THE BIG GAME FISHES OF 

 CALIFORNIA 



By CHARLES FREDERICK HOLDER, LL.D. 



In the acknowledgment of his election as Honorary Vice- 

 President and member of the Tuna Club of Santa Catalina 

 Island, California, ex-United States Senator George F.Edmunds, 

 one of America's greatest statesmen, and who could have been 

 President of the United States had he said the word, wrote 

 to the President of the Tuna Club : " I thank you and the 

 members of the Tuna Club for what I consider a real honour, 

 although I feel that I am hardly entitled to it. I have never 

 had the opportunity of fishing for the great and lovely tuna. 

 The nearest I have ever come to it was many years ago, when 

 in a small boat, with twenty or thirty other boats, we composed 

 the tow of a large horse mackerel, as the tuna is called on the 

 Atlantic side, near the Isles of Shoals. That fish had been har- 

 pooned from the deck of a fishing smack, and when at last he 

 was captured and hoisted on board he weighed, to the best 

 of my recollection, between eight and nine hundred pounds." 



This is the fish that, in the twentieth century, anglers are 

 taking with rod and reel, and no more graphic illustration 

 of its power, strength, and endurance can be given than this 

 modest statement of one of America's most distinguished men 



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