The Salmon: The Extraordinary Story of the King of Fish

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The Atlantic salmon has been a lifeline of survival for early Man since the Stone Age. As G.E. Sharp, counterpointing survival with angling, said in 1910, ‘The caveman’s necessity has become the rich man’s hobby.’ It has been, as for the north-west Pacific Indians, the most reliable source of returning protein of any. It swims into the larder voluntarily and, unlike the fleet-footed reindeer, need only be stopped from going out again. Seals are large lumps of meat easily overtaken and knocked on the head, but they only make landfall once a year for pupping and their meat is unsuitable for variable curing. No wonder some of the Pacific tribes enunciated heartfelt thanks for salmon’s bountiful re-appearance.

There is an intrinsic difficulty in firmly tying down what happened long ago in western Europe. It is known that Cro-Magnon man ate salmon from bones in middens on the River Dordogne. And the indigenous inhabitants of Scotland, the Picts, incised salmon on sacred stones, some of which survive to this day. But the food-remains legacy is not all that it might be.

One problem is that fish bones soften and disintegrate faster than animal bones; they are less durable. Where the middens full of clam and mollusc shells present an unarguable picture of shellfish consumption, salmon eating is much harder to ascertain from bone remains. Historians of Stone Age culture say that three-quarters of all animal bones were eaten by creatures, from deer down to voles, needing the calcium. This is prior to natural biological breakdown. We get only a whiff of what was consumed from rubbish deposits, even with animals and their harder bones. Fish bones are often long gone from recorders’ view.

Then there is a possible misinterpretation of the meaning of surviving bark and wicker artefacts. These are shown on the Pacific Northwest to have been used for fish capture. Stone Age historians on the east side of the Atlantic often imagine that these surviving creations were used for carrying things. They may, rather, have been used to trap fish. What were suitable materials for doing this on one seaboard may reasonably be assumed to have been suitable for the same purpose on another.

Then most of the evidence of a salmon culture determining settlement in western Europe may lie underneath the coastal cities which have grown where there were once river-mouth fishing villages. Of England’s cathedral cities, eighteen of twenty-five are on salmon rivers – either a coincidence, a practical matter relating to easier travel using water, or something to do with an easily obtained food resource. Who knows? My guess is that salmon presence played a part in human settlement locations. Salmon may have determined early settlement. If it is trouble to take the food to the people, take the people to the food.

If you deduce early diet from drawings and rock art depictions, fish appear as well as deer. Perhaps the fact that the hides of deer were vital for clothing made deer more integral to survival, but in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum there is a woman’s marriage coat described as of the Gilyak tribe from the lower Amur River in eastern Siberia, made of 60 Pacific salmon skins and dated to about 1900. On the upper back are appliqué semi-circular panels simulating fish scales. There are similar garments in other collections.

Not only were salmon skins used in ceremonial occasions, but Icelanders, inhabitants of the Gaspé Peninsular in Quebec, and the Ainu from the Kuril Islands off Japan, all used salmon skin for clothes and shoes. The Ainu used the tougher skins of spawned salmon for making winter boots. My wife, even, is in on the act. She had a business making fashionable items from salmon skins, with a customer base including celebrities. Of course she did! With its delicately inscribed, miniature, cupped ring patterns and very tough texture it is fabulous material.

Today most Atlantic salmon run rivers in only seven countries: Britain, Ireland, Norway, Canada, America, Russia and Sweden. But European rivers at one time mostly possessed salmon populations. Spain, Denmark, Portugal, France and Germany had rivers suited to salmon breeding, as did the countries round the Baltic. The Rhine, Seine, Loire, Douro, Gudena, Oder, Elbe and Weser hosted large populations of the silver visitor.

There is a dearth of statistical information about pre-industrial catches of salmon in Europe, but the few titbits which can be found conjure up a picture of abundance which is reminiscent of the north-west Pacific. A late-eighteenth-century Spanish study claims that 2,000 salmon a day were caught during the season in the province of Asturias. Another writer extrapolating from this considers that 10,000 salmon a day were landed every day in north Spain in the eighteenth century. Adding to this calculation figures for fishing rentals, which were high, Anthony Netboy in Salmon: The World’s Most Harassed Fish, written in 1980, says that the annual harvest in Spain might therefore have been up to 900,000 fish. Remember, Spain is a salmon country with some of the smallest salmon rivers. Human populations were low then. Salmon were a key ingredient of survival.

France has the shape and physiognomy of a major salmon location. Long winding rivers meander placidly through forests and farmland and course through verdant green valleys. When Caesar colonised Gaul in 56 BC the legions witnessed salmon leaping in the Garonne, and noted a fish-eating people. Salmon and mullet were the delicacies. Taking their cue from the natives, the Romans investigated salmon flavour and took the salted product back home.

The medieval period is perceived only from flashes of comment, but it is known that salmon were traded over long distances. Anthony Netboy says that by the thirteenth century salmon were being exported from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Berwick and Perth to England and the Continent. That is a fact that takes a while to fully appreciate. Salmon, then, was a major trade item from early time, like gold. By the time of the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the value of Scotland’s salmon exports was £200,000 – an enormous sum.

Better-detailed is the trade established by Glaswegian merchants sending salted-down salmon to Flanders, Holland and France in the eighteenth century. ‘Kippering’ was the name given to a method involving decapitating the fish, removing the insides, including any roe, and splitting it down the middle. The cure was dry, with the preserving agents, principally salt, being absorbed into the flesh. Saltpetre, brown sugar, even rum, might be added. The salmon would lie in this concoction for two days, after which it was dried either by heat from a kiln or by sunlight. Sun-drying could take five weeks. Smoking as done in those days involved the same initial process as today, with the fish in the round then being exposed to wood-smoke.

Pickling replaced salting and kippering, mainly because it was less labour-intensive. This entailed boiling in brine (30 minutes for salmon, 20 for smaller grilse), cooling, then topping with brown vinegar. The fish were exported in barrels to a variety of European ports in regions where salmon did not exist naturally. There were idiosyncratic recipes, as you might expect from a food-conscious time: added to the pickle were bunches of rosemary, slices of ginger, mace, lemon-peel, wine and, in the case of salmon emanating from Newcastle, beer.

London was distinct from European markets in demanding salmon that was fresh. Unadulterated salmon was unloaded in London from boats sailing out of Berwick-on-Tweed and Perth. Again, eighteenth-century Londoners were fastidious. Prices of salmon tumbled as the season wore on. Early-season salmon which travelled in cold weather fetched prices nearly two-thirds higher than later in May, by which time salmon were abundant and freshness was fighting higher temperatures. However, transport in ‘kitts’ (barrels of 30–40 pounds of fish) was quick: fast cutters of 60–70 tons could whack down from Perth on favourable north winds in 50 hours. When Londoners had to hold their noses the fish were pickled and sent abroad.

Although history recounts that the first salmon packed on ice travelled from Perth to London in the 1780s, Galen, the Roman writer, had reported fish being preserved in snow in the second century. Preservation in frozen water was hardly a sophisticated trick anyway; by the time full-scale salmon netting was underway in the eighteenth century there were ice houses at the mouths of many salmon rivers in Scotland. Winter ice was chopped and packed inside these stone-vaulted, partly subterranean buildings, then sealed off. Salmon were loaded in as and when they were caught.

The volume of trade can be established in some of the local details. The big rivers have clear records, at least of official catches. The Tay is Scotland’s premier salmon water. By 1807 the average catch of grilse and salmon was 56,000. Including its main tributary, the River Earn, by the 1840s these numbers had increased to between 65,000 and 80,000, and in the year 1842, to 111,000.

England’s Tyne, today the top salmon angling river by a clear lead, has an 18-mile estuary which, during the period of industrialisation, became horribly choked and polluted. But when Tyne waters ran clear, as they do again today, the salmon run was prodigious. Nets took 80,000–120,000 fish every year at one time. This was in addition to some 4,000 salmon on rods. Some days the nets managed to sweep up 2,000 fish, an almighty harvest by the standards of any Atlantic salmon rivers anywhere.

Netting and over-netting then took its toll on returning runs in different places at different times. The Tweed, which at the sea-end divides England and Scotland, had a salmon and grilse catch averaging 109,000 fish between 1811 and 1815, which had shrunk to a third of that in the early 1850s. That contraction had itself halved by the end of the century. Pollution, poaching, over-fishing and industrialisation began to hammer stocks of a fish which above all needed unadulterated water and a clear passage.

Brittany has a rocky coastline but French historians of the eighteenth century reckon that as many as 4,500 tons of salmon were landed in good years. Using an average weight of ten pounds per fish, this equates to roughly one million salmon. The 1789 revolution ended this happy state of affairs when landed assets, including fishing rights, were distributed amongst the population without safeguards for maintaining the harvest. Fishing was allowed above the navigable reaches of rivers and the waters were ransacked. Prior to that, sense had prevailed: mills were obliged in law to open their gates by night and on Sundays, and if salmon were held up in their passage to the redds in the headwaters, it was never for long.

Up until the French Revolution the monasteries and landowners had owned and managed the salmon runs. Peter Coates, in his amusing 2006 monograph, Salmon, describing the pivotal role of monasteries in medieval salmon capture, writes: ‘Salmon loomed particularly large in the worldly desires of religious men.’ Because wise use of the harvesting rate was properly understood, there are many examples of early conservation. One of Netboy’s sentences on the subject of early French conservation stops you in your tracks: ‘Until the eleventh century only fishing for salmon and eels was regulated.’ Early control of salmon extraction was evidently a feature of European culture a millennium ago. Scotland had salmon conservation law in place protecting fish preparing to breed by the end of August, by 1030. In England as well as Scotland there was what Netboy has called ‘a steady flow’ of laws to protect salmon as the lifecycle became better understood. Fixed net operations in rivers were outlawed, and weirs had to contain gaps for the passage of running fish. In 1285 England’s King Edward II produced more muscular protection, amongst other measures banning taking salmon fry for feeding to pigs.

Clearly, the lifecycle was properly understood a very long time ago. When you consider what violations have been perpetrated on this species in modern times it is a matter for amazement that anyone can pretend humankind gets any wiser! A law passed in Ireland in 1466 illegalised tipping the effluent from the leather-tanning process into the salmon-rich River Liffey. So they understood too.