244 TACKLE—CURIOUS METHODS—SILURUS—EELS 
contest takes place between the monster and the yoked animals ; 
for the creature, foster-child of the Ister, draws downward with 
all his might, while the yoked animals pull the rope in an 
opposite direction. The fish can make no headway. Beaten 
by the united efforts of the team, he gives in, and is hauled on 
to the bank.” 
Siluri, according to common report, have been caught 
weighing over 400 Ibs. and of more than twelve feet in length. 
There is good ground for us moderns patting ourselves on the 
back, when we realise that owing to the many improvements 
effected in our tackle, and not least in the Rod, an angler off 
Catalina has often landed a heavier fish than a yoke of oxen 
on the banks of the Ister, e.g. Mr. A. N. Howard (in 1916) 
caught the record Black Sea Bass in Californian waters, weighing 
493 Ibs. 
Even this big fellow is quite a dwarf beside the Tuna of 710 
Ibs. taken in Canadian waters by Mr. Laurence Mitchell,! which 
still holds, I believe, the record of the world as the very largest 
fish ever taken on a rod. 
I myself have seen a sword fish of over 300 lbs. killed on a 
rod off Santa Catalina. When in rg09 out for Tarpon in 
Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, I had the good luck to secure after 
a fight of two and a half hours, and after being towed almost 
down to Port Royal and back, a distance of some five miles, 
a shark weighing 116 lbs., with a rod only 8 foot long, with a 
light salmon line, with a No. 4 hook, and with a bit of piano 
wire, faute de mieux, attached to prevent erosion.? 
From the time of the earliest authors the identification of 
the Si/urus has been a vexed question. 
Aristotle writing of the Giants, a large fresh-water fish (his 
only account of actual fishing, it may be remembered, is a fight 
1 See Forest and Stream, Nov. 7, 1914. 
2 The shark finds great favour among the negroes; ‘‘ you can swallow 
him in de dark,” is a commendation based on the absence of small tricky bones, 
such as the shad’s. But to the best black gourmets, the fish only attains its 
highest perfection in soup, after being buried for two weeks! The cook of 
the friend with whom I was staying in Jamaica only consented to cutting up my 
shark, on condition that if a gold watch was found in its belly, that was to be 
her perquisite—a condition postulated, I eventually discovered, because on a 
similar occasion one hundred years before, her grandmother did discover a 
gold watch. Alas for her! two ship-bolts of iron were her only treasure-trove. 
