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Common Atlantic Salmon
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The Atlantic salmon is perhaps the best and most widely known of all game fishes, and it was doubtless this fish which was sought by the earliest anglers. "In Aquitania the river salmon surpasseth all the fishes of the sea," wrote Pliny eighteen hundred years ago. This was the salmon's christening, and though more than 100 species of Salmonidae have been described, the salmon has always stood pre-eminent as a game-fish, like a Scottish chieftain, needing no other name than that of his clan. The luxurious Romans prized highly the salmon streams in their Gallic and British provinces, if we may trust Pliny and Ausonius, and that this fish was well known to the early English is evinced by the many Saxon names, such as "parr," "pearl," "smolt," "grilse," "kipper," and "baggit," given it in different stages of its growth. The Normans brought over the name of Latin origin, which they applied to the perfect adult fish, ready for the banquets of the conqueror. When Cabot discovered Newfoundland in 1497, he found salmon in its waters, but the red men had long before this learned the art of killing them with torches and wooden spears.
Salmon inhabit both coasts of the North Atlantic and all its suitable affluents. How far beyond the Arctic circle they range no one knows, though their occurrence in Greenland, Iceland, northern Scandinavia, and middle Labrador is well established. They occur in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, entering the Baltic and the waters of Russia, and, according to some writers, the White Sea. They abound in all the British Islands, where they are protected and fostered with great success. They are, or were, also common in France, Belgium, Holland, and Prussia, ascending the Rhine as far as Basle. The southern limit of their distribution in Europe is Galicia, the northwestern province of Spain, in latitude 43 degree. "There is a river in Macedon," says Fluellen, in "King Henry the Fifth," "and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth; it is called Wye, at Monmouth; but it is out of my brains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis so like as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both." But Fluellen was wrong, for there are no salmon in any part of the Mediterranean water system.
On the American side of the Atlantic, the presence of salmon in Hudson Bay and on the Arctic coast is not certain. They range far north on the Labrador coast, and in the waters of the Great Lakes system they ascended as far as Niagara Falls. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine have many salmon rivers. New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, a very few good ones.
The salmon was at one time very abundant in the Connecticut, and it probably occurred in the Housatonic and Hudson. They have also been taken in the Delaware which probably marks the southern limit of their distribution on our Atlantic Coast.
Salmon were marvellously abundant in Colonial days. It is stated that the epicurean apprentices of Connecticut would eat salmon no oftener than twice a week. "Plenty of them in this country," wrote Fuller, "though not in such abundance as in Scotland where servants (they say) indent with their masters not to be fed therewith above twice a week." There can be no doubt that one hundred years ago salmon fishing was an important food resource in southern New England. Many Connecticut people remember hearing their grandfathers say that when they went to the river to buy shad the fishermen used to stipulate that they should also buy a specified number of salmon. But at the beginning of this century they began rapidly to diminish. Mitchill stated, in 1814, that in former days the supply to the New York market usually came from the Connecticut, but of late years from the Kennebec, covered with ice. Rev. David Dudley Field, writing in 1819, states that salmon had scarcely been seen in the Connecticut for 15 or 20 years. The circumstances of their extermination in the Connecticut are well known, and the same story, with names and dates changed, serves equally well for other rivers.
In 1798 a corporation, known as the "Upper Locks and Canal Company," built a dam 16 feet high at Millers River, 100 miles from the mouth of the Connecticut. For 2 or 3 years fish were seen in great abundance below the dam, and for perhaps 10 years they continued to appear, vainly striving to reach their spawning grounds; but soon the work of extermination was complete. When, in 1872, a solitary salmon made its appearance, the Saybrook fishermen did not know what it was.