American fly fishing for brook, brown and other trout started here. So did surf casting, plug fishing for pike and musky, trolling for bluefish, saltwater fly and light tackle fishing and much else. You can make a good case that saltwater fishing for cod, not flight from religious persecution, settled New England. Hard-headed English and French settled near the superb fishing along the Atlantic Coast. It didn't take long, French boats started fishing Canadian waters just 12 years after Columbus discovered the Americas. They quickly established supply and fish processing centers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Some suggest these fish processing system with specialized headers, gutters and splitters was the first assembly line in the new world. By the early 1600's the British had over 25 boats on the Grand and other Banks, those productive shallows in the Atlantic where cod school up to spawn so aptly portrayed in Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS and by Spencer Tracy in the film of the same name . John Smith, the beloved of Indian maidens, claimed in his DESCRIPTION OF NEW ENGLAND -- that named the section -- you'd " have to be a bad fisher not to bad two or three hundred cod a day". Smith also said so many fish ran in some rivers that "one mighte go over their backs drishod." This was before New England distilleries and the rum trade probably accurate. Today, you could probably walk across the water on striper or bluefish boats moored to fish in these areas! Smith also reported catching 62 sturgeon at one time in a net, and other accounts tell us that sturgeon jumped in Boston Harbor well into the 1800s. By about the time of the Revolutionary War reports of 5,000 shad taken in one seine weren't uncommon. Salmon were so plentiful that farmers that went to rivers to buy shad for feed and fertilizer had to take and equal amount of salmon. Fish were commonly fed to cattle in Provincetown and flounders were used mostly for lobster bait. Lobster were even used for cod bait. Indentured servants, who traded their labor for a period of years for a ticket to the New World, complained bitterly about eating ducks, striped bass, salmon and lobsters instead of "good British beef and mutton.
