40 INTRODUCTION 
hand fishing, and then, later, on fish elsewhere in a river. On 
the latter, especially in the case of the salmon—in Pliny’s day 
still abundant in Aquitania, which comprised the Loire and 
many Palzolithic cavernes—the weapon, even if as bident or 
trident it had added unto itself a prong or two, would frequently 
be found ineffective, owing to lack of prehensility. Hence 
came about a modification, perhaps due either to the happy 
chance of a spear on which a point or thorn had inadvertently 
been left, or to the inventive faculty of some Troglodyte Hardy. 
We later reach a Spear Harpoon with barbs on one side only, 
whence “ line upon line,” or rather barb upon barb, we attain 
unto the later type, which had a barbed head so socketed as to 
come free from the shaft (when the quarry has been struck) 
but made fast to the head by a line for retrieving the fish. 
In due, if differing, gradation we ultimately attain either unto 
the existing device of the aboriginal Tsuy Hwan of Formosa, 
an arrow shaped like a trident shot from but attached to a bow, 
or unto le dernier cri, our whaling Harpoon shot from a gun.! 
Third comes fishing with a line of some sort. This was 
devised doubtless by some hungry but perforce merely medi- 
tative Magdalenian observing how dropped morsels were 
seized by fish in a pool, whose depth or environment set at 
naught both his hand and his spear. 
The problem how to reach and how to land them was eventu- 
ally solved by the method—happily christened by Sheringham, 
“ Entanglement by Appetite ’’—of fastening a gorge through 
or a thorn holding some kind of bait to an animal sinew, a 
wythe, or a hardened thong of one of the whip-like alge. 
This wythe or what not in the procession of the ages was 
(according to Pepys) to betaper itself into the first English 
catgut line of 1667, and (according to The Compleat Fisherman, 
! For a similar use of bow and harpoon arrow by the Bororo tribes in the 
Amazon valley, see W. A. Cork, Through the Wilderness of Brazil, p. 380. 
Our gaff, a descendant, possibly, of the unilaterally one-barbed spear, seems 
possessed of perpetual youth. The first description of its use in Angling in 
England occurs, according to Mr. Marston (Walton and the Earlier Fishing 
Writers (1898), p. 97), in T. Barker’s Art of Angling (1651), but according to 
Dr. Turrell, op. cit., pp. 85 and 91, only in Barker’s 2nd of 1657, ‘“‘a good 
large landing hook.” From the definition, however, by Blount, Glossage, in 
1657, “ Gaffe, an iron wherewith seamen pull great Fishes into their ships,” 
its previous existence and employment at sea can be deduced. 
