One of the most striking stories we have taken from the lives of our fellow creatures is the one about the salmon’s last journey to do its ‘natural duty’ (to quote Izaak Walton).1 Whereas many creatures reproduce season after season for as long as they live once they reach sexual maturity, the salmon’s entire life is geared toward a single act of reproduction in the frigid place of its birth that marks the culmination of its existence. Salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn is one of nature’s most fantastic spectacles. Observing it on the Bol’shaya river on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, a Russian ichthyologist compared a school of migrating salmon a kilometre long and a hundred metres wide to ‘the noise of boiling water splashing in a gigantic cauldron’.2
The salmon’s stamina is also famous. A Briton reported in the 1840s that it could cover 24 feet (7.3 metres) per second in relatively calm lake waters. At 86,400 feet (26.3 kilometres) an hour, he calculated that a salmon could circumnavigate the globe in just a few weeks!3 After expending their final spurts of energy, their frayed and decaying bodies collapse and they die within weeks – sometimes days. (A 2003 TV commercial for the UK’s best-selling brand of confectionery showed salmon struggling upstream; the slogan read ‘Remember you are not a salmon. Have a break. Have a KitKat’ – and even appeared on the wrapping paper. Catching the mood, Cheltenham Borough Council staged a ‘dead salmon day’, supported by 700 free KitKat chocolate bars, on 10 June 2003; staggered breaks of 10–20 minutes were designed to allow demoralized staff who often felt like hapless salmon fighting the current to ‘reflect on how they can improve their working life’.)4 Salmon also undergo remarkable physiological changes to prepare themselves for saltwater life and to re-equip themselves for a return to freshwater some years later, after thousands of miles of ocean roaming,
Inspired by its remarkable life cycle, we have selected the salmon as a symbol of indomitable fortitude and endurance, self-sacrifice, loyalty to place, untamed wildness, irrevocable fulfilment of destiny and the powerful intimacy between life and death. We routinely describe its journey home as a pilgrimage or an epic. (The salmon features as a symbol of wondrous voyaging and inter-galactic roving in a posthumous collection of writings by the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)5 Moreover, by general consensus, the fish is unmatched in beauty among its peers. ‘The form of a salmon, fresh run from the sea’, remarked a nineteenth-century British angler, ‘is faultless.’6 This awareness of beauty is heightened by its brevity, the onset of spawning quickly converting a gorgeous, shapely fish into something ‘lean and ugly’ (to quote the German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller).7 Fish tend to lack the qualities of beauty, dignity and grandeur that endear certain mammalian members of the animal kingdom to us. But we have elevated the salmon to the regal ranks of the tiger, the lion and the stag. The king of kings, the chinook salmon of the Pacific (also known as king salmon), can weigh as much as 56 kilograms and measure 1.5 metres. Over short distances, it can accelerate faster than a Ferrari.
The kingly salmon’s habits have puzzled observers for centuries. As Thomas Fuller remarked in the Herefordshire chapter of his renowned county-by-county survey of England’s prominent people, wonders, buildings and natural commodities (1662), the salmon presented ‘a double riddle in Nature: first, for its invisible feeding, no man alive having ever found any meat in the maw thereof. Secondly, for its strange leaping (or flying rather).’8 Whether or not the salmon eats on re-entering freshwater, how it can surmount obstacles and how high it can jump are just a few of the fish’s curiosities that have engrossed the attention of natural historians, ichthyologists and anglers since medieval times. Chapter One (Biological Salmon, or the salmon as fish) examines the natural and evolutionary history of the various salmon species pieced together by those who have striven to understand a ‘strange and splendid organism with a strange and wonderful life-history’.9 The salmon’s homing instinct is one of the natural world’s greatest wonders and one of the most enduring of biological mysteries.
Yet the fish offers much more than a scientific challenge. Relations between salmon and people in the northern hemisphere are close, extensive and long-standing; in fact, we co-evolved with them. Chapter Two (Edible Salmon, or the salmon as food) looks at the most basic form of contact that we (and many other creatures) have had with them: as consumers of their nourishing flesh. Entire communities have been embedded in salmon, giving rise to the notion of ‘salmon nation’ and ‘salmon people’. For tribal populations sharing its freshwater range on North America’s west coast, the salmon occupied the same position as the buffalo in the lives of the Indians of the Great Plains.
Since the Middle Ages, however, this local food, the basis of subsistence economies, has become a lucrative commodity within an increasingly global economy. And, unlike many other natural resources, the available amount has actually expanded. ‘Even under Socialism’, admitted the leading writer on the British Left in the 1890s, ‘there might not be enough salmon and pineapple for all’.10 Yet subsequent developments in the making of fish confounded Robert Blatchford’s notion of a finite resource. Thirty years ago, fresh salmon was a luxury item in European cuisine. Now it is one of the most widely available of fishes thanks to the aquaculture boom. It is difficult to make a case for salmon as another fish that changed the world (a reference to Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World). For many in North America and western Europe, though, farmed salmon is the new cod. A much coveted fish traditionally associated with privilege is now one of the cheapest on the fishmonger’s slab.
Salmon is a controversial as well as widespread dish, though, and a highly paradoxical fish. News bulletins and frontpage stories announce the latest scientific studies that advise us to limit our consumption of farmed salmon on health and ecological grounds. Celebrated for centuries by enamoured anglers as the noblest of fish, a heroic symbol of unfettered freedom, the salmon is now just as likely to be deplored as the ignoble product of the aquatic equivalent of battery farming. (The recent British brouhaha peaked in December 2004 when celebrity chef Jamie Oliver got into hot water for his TV advert promoting Sainsbury’s smoked salmon. The farm on Loch Hourn, Inverness-shire, that featured in the advert, it emerged, was being investigated by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency for polluting local waters. Meanwhile, Oliver himself eschewed farmed salmon in his London restaurant.) While supermarket fish counters are awash with farmed salmon, some local wild populations teeter on the brink of extinction. ‘A salmon’s life seems to be a very short and a very hard one’, reflected an American angler in the 1930s. ‘He lives, on the average, about eight years; and from the time he is spawned in the river there seems to be something or someone continually at him.’11 Chapter Three (Unfortunate Salmon, or the salmon’s dangerous world) looks at the human activities that have complicated the life of ‘this unfortunate fish’ (as Charles Dickens dubbed it).12 Nonetheless, the return of the wild salmon has also grabbed the headlines, recent reappearances in once-blighted European rivers hailed as a welcome antidote to the usual tales of ecological woe.
Native Americans who have harvested salmon from the Columbia in the Pacific Northwest for millennia had a metaphor for their river. It was a ‘great table’ at which various bands came to eat at different times. In every salmon river, a range of groups have jostled for position at the great table, often elbowing others aside in their bid to secure the lion’s share of the fare, leaving those pushed away with the crumbs from the feast. Chapter Four (Disputed Salmon, or who owns the salmon?) examines these tensions and altercations (and, in the process, looks at various methods of capture). For excluded Britons, zealously guarded fishing privileges epitomized the elite’s arrogant appropriation of fundamental human rights. In North America, social conflict has been supplemented by racial strife between aboriginal and Euro-American fishers.
Often aligned against both subsistence and commercial interests were those who fished with a rod and line for pleasure (the subject of Chapter Five, Sporting Salmon, or the fish that hooked us). No angler would dissent from Walton’s view that the salmon has been ‘accounted the King of freshwater fish’.13 In fact, the sporting fraternity is largely responsible for consolidating its lofty reputation. Since the early nineteenth century, fly fishing for salmon has been the preferred pastime of an assortment of royalty, politicians, aristocrats, industrialists, novelists and poets. Many aficionados have recorded the joys of fishing for this gamest of game fishes and dipping into this literature helps explain its lure.
Finally, fish culture means a lot more than artificial propagation. Chapter Six (Cultural Salmon, or a fish swims through us) ponders the range of meanings we have attached to the salmon and how we have represented it through various cultural media – from first salmon ceremonies to the poems of Ted Hughes. The notions of ‘salmon nation’ and ‘people of the salmon’ – conveying how profoundly the fish has sustained cultures in mind as well as body – is usually synonymous with North America’s Pacific Northwest. Yet the beliefs and cultural forms of the indigenous peoples of northern Japan and the Siberian Far East were just as enmeshed with salmon. And in northwest Europe, cultural expressions provide glimpses of former salmon nations. This biography of a species that has acquired multiple identities explores the salmon’s evolutionary, ecological and human stories. Ranging from Nova Scotia to Norway, from Korea to California, and from prehistory to the future, it compiles a multifaceted portrait: a veritable ‘compleat salmon’.