Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 233

were still circumnavigating our coasts. Bluefin tuna, sometimes
described by fishermen hunting pilchard and herring as 'blue mack-
erel' or 'king mackerel', roamed through all the seas around Britain. As
the angling expert Mike Thrussell records, in the late 1920s big-game
hunters heard tales of vast fish appearing among shoals of herring in
the North Sea. In 1930, fishing off Scarborough on the Yorkshire
coast, they landed their first five fish, all between 400 and 700 pounds. 4
By 1932, in the same waters, they had beaten the world record for
bluefin tuna. They did it again in 1933, with a monster of 850 pounds.
Some remarkable footage of these early expeditions exists. Tweedy
men and women, angling from a tiny launch, used split-cane rods and
gearless reels to catch this king of fish. One shot shows nine mon-
strous tuna lying on the deck of the steam-trawler the anglers used as
their mother ship. 5
Perhaps this contributed to their decline. The industrial fishing of
herring and mackerel after the Second World War must also have
done so, and by the late 1950s the sport-ishing had ceased. Since then
the odd fish has been taken in nets, including one, off the Irish coast,
of over 1,200 pounds.
The migrations inland were no less impressive. Before they were
silted up by forest clearance and the runoff from ploughing, before
they were weired, impounded and polluted, the water in most of the
rivers in Europe is likely to have been clear. Most rivers would also
have supported runs of migratory fish on the scale of those the Euro-
peans encountered when they first arrived in North America. There
they found sturgeon, some of them eighteen feet long, moving up the
rivers in such numbers that, an English visitor recorded, 'in one day,
within the space of two miles only, some gentlemen in canoes caught
above six hundred . . . with hooks, which they let down to the bottom
and drew up at a venture when they perceived them to rub against a
fish'.6 6 Which river was this? The Potomac, that foul drain which runs
through what is now Washington DC. 7
Above the bottom-hugging sturgeon, Callum Roberts tells us,
swarmed alewife and shad (migratory members of the herring family)
in such numbers that there seemed to be more fish than water: in
1832 European settlers caught almost 800 million of them in the
Potomac alone. In other rivers salmon were packed so densely that,