Greek is inadequate to resolve the matter).

Another shadowy figure from those distant days, Agathar-chides of Knidos, alleged that the Boeotians held the fat eels of Lake Copais in such reverence that they turned them into demi-gods, putting crowns on them and offering prayers. According to Alexandre Dumas’s Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, ‘the Egyptians placed eels on a par with the gods …they raised them in aquariums, whose priests were charged with feeding them with cheese and entrails.’ (An American anthropologist, Albert Herre, who worked in the Philippines in the 1920s, found a ‘well-developed’ eel cult among the Lepanti Igorots who lived near Mount Mougoa. They kept sacred eels in pools, which were fed daily on rice and sweet potatoes by devotees who sang songs of praise as they went about their work.)

All the peoples of the ancient world ate eels, with the exception of the Jews, who were forbidden on the erroneous grounds that it was of the company ‘that hath not scales …and shall be an abomination’. The place of the eel in Roman affections was savagely mocked by Juvenal, who alleged – most unfairly – that they fed on sewage:

Now comes the dish for thy repast decreed A snake-like eel of that unwholesome breed Which fattens where Cloaca’s torrents pour And sports in Tiber’s flood, his native shore.

According to the legendary Roman epicure, Marcus Gavius Apicius, six thousand eels were served at various feasts marking the triumphs of Julius Caesar. They were supplied by Gaius Hirrius, whose fishponds were so famously productive that – mainly on account of them – he was able to sell his estates for the fabulous sum of four million sesterces. (Of Apicius and his gluttonous excesses, Chambers Biographical Dictionary records: ‘It is said that when he had spent £800,000 upon his appetite and had only some £80,000 left, he poisoned himself to avoid the misery of plain diet.’ Being informed that the prawns of Libya were even larger and more luscious than those available in his native Campania, Apicius is said to have sailed straight away for Tripoli; and on discovering that the report was false and the prawns were no better, to have sailed home again.)

‘It is agreed by most men,’ wrote Izaak Walton in the first edition of The Compleat Angler, published in 1653, ‘that the Eel is a most dainty dish. The Romans have esteemed her the Helena of their feasts, and some the queen of palate pleasure.’ Walton cautioned against overdoing it, quoting Solomon: ‘Eat no more than is sufficient, lest thou surfeit.’

But flesh of such richness and flavour can be difficult to resist. The pre-eminent Irish eel expert, Christopher Moriarty, speculated that Henry I of England, who, according to the account of the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, died from eating lampreys ‘contrary to the instructions of his physician’, might in fact, given a general confusion between the two species, have been gorging on eels.

One who certainly succumbed to an extravagant anguillo-philia was the wretched Simon de Brie of Tours, the puppet Pope Martin IV installed by Charles of Anjou in 1281. He did not last long, dying four years later – much to his patron’s inconvenience – from an excess of Lake Bolsena eels, which he favoured stewed in Vernaccia wine. One of Simon’s epitaphs viewed his fate from the celebratory perspective of his prey: ‘Gaudent anguillae, quia mortuis hic jacet ille qui quali morte excoriabit eas.’ His punishment was to be dispatched to Purgatory, where Dante spotted him:

…e quella faccia

di la da lui, piu che l’altre trapunta,

ebbe la santa Chiesa in le sue braccia:

dal Torso fu, e purga per digiuno

I’anguille di Bolsena e la vernaccia

( …and that visage

beyond him, more shrivelled than the others,

held the Holy

Church within its arms; from Tours sprang he

and by fasting purges

the eels of Bolsena and the sweet wine).

Another possessed of a fierce and notorious passion for eel flesh was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Having spent thirty years vying with the King of France, Francis I, as to who should be master of Europe, Charles famously abdicated and retired to the monastery of Yuste in the Spanish province of Estramadura, where he kept a close eye on his son and successor, Philip II, and was tormented by gout and gluttonous yearnings. The great American historian of Spain, William Hickling Prescott, wrote of Charles:

In the almost daily correspondence [with the Secretary of State] there is scarcely one letter which does not turn on the Emperor’s eating or his illness. It must have been no easy matter for the secretary to preserve his gravity in the perusal of dispatches in which politics and gastronomy were so strangely mixed together. Fish of every kind was to his taste, as indeed was anything that in its nature or habits approached to fish. Eels, frogs, oysters occupied an important place in the royal bill of fare. Potted fish, especially anchovies, found great favour with him. On an eel-pasty he particularly doted.

How the world-weary, gouty Emperor would have relished an eel dinner with Izaak Walton, whose favourite recipe – presented with lip-smacking relish – makes something of a nonsense of his call for self-restraint:

First wash him in water and salt; then pull off his skin below his vent or navel, and not much further: having done that, take out his guts as clean as you can, but wash him not: then give him three or four scotches with a knife; and then put into his belly and those scotches sweet herbs, an anchovy and a little nutmeg grated or cut very small and mixed with good butter and salt; having done this, then pull his skin over him all but his head, which you are to cut off, to the end that you may tie his skin above that part where his head grew, and it must be so tied as to keep all his moisture within his skin: and having done this, tie him with tape or packthread to a spit and roast him leisurely, and baste him with water and salt till his skin breaks and then with butter: and having roasted him enough let what was put in his belly, and what he drips, be his sauce.

One of the chief attractions of the eel was that, in an age when most fish and meat was of necessity preserved in salt, it was readily obtainable fresh, if not actually alive. When Henry III celebrated St Edward’s Day in October 1257, it is said that fifteen thousand eels were provided for the feast. On a more modest scale, when Bishop Hales of Coventry and Lichfield called his sixty guests to the table for the Feast of the Assumption on 15 August 1461, they were served with two salmon, two chub (a dubious choice – Walton called the flesh ‘not firm but short and tasteless’), three pike, four perch, half a dozen dace and trout, and two dozen each of grayling and eels.

Although Walton’s recipe was ornate and clearly intended for special occasions, the abundance of eels, the length of their season, the ease with which they could be kept alive for lengthy periods, and their range of distribution, made them a dietary staple – at least for the English and much of Continental Europe. Londoners, famously, took them to their hearts, inventing the eel pie and jellying in their honour. Perhaps surprisingly, eighty or so eel and pie shops still do business in the East End and outlying districts⁶ – although these days the contribution to turnover from the old cockney favourite, stewed eel and ‘liquor’ (green parsley sauce), is pretty negligible. Some of the families involved in the trade – the Cookes, the Kellys, the Manzes – go back to Victorian times, when eel was cheap and plentiful. The Reverend David Badham, a Victorian curate and authority on mushrooms, insects and fish, described the thriving trade in his book Ancient and Modern Fish Tattle:

London …steams and teems with eels alive and stewed; turn where you will and ‘hot eels’ are everywhere smoking away, with many a fragrant condiment at hand to make what is itself palatable yet more savoury …For one halfpenny a man of the million may fill his stomach with six or seven long pieces and wash them down with a sip of the glutinous liquid they are stewed in.

The affinity between the capital and eels went back many centuries. Shakespeare’s Fool invokes it as he chatters to Lear: ‘Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put them in the paste alive; she rapped them o’ the coxcombs with a stick and cried “down, wantons, down”.’ At about the same time that assiduous recycler of other men’s work, Gervase Markham (‘a base fellow’, Ben Jonson called him), included a recipe for eel pie in his brantub of domestic counsel, The English Hus-Wife, advising that it be cut up, combined with ‘great Raisons’ and onions, and placed in a coffin or pie dish. By the time Dr William Kitchiner published his Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook’s Oracle, in the early 1800s, the ingredients had multiplied to include parsley, sherry, shallots and lemon, all to be hidden beneath a dome of golden pastry. ‘It is a great question debated for ages on Richmond Hill,’ Dr Kitchiner reported, ‘whether the pie is best hot or cold. It is perfect either way.’

The only European city to rival London in its love of eels was Naples. Mr Badham included this description of the Neapolitan fish market on Christmas Eve:

The dispersals of this delicacy occupy either side of the Toledo from end to end and there display the curling, twisting snake-like forms of their slippery merchandise. Some, suspended over the booths, wriggle around the poles to which they are attached; others, half-flayed to demonstrate the whiteness of their flesh, undulate their slimy coils by thousands in large, open hampers …Others are fizzing and spluttering in the midst of hot grease in huge frying pans. Every man, woman and child carries home eels for breakfast, dinner, supper. Every Scotchman who chanced to find himself in the midst of such a scene will learn to hate and recoil from a Church which sanctions such an abomination as food.

The French, too, revered their eels. A cookery book of the seventeenth century, Le Cuisinier François, gives a bewildering array of recipes, including eel stuffed with whiting and mushrooms and braised in brandy and white wine, eel served with fish veloutée and crayfish coulis, and eel sliced and larded with anchovy fillets. The most illustrious of all French gastronomes, Jean-Antoine Brillat-Savarin, included a charming eel story in his best-known work, The Philosopher in the Kitchen. A horse dealer named Briguet, having made a decent fortune in Paris, returned to his home village of Talissieu, in the Ghambéry region, where he married a woman previously employed as a cook to the notorious Mademoiselle Cheverin, ‘once known to all Paris as the Ace of Spades’. It was the custom in the diocese that included Talissieu for the parish priests to dine together once a month to discuss ecclesiastical matters. When it was the turn of the cure of Talissieu to host the dinner, he – having been presented by a parishioner with a three-foot eel ‘taken from the limpid waters of the Seran’ – asked Madame Briguet to work her culinary magic with the fish. She gladly agreed, confiding that she had a little box containing ‘certain condiments’ given to her by her former mistress, the Ace of Spades. The dish was prepared, the guests sat down. ‘It looked magnificent and smelt delicious. Words could not be found to express its praise. It disappeared, body and sauce, down to the last particle.’

As the evening wore on the proceedings became increasingly convivial. ‘The reverend men were stirred in an unaccustomed manner. Their conversation took a ribald turn …and was entirely given to the sweetest of the deadly sins.’ Next morning they were all thoroughly ashamed of themselves, and blamed Madame Briguet’s eel for their loose tongues. ‘I have inquired in vain after the nature of the condiment,’ Brillat-Savarin concluded. ‘The artist herself pleaded guilty to serving a highly spiced crayfish sauce, but I am convinced she was not telling me everything.’

Across the Channel, the English yielded nothing in their enthusiasm. Parson Woodforde of Weston Longville in Norfolk recorded in his diary his keen appreciation of the occasional ‘fine string of eels’ from his local miller, and would have them stewed in milk or rolled in seasoned flour and fried in clarified butter. Another clergyman of literary inclination, Richard Barham, author of the Ingoldsby Legends, had firm views:

If you chance to be partial to eels

then – credo experto – trust one who has tried – have them spitch-cock’d or stewed – they’re too oily when fried.

Spitch-cocking (or spatch-cocking) is the Anglo-Saxon method of grilling, in which the eel is split lengthways, and the backbone removed, the two halves then being placed over or under the heat. A more intricate version has long been practised in Japan, where it is known as kabayaki. The classic mode of preparation requires that the eel be pinned through the head – alive – to a wooden board, slit open along the back with one cut, opened out for the backbone and guts to be removed, then cut into twelve-centimetre lengths. Bamboo or metal skewers are threaded through the flesh to restrain it from curling when cooked. Boiling water is poured over the fillet, after which it is lightly steamed, then grilled over charcoal, the grilling being interrupted three times for the meat to be dipped in a soy sauce.

The passion of the Japanese for this delicacy is unbounded. The first written record of kabayaki dates back to the thirteenth century, and the eel occupies a place of enormous importance in the complex relationship between the Japanese and their food. The standard book on the subject, Isao Matsui’s The Eel, published in 1972, runs to 737 pages, of which more than a hundred are devoted to eel dishes, the eel in literature, religion and legend, and other cultural associations. It is reckoned that today more than a hundred thousand tons of eel are consumed annually in Japan – ten times as much as in all the other eel countries of the world put together. The scale of this demand, and the inability of the long-established Japanese eel-farming sector to meet it, has promoted an explosive growth in the international trade in live eels, some aspects of which will be examined later.

The Japanese fascination with the eel continues to extend far beyond the pleasure it provides skewered and grilled. Shohei Imamura’s film The Eel, which was joint winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes festival in 1997, is a dark, enigmatic reflection on that fascination, in which the feelings of the protagonist for his pet eel act as a counterpoise to other forces leading him to murder and redemption. It is difficult to imagine any European or American director of Imamura’s stature choosing to occupy himself with a celluloid meditation on a creature so lacking in conventional box-office appeal.

THREE By diverse means

The men who caught the eels to satisfy the great and the greedy generally kept quiet about their ways and means. Their traces have to be dug for in the mud left by floods, sifted from ancient and unreliable chronicles, ferreted out from the documentation accumulated in dusty heaps as human society acquired the habit of minuting its mundane transactions. They do not amount to much: a sieve-full of old fish bones, a scattering of flint flakes from prehistoric eel spears, the record of dealings between the monastery’s financial obedientiary and fisherfolk required to pay their dues in scaly form. But they tell some sort of a story.

Several millennia before Aristotle took out his pen of split reed and scratched the first observations and speculations about the lives of eels on his papyrus sheet, men who lived by water had worked out what they needed to know and had fashioned ways to lay hold of an elusive but reliable source of nourishment. They knew that through the summer eels fed and might be caught on bait; that with the coming of autumn they made their way downriver; that in winter they hid in the upper layer of mud where they dozed.

A glimmering of how some of our prehistoric ancestors lived their short, arduous lives has been provided by archaeological finds around the northern end of what, to this day, remains the most abundant wild eel fishery in Europe, Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. These are some of the earliest known human settlements, going back to the time when the sun first rose on something resembling communal life, almost nine thousand years ago. The oldest is at Mount Sandel, situated on the lower Bann, the river that connects Lough Neagh to the sea and acts as a gateway for inward and outward migration.

At Mount Sandel, at Toome Bay – where the Bann leaves the lough – and at one of the river crossing points, Newferry, quantities of fish bones have been unearthed together with flakes from implements of stone, bone and flint surmised to have been fishing spears or parts of fish traps. These fragments were recovered from deposits of ash contained within layers of diatomaceous earth laid down by the seasonal flooding of the areas along the river between 6000 and 1000 BC. In 1951 a worked wooden harpoon was found at Toome and later dated to 5725 BC. More revealing was the discovery, between Newferry and Toome, of a line of wooden stakes connected by wickerwork – unmistakably a four-thousand-year-old precursor of the skeagh, or fishing weirs, still used on the Bann to intercept eels.

It is likely that these Mesolithic hunters moved up and down between the lough and the sea, occupying and deserting camps according to the dictates of the seasons. There is evidence that Mount Sandel was used in autumn and winter, while Newferry would have been uninhabitable in winter because of flooding. Around 3000 BC the first Neolithic farmers arrived in the area and the two groups probably coexisted in passable harmony for some time, the older concentrating on the specialised demands of hunting and fishing, trading their captures for tools of polished stone, pots and other modern conveniences manufactured by the newcomers. Gradually the distinctions between them would have faded anyway. And it is inconceivable that anyone – be they Mesolithic, Neolithic or the Celtic-speaking Iron Age pastoralists who came later – would have neglected the inexhaustible food source represented by the salmon and eels which swarmed up and down the Bann.

In Continental Europe, the exploitation of the eel would have evolved on much the same lines. Remains of prehistoric traps – in the form of stakes and woven fences – have been found on the Danish coast where the silver eels exit into the North Sea. Pieces of spears made of bone and horn have turned up all over Scandinavia and as far east as Poland. In central France, close to the Vézère, one of the main tributaries of the Dordogne, a carved cylinder of stone was found in the cave of La Madeleine, showing a human, two horses, and a creature which looks a lot more like an eel than anything else. Wherever our prognathous forbears found themselves beside still or moving water, they would have worked out that eels were good to eat, plentiful, and ever-present; and would have made nets, pots, traps and hooks to catch them.

In general the interest of the ancient scribes in the eel was biological and culinary. The one authority to show an interest in how the fish was caught, rather than in the mystery of its origins or qualities on the table, was a Roman of Praeneste, Claudius Aelianus, who, in the second century AD, compiled a collection of contemporary curiosities entitled De Natura Animalium. This included an account of a queer method of eel fishing supposedly employed on the river Eretaenus (where they are ‘of very great size and far fatter than those from any other place’):

The fisherman sits upon a rock jutting out …or else upon a tree which a fierce wind has uprooted and thrown down close to the bank …The eel fisherman seats himself and taking the intestines of a freshly slaughtered lamb, he lowers one end into the water and keeps it turning in the eddies; the other end he holds in his hands, and a piece of reed, the length of a sword handle, has been inserted into it. The food does not escape the notice of the eels, for they delight in this intestine. The first eel approaches …and fastening its curved, hook-like teeth, which are hard to disentangle, continues to leap up in its efforts to drag it down. When the fisherman realises from the agitation that the eel is held fast, he puts the reed to his mouth and blows down it with all his might, inflating the intestine very considerably. And the downflow of breath distends and swells it. And so the air descends into the eel, fills its head, fills its windpipe and stops the creature’s breathing. It suffocates …and this is a daily occurrence, and many are the eels caught by many a fisherman.

Aelian was a notoriously credulous soul, but it is worth pointing out that his book also contains a reference to fly fishing for trout, as practised by the Macedonians, which subsequent investigation has shown to be – almost certainly – authentic and reliable. Whether the same can be said of his eccentric and laborious eel-fishing technique is, perhaps, open to doubt.

After Aelian, a literary curtain descends for several centuries. Fishing for eels by more efficient means than suffocating them through a hollow reed certainly continued. For instance, archaeologists digging in the remains of the town of Oldenburg in Schleswig-Holstein – which stood beside a lake – found that more than half the fish bones thrown out by the residents between 650 and 900 AD came from eels. It is a matter of regret that no one troubled to record how the fishermen of Oldenburg – or anywhere else – came by their eels, but the silence is characteristic of the times. It was broken only by that indispensable if erratic illuminator of Anglo-Saxon ways, the monk Bede of Jarrow, who credited Saint Wilfrid (or Wilfrith) – at various times Abbot of Ripon, and Bishop of York, Hexham and Leicester – with having saved the South Saxons from famine in the late seventh century: ‘The people had no skill in fish-catching except only for eels …The Bishop’s men used the eel nets …and with the help of Divine Grace caught 300 fish.’

It is to Bede that we owe the traditional derivation of the name of that ancient centre of virtue and learning situated in the heart of the eel’s watery realm in eastern England: ‘Ely is in the province of the East Angles, a county of about 600 families in the nature of an island enclosed with marshes or with waters, and therefore it takes its name from the great plenty of eels taken in those marshes’.

Anyone who has read Waterland, Graham Swift’s black and tortuous Fenland tale of love, betrayal, incest and madness, will have obtained some idea of the entwining relationship between those who lived beside those still, green, weedy waterways and the slippery creatures hidden within them. The smell of the place, of mud, decomposing reeds and weeds, and fish, which suffuses Swift’s narrative would have been a lot stronger in Bede’s time and over the succeeding centuries, before the marshes were drained and brought to heel; when the lives of the people of the Fens were lived on, in and surrounded by water, and they owed their obeisance to their ecclesiastical overlords in the abbeys and monasteries which had arisen on the few knobs of dry land. There is a roll of their names in one of the early texts, the Coucher Book of Ely: ‘Henry son of Osbert de Walpole, Hugh Wade, Henry Dale, Moyses, Roger Fot, John Gubernator …14,500 eels paid on the first Sunday in Lent.’

They are good, sturdy Fenland names, men adept at spearing, netting and trapping the eels that slithered in such profusion across the soft mud at the bottom of those countless ditches and dykes and meres and infinitely slow-moving rivers. There are more, listed in the Ramsey Cartulary, the foundation charter granted in 970 by King Edgar: Alfgar of Hilgay and Hugh of Wiggenhall, altogether ‘seven fishermen and their seven assistants and seven little ships’. The charter mentions among the properties owing dues, the manor of Welles ‘which was of profit to the abbey solely on account of its render of eels; 20 fishermen gave 60,000 eels every year for the use of the brethren.’ The monks of Thorney Abbey were similarly well provided for, Bishop Aetholwold having endowed them – at a cost of twenty-one pounds – with the fisheries ‘surrounding the villages of Wyllan and Eolum …and 16,000 eels were captured there each year.’

Bishop Aetholwold may well have been alert to the merits of eels, since – as a young man, before his elevation to the see of Winchester – he had been dean at Glastonbury, which was the greatest of all the religious houses and commanded another eel stronghold, the equally flat and damp Somerset Levels. He was a strict and unbending Benedictine, and forcibly imposed Benedictine doctrines – among them a powerful interdict against the eating of meat – on a number of institutions. Such a prohibition would have been less burdensome at Glastonbury than in some other places. As early as 670, the monastery’s abbot, Beorhtwald, was granted by King Genwalh of Wessex the rights to the fishing at Meare on the dark and torpid Brue river. Some time later a building known as the Fish House was built at Meare, whose walls still stand. Glastonbury’s chief fisherman resided there, organising a regular supply of eels, tench, carp, pike and roach for the monks. For seven hundred years and more Glastonbury reigned supreme among the religious institutions of England, until Thomas Cromwell contrived the execution of its last abbot, Richard Whiting – ‘The Abbot of Glastonbury is to be tried at Glastonbury and also executed there with his complycys …see the evidence be well sorted and the indictments well drawn,’ read his directions on the matter – and the noble buildings and their treasures were wrecked and looted and lost for ever. Whiting’s head was placed on the abbey’s walls; and the quarters of his body were displayed over the gates of Wells, Bath, Ilchester and Bridgwater. There would be no more dishes of eels for the monks of Glastonbury, nor for those of neighbouring Muchelney and Athelney, whose charters also referred to marshland fisheries yielding eels by the thousand.

Long before Glastonbury fell victim to a complaisant king and his hatchet man, strict observance of St Benedict’s ban on meat-eating had faltered and faded away. But by then the taste for freshwater fish, and the methods of catching and preparing them, had been thoroughly absorbed into the fabric of life, with the Church – as so often making a virtue of self-interest – providing the organising impetus. However avid those monks of Fenland and Somerset may have been for their portions of eel stewed and boiled, they cannot possibly have consumed them in the numbers recorded in those dusty old scrolls. It follows that they, or – more likely – the officers of the monastery, traded in them.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the technology developed on the Continent for the construction and maintenance of stews and fishponds was greedily embraced by the piscivorous aristocracy and religious orders of England. The principles were laid down in the mid-sixteenth century by the learned Bishop Janus Dubravius of Olmutz, in his De Piscinis et Piscium, but were certainly in circulation much earlier than that. All over England holes were dug in the grounds of princely houses, abbeys and monasteries, filled with water, and stocked with carp, tench, bream, pike and eels. Prior William More of Worcester left a detailed record of his care of monastic stewponds at several locations. Between 1518 and 1524 he put six thousand eels into the ponds – no minor enterprise, given that they had to be caught somewhere and transported live.

In general, however, the eel was so abundant and ubiquitous that it was much less trouble to catch it in its chosen natural habitat than to raise it in captivity. The records of this endeavour are sparse and, in themselves, not enormously exciting. The remains of a Saxon fish weir have been dug up at Colwick, on the Trent in Nottinghamshire, which is assumed to have been used to trap migrating eels, since the Domesday Survey refers to all twenty-two ‘piscaria’ on the Trent being for eels. The Luttrell Psalter, which dates from the fourteenth century, shows basketwork traps of green willow or osier placed in a mill race to catch silver eels. (They were known as kiddles, possibly the origin of the phrase ‘a pretty kettle of fish’.) Evesham Abbey was but one of many monastic institutions which maintained such traps as of right. Its stations, at two mills on the Avon, are said to have yielded two thousand eels a year.

Men used bait to catch eels in the summer and intercepted them with fixed traps in the autumn. They also speared them whenever the opportunity presented itself but mainly in the winter, when fresh fish were hard to come by, and the eels had retired to holes in the mud, where their heads might be spotted by the practised eye and their bodies either impaled on a single prong, or – more often – jammed between two or three serrated prongs arranged like a fork. A late-fifteenth-century manuscript of heraldic bearings, Shirley’s Book, displayed the Harding arms with a chevron gules between three eel spears. John Guillim’s A Display of Heraldrie, which appeared in 1610, described how spears were used:

…for the taking of eeles, which being (for the most part) in the mudde cannot be taken with Net or any other Ginne: which gave occasion to the invention of this Instrument, a long staffe being set in the socket thereof, and so to strike into the depth of the mudde and by means of the Barbes of this Instrument they detain as many as come within the danger of.

In the previous century, the first great English antiquary, John Leland, referred to Langport market in Sedgemoor being full of ‘peckeles, as they call them, because they take them in those waters by pecking an eel speare in them when they lie in their beds.’

The method was employed all over Europe until comparatively recently. Eel spears were still being made in the small Danish town of Skyum within living memory; and Dr Christopher Moriarty records how commercial eel spearing continued on the mudflats at Rosslare, in south-east Ireland, into the 1960s, when tidal changes resulted in the eel grounds being buried by sand. An account of spearing on Ullswater, in north-west England, is contained in James Clarke’s Survey of the Lakes, published in the late eighteenth century:

Two or more persons go in a boat on a summer morning, from three till six o’clock. One gently moves the boat by the margins of the lake, whilst the other looks. He no sooner sees one than he sticks it with an eel spear and by this method great numbers are sometimes caught.

A rather more vivid description is found in a book called The Practice of Angling Particularly as Regards Ireland, which was published in 1845. It was the work of James O’Gorman, a well-known resident of the town of Ennis, of whom the Limerick Chronicle reported on his death that ‘he was the most expert angler in Glare and a devoted admirer of the gentle Izaak Walton.’ O’Gorman saw the locals at work on a nearby lake:

When the rushes grow up there is a regular flotilla of spearmen. A man stands on his bundle, poking before him with his long-handled spear. When he takes an eel he bites his head between his teeth, and then strings it up with a needle on a long cord. Anything so hideous as the appearance of these fellows, their faces begrimed with blood and dirt, can hardly be imagined.

‘These fellows’: that is as close as we get to knowing them. They were Irish bog peasants, marshmen, fenmen, men of the waterside, plying their skills in remote, damp places, at dusk, through the night and at dawn, keeping themselves to themselves, not caring much to share their secrets with outsiders, certainly not the sort to take a pen and write it down. As Andrew Herd has pointed out in his The History of Fly Fishing, we bookish types inevitably view the early development of ‘country pursuits’, whether it be fishing, bee-keeping, wildfowling, hunting or apple-growing, through the distorting lens of books. We are apt to forget that, in a world nine tenths of whose population could not read or write and to whom the printed word meant and mattered nothing, the process of discovering, learning, advancing, and refining was taking place out there in the field, far away from the desks and fireplaces of literary folk.

Thus, men who lived by rivers with trout in them and found they were good to eat, discovered at least two thousand years ago that they might be conveniently caught on a tuft of fur and feather arranged to look like an edible insect, with a hook concealed beneath it. When Aelian described how those Macedonians of old lured their speckled fish, he was not reporting a technological breakthrough but merely dropping in, by accident, on an established tradition. In the succeeding centuries, men – shepherds, woodcutters, herdsmen, pastoralists, poachers, charcoal burners – went on catching trout on artificial flies, all the time refining the technique. They did so, not to amuse themselves, but as one small part of their strategy for survival – a strategy which did not extend to sitting down by the light of a candle at the end of another long, hard day, and taking up pen, ink and parchment to make a record for the enlightenment of generations to come.

They were silent, these fishermen, for centuries. But they fished, cast their flies in the mountain streams of the Balkans, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and on the slower, weedier lowland rivers – anywhere trout thrived and ate insects. As they did so, they made their traditions, their own unwritten folk history. Eventually the first stirrings of a European civilisation were felt, and society began to aspire to something beyond conquest, defending itself and feeding itself, and became alive to the notion that there might be more to life than merely the striving to continue it. Music, painting and literature burst forth. Games, played in one form or another for centuries, were celebrated and codified. And someone, charmed by the way fly fishermen contrived to catch trout, wrote some of it down; and some time later Caxton’s fellow pioneer of the printed book, Wynkyn de Worde, attached the anonymous Treatyse of Fysshynge with the Angle onto the end of a hotchpotch of other texts covering the amusements available in the countryside. From that publication, at the end of the fifteenth century, subsequent writers dated the birth of the ‘history’ of angling.

The humble eel received short shrift in the Treatyse, being labelled as ‘a quasy [i.e. liable to case nausea] fysshe, a ravenour and a devourer of the brode [fry] of fysshe.’ As a consequence of these shortcomings, the eel is bracketed with the pike as ‘behynde all other to angle’, the one method – grudgingly suggested – being to drop a ‘grete angyll twytch or mennow’ [earthworm or minnow] into a hole and await developments. Thus, from the start, the eel was expelled to the ghetto of the piscatory world, as being wholly unworthy of the notice of educated men in search of sport. The eel was left to those who had learned from their fathers, as their fathers had from their fathers, about its usefulness. This extended far beyond its role as food. From its skin they made hinges for doors, membranes for filtering liquids, and flexures for flails. The skin had protective qualities, too. The men and women of the Fens made garters of it and swore that they helped keep off the ague, a constant threat in those dank climes. Strips of skin were dried in the sun, greased with fat, placed in a linen bag stuffed with thyme, lavender and marsh mint, then buried under the peat for the summer, before being dug up, greased again, polished with a smooth stone and declared ready to be tied around Fenland legs.

Thomas Boosey, in his Anecdotes of Fish and Fishing, quotes another, more specialised application for the eel:

If you would make some notorious drunkard to loathe and abhor his beastly vice, and for ever after to hate the drinking of wine, put an eel, alive, into a wide-mouthed bottle with a cover, having in it such a quantity of wine as may suffice to suffocate and strangle the eel; which done, take out the dead eel and let the party whom you would have reclaimed, not knowing hereof, drink of that wine.

The generations of eel men learned of its habits, and handed down their knowledge: where and when to lay traps, cast bait, stick spears; the influence of the seasons and the moon. Theirs was a closed world, and they had no need to write any of this down, even if they could. But they did have to talk to each other. And that is all that is available to the outsider – the varied vocabulary of eeling.

Thus, on the Severn, in Kent and in Lancashire, the eel spear was known as a shear or shar, in Wiltshire as a sticker, in Humberside as a stang or stang gad, in Yorkshire as a dilger, in Fenland as a pritch, in the Borders as a glaive, glave or gleve. That other favoured method, used for centuries all over the British Isles and Continental Europe, in which a ball of worms woven into a looped length of worsted or wool was lowered into a likely eel haunt, and sharply raised when its motions suggested the entanglement of teeth is, in the English translation of Friedrich Willem Tesch’s dense and scholarly study, The Eel, rendered as naring. On Sedgemoor it used to be known as clotting – a term employed in several other eel regions – or rayballing. Variants include patting, tatting, totting, sniggling, snigging, bobbing, bebbing, babbing, bubbing and broggling. Permanent traps for intercepting migrating silver eels were kiddles, or – much later, and particularly on the Thames – bucks. Terms for movable, baited pots included grig, putcheon, hive and wheel.

To the naked eye, the American eel, Anguilla rostrata, is no easier to distinguish from its European cousin, Anguilla anguilla, than a citizen of Milwaukee from one of Birmingham or Düsseldorf. They look the same, they behave the same, they taste the same, and for centuries they were prized for the same reasons. In his study of one of the Native American peoples of Maine, Penobscot Man, the ethnologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck included an eyewitness description of a fishing party at work in the early years of the twentieth century. It happened in August, when the berries of the poke bush are at their most toxic, before the eels stir on their quest for the sea. Five families of Penobscot came to the river; men, women and children. For two days they dug the roots of the Indian turnip that grew wild along the streams and in damp places. They mashed the roots and the pokeberries into a pulp on flat rocks, which ran purple with the juice. When they had enough, they spread out along a mile of river. At a signal they waded into the water, casting the pulp across the surface and stirring up the muddy bottom with sticks. As the poison took effect, the Penobscot were driven ashore, where they applied plantain leaves to soothe their inflamed skins and waited.

Torpid eels began to appear upon the surface, and before an hour had passed the surface was spotted with the bodies of dead and dying fish, which floated belly up. The children of the party, having recovered from their hurts, were forced to enter the water and bring the fish ashore, where they were skinned and salted by the women. After this the eels were placed upon dead limbs and laid in the sun for two days. Then they were hung up in a tent and smoked until there was no drip from the suspended bodies.

It was the way of the Penobscot to avail themselves of everything the shores and hinterland provided. In the spring they netted alewives, shad, salmon and sturgeon. They planted corn, beans and potatoes to be harvested in late summer. In June they came down to the sea to hunt seals and porpoises, and to gather eggs, baby seabirds, clams and lobster. In October they took to the woods, setting traps for muskrat and hare. They feasted at Christmas, then hunted moose and caribou, and later otter and beaver.

The eel had three seasons: summer, fall and winter. In summer they trapped them in baskets of woven splints, and poisoned them. In winter they speared them through holes in the ice, using a weapon eighteen or twenty feet long with outer prongs of hardwood and a central one of bone, later iron. And in between, when the silver eels made for the ocean with the coming of autumn, it was time to man the weirs. Up to a dozen families would camp at the places where the traps had been maintained by generations past. They made fences of willow and brush running downstream at an angle from each bank. Where the fences met, three trays of willow rods, ten feet long by seven wide by a foot deep, were fixed, one on top of the other, the rods spaced so that the biggest eels were caught in the top and the smallest in the bottom. Somewhere close at hand a pit was dug and lined with salt, into which the eels were thrown to rid themselves of their slime and die.

The highly nutritious flesh of the American eel was a staple in the diet of the Penobscot as it was for their neighbours, the Micmacs of Nova Scotia. Archaeologists have found an encampment at the southern end of Kejimkujik Lake in Nova Scotia, which dates back five thousand years and which they believe was used for seasonal eel fishing. Indeed all the Native American tribes scattered across the virgin lands of New England and the basin of the St Lawrence had reason to be thankful for the eel and to study its habits.

Although their territories lay towards the northern limit of the species’ range, the immensity of the St Lawrence – its mighty tidal displacement, the tens of thousands of miles of suitable habitat it offered – made it the greatest wild eel river system in the world. Its abundance of fish – not just eels, but salmon, sturgeon, shad, alewives and others – dumbfounded the first white settlers. The possibility that it could ever be exhausted or cease to provide could not have crossed their minds, or the minds of those who lived from it.

A riddle confronted the Jesuit missionaries who were dispatched to Canada during the seventeenth century to spread the Word of God in territories claimed by France – generally on rather tenuous grounds – as conquests. The land they called New France had clearly been shaped by God and provisioned by Him on the most lavish scale; yet was inhabited and enjoyed by people for whom it could not possibly have been intended since they were not even aware of His existence. It was evidently their duty to annexe it spiritually in the name of the Christian God, just as it was the duty of the military to do so temporally in the name of the King of France. But at least some of them had the wit to realise that the manner in which the ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ lived from the land and the water had an ordained appropriateness about it, however inscrutable the divine purpose might be; and had the sense to observe without condemnation, and to learn.

The process of annexation initiated by Samuel de Champlain when he founded Quebec in 1608 was problematic enough, the writ of France being in practice restricted to a scattering of well-guarded settlements on or near the St Lawrence River. The spiritual mission, begun by Franciscans in 1615 and subsequently pursued with typical energy and zeal by the Jesuits, was at least as hazardous and strenuous. The fathers endeavoured to spread the Word among the Abenakis of Acadia (now Maine); the Montagnais and lesser tribes of the lower St Lawrence; the Huron and their enemies the Iroquois; the tribes beyond Lake Huron, including the Beaver and the Cree; and the Sioux who lived along the Mississippi. They strove and suffered. Some were captured and tortured, many died. Sometimes they were listened to, often they were chased and harried. Sometimes they baptised.

However limited the success of the Jesuits – and the matter is complex and controversial – and whatever view we may take of the pursuit of the missionary principle among native peoples, there is reason to be grateful to those fathers of the black gown who laboured so heroically so far from home. In the form of the celebrated Jesuit Relations, the written records of their missionary work compiled by successive superiors in Quebec to be sent back to the headquarters of the order in Paris, they left an amazingly detailed and revealing commentary on the alien world into which they had been delivered. Although the ostensible purpose of the Relations was to keep the order informed about the progress of the mission, a great deal else found its way into their narratives. Indeed, one suspects that – as the fathers settled themselves in their birch-bark wigwams deep in the boundless wilderness, surrounded by people they necessarily regarded as godless primitives – they often found it easier to describe the wonders of the land and the extraordinary customs and practices of its inhabitants than to give a wholly objective account of how well they were doing.

The first of the Jesuit missionaries was Father Pierre Biard, who was sent on the orders of Henri IV to the settlement of Port Royal, on the coast of Acadia. Although the native Micmacs seem to have paid little heed to him, certain aspects of their way of life clearly made a favourable impression on him. ‘Never had Solomon,’ he wrote, ‘his mansion better regulated and provided with food than are these homes and their landlords. But then a greater one than Solomon has made them.’ Father Biard ate seal – ‘as good as veal’ – and bear – ‘which is very good’. The inshore waters and streams swarmed with herring, smelt, salmon, sturgeon and eels ‘good and fat’. ‘Anyone who has not seen it could scarcely believe it,’ he marvelled. ‘You cannot put your hand in the water without encountering them.’

The Acadia mission was a failure, and Biard, who had actually arrived in 1611, the year after Henri’s assassination, was captured by English raiders, eventually making his way back to France. In 1632 French rule over Canada was confirmed by treaty with England, and a Jesuit mission was established in Quebec under the leadership of Father Paul le Jeune. Over the next ten years le Jeune composed and compiled ten Relations for his superior in Paris, Father Jacquinot, who responded to the growing public interest in the New World by having them published. Le Jeune had taken the trouble to learn something of the language of the neighbouring Montagnais, and studied their way of life. It is clear from the attention he gives the subject that the eels of the tidal St Lawrence, and of the lakes and rivers feeding into it, represented a crucial source of food:

In regard to eels, they fish for them in two ways, with a weir and a harpoon. They make the weirs very ingeniously, long and broad, capable of holding five or six hundred eels. When the water is low, they place these upon the sand in a suitable and retired spot, securing them so they are not carried away by the tide. At the two sides they collect stones which they extend out like a chain or little wall …so the fish, encountering the obstacle, will readily swim towards the mouth of the net. When the sea rises it covers the net; then, when it falls, they go and examine it. Sometimes they find there are one or two hundred eels …When the sea is rough many of them are taken; when it is calm, few or none.

The fishing with harpoon, or spear, took place at night:

Two savages enter a canoe – one at the stern, who handles the oars, and the other at the bow, who, by the light of a bark torch fastened to the prow, looks around searchingly for the prey, floating gently along the shore of this great river. When he sees an eel, he thrusts his harpoon down …There are certain ones who will take three hundred in one night …It is wonderful how many of these fish are found in the months of September and October. It is thought that this great abundance is supplied by some lakes in the country further north, which, discharging their waters here, make us a present of this manna.

Other brothers used the same term to convey what struck them as the miraculous nature of this supply. Franco Bressani, who preached among the Huron in the 1640s and 1650s, spoke of the eel as ‘a manna exceeding all belief. One or two men, he claimed, could catch five or six thousand in a night, which – smoked or salted – could be kept all winter and ‘are much better than any eels in France’. ‘To tell the truth,’ he enthused, ‘this country is the Kingdom of water and of fish.’

The fishing methods observed by the first pioneers, traders and missionaries – and described in such careful detail by Father le Jeune – had been in use for many centuries before they came. A Canadian archaeologist, Chris Junker-Andersen, carried out an examination of a midden uncovered at an Iroquois seasonal camp on a creek close to the northern side of the St Lawrence, near the present-day town of Morrisburg. Radio-dating of carbon showed the camp to have been in use for at least four hundred years, up to the time the Iroquois – for reasons still not wholly understood – vanished from the St Lawrence valley at the end of the sixteenth century. Peaks of activity occurred in the middle of the twelfth century, towards the end of the fourteenth, and in the middle of the sixteenth. Study of the fauna remains indicated that the diet of the Iroquois using the camp included ten species of freshwater clam, four of turtles, nine of snails, at least sixteen of birds, more than twenty of mammals, and twelve of fish. The single most common vertebrate was A. rostrata. Chris Junker-Andersen believes the camp was established specifically to exploit the migration of the silver eel, and that its occupation would have been generally restricted to the fall. While some eels were consumed there and then, most would have been dried and smoked and transported elsewhere, to be eaten over the winter. Smoked eel, like biltong in southern Africa, would have been ideal travelling food.

When the first French explorer of Canada, Jacques Cartier, sailed up the St Lawrence in 1535, he encountered Iroquois along the upper reaches and commented on their reliance upon smoked fish, including eels, to survive the winter. By the time Champlain revisited the area, the Iroquois had been supplanted by their traditional enemies, Algonquian-speaking tribes such as the Weskanini and the Montagnais (or Innu). But the exploitation of the eel by age-old means continued throughout the St Lawrence system as far as the western end of Lake Ontario, where the Niagara Falls presented a barrier insuperable even for this assiduous traveller. It embraced groups of tribes divided by ancient enmities: Iroquois, Huron, Algonquian. And, as Junker-Andersen has demonstrated, even Huron people living along Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay – well beyond the limits of eel distribution – habitually travelled east in order to take part in seasonal fishing.

The establishment of the first colonial settlements along the eastern seaboard presaged a struggle between the great European powers – England, France and Holland – which would consume the ‘kingdom of water and fish’ along the St Lawrence and across the virgin lands to the south and south-west for a century and a half. By the agencies of warfare and disease, this struggle brought catastrophe to those who inherited it. If any of the invaders or their descendants had moral qualms about the holocaust unleashed upon the Native Americans, they generally kept quiet about them. In the case of the French and the Dutch, the paramount consideration in dealing with the Indian tribes was trade, particularly in furs; for the English it was to obtain land for settlement. Both came with the impregnable assumption that the indigenous people were not really human, and that to exploit, trick, slaughter and dispossess them was to secure for the true inheritors of the earth what was rightfully theirs. But, although it was customary to deride the ‘savages’ for their brutish habits, aspects of their way of life – in particular their genius for hunting and fishing – often aroused a genuine, if condescending, wonder.

Travellers’ tales of the marvels and terrors encountered in this wilderness were – however fanciful or incompetently written – immensely popular. One notably inept example was an account published in 1751 by John Bartram of a journey up the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania, through the lands of the Onondaga, to the Oneida River and Oswego on the shores of Lake Ontario. On the Susquehanna, Bartram found the Indians ‘cut a stick about three foot long and as thick as one’s thumb, they split it about a foot down, and when the eel is gutted, they coil it between the sides of the stick and bind the top close, which keeps the eel flat, and then stick one end in the ground before a good fire.’ Further north, on the Oneida, Bartram met Onondagas of genial disposition:

These Indians were very kind to us …In the morning they catched some stout eels and a great fish two feet [sic] long, it was round and thick, they strike them with long slender shafts 18 or 20 feet long, pointed at the end with iron …the two splints of wood spreading each side directs the point into the fish, which at a great depth would otherwise be difficult to hit.

Eel fishing was evidently of great importance to the Onondaga, one of the Iroquois peoples spread across the lands to the south of Lake Ontario who together formed the political confederation known as the Hotmonshonni, or League of Five Nations. Two years after Bartram’s book appeared, two German missionaries, David Zeissburger and Henry Frey, were entertained by an Onondaga chief called Otschinachiatha. He told them about his fishing weir, explaining that ‘each one has his own place where he is allowed to fish and no one is permitted to encroach …A chief is appointed to each fishing place, and he has his people who belong to him.’

The two brothers went downstream from Lake Oneida, until they came to a weir which ‘quite closed the river’, where a number of Onondaga were fishing. An opening through the obstruction was made on the orders of Chief Hatachsocu, and the travellers were given some dried eels in exchange for flour. They reached the Seneca River and another weir ‘where there were also Onondagas, who were very friendly and gave us eels.’

A nineteenth-century traveller, Christian Schultz, reported that eels were found in Lake Oneida ‘in the greatest abundance and are the finest and largest that I ever saw.’ Schultz described the weir constructed below the outflow from the lake, and the setting of the basket at its apex:

I was present when one of the baskets, which had been set overnight, was taken up; it filled two barrels and the greater part of the eels weighed from two to three pounds each. I have always been prejudiced against eating eels on account of a rancid taste …but, being prevailed upon to taste of these, I must declare that I have never before tasted any fish so delicious, without excepting even the salmon. A family who live at the outlet of this lake depend almost entirely on this eel fishery. They salt down about forty barrels a year, and find a very ready sale for them at ten dollars a barrel.

The Native Americans were the great catchers and consumers of the freshwater eel, and with their expulsion from the major waterways and general decline, interest in exploiting the species waned. There were pockets of aficionados – witness a ditty quoted in the official History of the Town of Windham in New Hampshire, published in 1883:

From the eels they formed their food in chief

And eels were called the Derryfield beef

It was often said that their only care And their only wish and their only prayer

For the present world and the world to come

Was a string of eels and a jug of rum.

But, broadly speaking, as the United States developed into a city-based society, the habit of eating freshwater fish withered. With the development of the rail network, almost all the population centres located within the eel’s distribution range became accessible to supplies of fish from the sea, which were regarded as being tastier and generally more appealing.

The same thing had already happened in England. The railway lines crept to every corner of the land, enabling the ports to dispatch fresh sea fish anywhere and everywhere. In the course of the nineteenth century the middle classes abruptly forsook the mundane flavours of carp, tench, pike and eels, and they have never returned to them. And within a couple of generations the economic and social chains which had tended to anchor age-old traditions in their particular regions began to give way to new, more potent forces. Thus, the narrator of Graham Swift’s Waterland – son of a Fenland lock-keeper and eel-catcher – becomes a teacher in Greenwich. The life of the eelman was associated with slime and fish smells, toil, unsociable hours, uncertain and meagre incomes. As regional diversity was eroded by upward mobility and creeping social homogeneity, so those quaint old ways were lodged in the museum of folk memory, to be sighed over nostalgically as belonging to a past which – as it recedes ever further from view – seems, at sentimental times, somehow quieter and less troubled.

Nowadays, glistening on the supermarket counter under the watch of staff in striped aprons, bogus boaters and regulation disposable gloves, are fish hoovered up by factory ships from every distant ocean of the world; beheaded, betailed, scaled, filleted, spirited across continents to be laid on beds of sparkling ice. To this generation, brainwashed into believing that the only good food is food cleansed of any vestige of its mucky history, the slithery eel comes with an image deficiency so acute as to disqualify it from polite society. The wonder is that there are any English eel fishermen left at all.⁷

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