Hemingway on Fishing

 It has always seemed to me that golf was a game you played if your father or maybe both parents played it.  The same went for fishing or hunting. If your dad fished or hunted chances are he would have at some point in your childhood, woke you up before the crack of dawn, dragged you still groggy into suitable clothes and off to a boat or a stream or the woods for your initiation into the ancient sport (s).

Ernest Hemingway, the celebrated American novelist was an avid lifelong fisherman and hunter introduced to both pursuits by his father Dr. Clarence Hemingway.  Dr. Hemingway's meticulous methods in everything he did were passed on to his son via these pursuits and Ernest in turn later adapted them to his other passion, writing. The family purchased "Windermere" on Walloon Lake in  Upper Michigan as their summer retreat in 1900 and the young Hemingway spent summers there for his entire childhood. The property remains in the family to this day.
Hemingway fished anywhere he lived and he wrote about fishing in Michigan, in the middle of Paris, on the Rhone Canal, in Switzerland, Italy, Bavaria, Spain, Florida, Bimini, Key West, Cuba, Idaho, Wyoming, Canada, and Africa.

Anyone familiar in the very least with Hemingway's most familiar works realizes the depth of his passion. In "The Sun Also Rises" he devotes an entire section on his side trip to the bullfights in Spain to describe trout fishing on the Irati River high up in the Pyrenees. This part of the book is for me the most resonant and enjoyable, more than the love interest, more than the bullfights (another Hemingway passion) more than the prodigious drinking and carousing in Paris, Pamplona or Madrid.

"The gate was up and I sat on one of the squared timbers and watched the smooth apron of water before the rivers tumbled into the fall and was carried down. Before I finished baiting, another trout jumped at the falls making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down. I did not feel the first trout strike. When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and I brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls and swung him out onto the dam."

Much like his early story "The Big Two-Hearted River" his descriptions of the surroundings and the river itself put the reader right by his side as he fights to land the trout he loves. This is from that earlier story:
"From where Nick stood he could see deep channels, like ruts, cut in the shallow bed of the stream by the flow of the current. Pebbly where he stood and pebbly and full of boulders beyond; where it curves near the tree roots, the bed of the stream was marly and betweeen the ruts of deep water green weed fronds swung in the current.  Nick swung the rod back over his shoulder and forward...."

Hemingway was introduced to marlin fishing after he returned from Europe in Key West and this drew his love of the Gulf Stream and the fish and the islands in it. From Key West he moved to Bimini to experience life and fishing fully in the Stream. A long passage about a day's fishing with his three fictional sons  shows how deeply he was immersed in a relatively short time. In his ,Islands In The Stream, Hemingway's alter ego's boy "Davy" had hooked a big marlin and was intent on fighting the fish to the end.
"The boy's broad back was arched, the rod bent, the line moved slowly through the water, and the boat moved slowly on the surface, and a quarter mile below the great fish was swimming. The gull left the patch of yellow weed and flew toward the boat. He flew around Thomas Hudson's head while he steered then headed off toward another patch of yellow weed on the water.
"Try to get some on him now" Roger told the boy. "If you can hold him you can get some"
'Put her ahead a touch more," Eddie called to the bridge and Thomas Hudson eased her ahead as softly as he could. Davy lifted and lifted, but the rod only bent and the line only tightened. It was as if he were hooked to a moving anchor."

However it seemed that when he reached Cuba that Hemingway truly found his home. He was writing letters from Cuba on fishing and other subjects from around 1930. These were for publication in Esquire and Harpers and other magazines in the US and Canada.  His passion for fishing echoed those for hunting big game and bird shooting. He learned everything about his prey and showed sympathy, no let's call it devotion or love towards them. His activities led to the beginnings of the IGFA. In "Marlin Off the Morro" and the later "Out in the Stream: A Cuban Letter" he shows his deep contemplation of his prey. He discusses the various types, their colours, their ages, their behaviour in the wild and once hooked. He is willing to do as much work as he can to further the body of knowledge so long as it doesn;t keep him from his drinks dockside and the sale of the fish to the waiting Cubans. Here's an excerpt where he describes the number of marlin taken in 1933:
"As an indication of how plentiful they are, the official report from the Havana markets from the middle of March to the 18th of July this year showed eleven thousand small marlin and one hundred and fifty large marlin were brought into the market by the commercial fishermen of Santa Cruz del Norte, Jaruco, Guanabo, Cojimar, Havana, ....etc"
That's just four months and are the official figures. One can only guess how much never got counted. Hemingway describes the biggest caught at that time:

"...But in July or August it is even money any day you go out that you will hook into a fish from three hundred pounds up. Up means a very long way up. The biggest marlin ever brought into market by a commercial fisherman weighed eleven hundred and seventy-five pounds with head cut off, gutted, tail cut off and flanks cut away: Eleven hundred and seventy-five pounds when on the slab, nothing but the saleable meat ready to be cut into steaks. All right. You tell me. What did he weigh in the water and what did he look like when he jumped?"

US Academy of Natural Scientists, Henry W. Fowler, headed the Gulf Stream Marine Test of 1934–35, and Hemingway, who had become an Academy member in 1929, jumped at the chance to assist.The research project studied the life histories, migrations, and classifications of Atlantic marlin, tuna, and sailfish. In August 1934, Fowler and Hemingway spent a month on Hemingway's boat the Pilar, catching, measuring, and classifying numerous catches. Correspondence between Cadwalader and Hemingway after the trip illustrates that the latter party's assistance enabled Fowler to more accurately classify the marlin of the Atlantic Ocean.

If any of this comes as a surprise just remember this is the guy that won the Nobel Prize for the story "The Old Man and the Sea". Papa Hemingway was a fellow that really loved to fish!