The fish of choice for royalty and commoner, it was also fed to the many people who worked on large estates; in some cases so regularly that, "not salmon again" was the response to the only meal option they may have had at times.
There are very old written references to salmon, including the Doomsday Book 1086, and 12,000-year-old, accurate drawings of salmon on cave walls in France. Lore and mystery surround the salmon. Early explanations of its ability to jump high claimed the fish were grasping their tails in their mouths and spinning over high waterfalls.
Now, this is the "real" Atlantic salmon, not the new fish in the pond, the recent genetically engineered version. The new one has had a gene altered that makes them put on weight at about five times faster than the real fish. That this can be done doesn't seem so amazing if you realize restaurants have done the same thing to a lot of humans without gene tampering.
The abundance of salmon and other species in the Gulf of Maine is said to have been unbelievable even to Europeans 400 years ago. The old description of so many cod in the water it was speculated that a person could walk across on the backs of fish is well known. Similar things were said of salmon, but recent quantitative estimates of salmon abundance before Europeans arrived produced astonishing numbers. This primeval territory, an enormous watershed of several hundred thousand square miles, was virtually untouched by humans, except for the few thousand Indians living there, who were as compatible with it as the animals. It has been said the early immigrants from Europe knew of their nearness to the North American continent when they could smell the fragrance of the pine forests while still 200 miles at sea.
The native Americans of New England fished for salmon most often with a spear. This trident with a point and a barbed tang on either side was the tool of choice. The salmon was relatively easy to catch as it gathered below falls or congregated in shallow water. They also fished with a woven line using sharpened bones for hooks. Some Indians fished with wicker baskets and others used nets, which a few anthropologists believe they may have learned to make from Basque fishermen who fished off the Maine coast at least as early as the 1400s.
But the most common method for catching large numbers was the weir. This trap built with sticks driven into the mud in shallow water and woven with brush was copied by the Europeans and continues to be used today in the sardine fishery of eastern Maine and southeastern Canada. This was the largest volume mechanism used by native Americans, yet in thousands of years of fishing salmon they didn't make a dent in the stocks. There is some evidence of depressed stocks in some locations by intense Indian fishing.
Colonists, like the Indians, fished salmon for themselves. However, they also did two things the Indians hadn't that made an impact on the salmon fishery. First, they were fishing for a market and using ever larger nets across rivers for ever larger markets. The markets expanded beyond local towns and cities to England, France and the West Indies. Salmon was shipped pickled in barrels of three and six hundred pounds. By the early 1700s the effects of this increasing volume were seen in the salmon stocks of some rivers.
Second, when control of many rivers was taken to power the industrial revolution in the late 1700s, dams blocked access to spawning grounds in the headwaters of most coastal rivers. This more than anything drove the salmon to the point of being little more than a curiosity by the 1850s. The pollution from manufacturing and towns along the rivers compounded the problem of reaching spawning grounds.
While the salmon is considered a sport fish today it has not always been so. Before it was a sport fish here, it was a commercial fish and earlier a sport fish on the other side of the pond. And before that, it was a commercial fish in varied forms, either as a plentiful fish caught for family or tribe, or a small scale market fish traded, sold or used as currency.
In Europe, with its appeal to consumers and easy availability, the salmon ran into regulations fairly early. In the U.S. it may sometimes seem that NMFS started fishing regulations, but Scotland in 1030 had a closed salmon season. England by 1285 had legislation establishing a salmon season, stock protections and, of course punishments for offenders. These, along with the Magna Carta of that era, formed the basis of English fishing law as it pertained to salmon and created a legal foundation that could be expanded. Later it would be a model for American law and therefore NMFS regulations.
The longer history as a market fish in Europe strained the stocks before those in America. But the industrial revolution did the same thing to European rivers and the Atlantic salmon. Fishways were built, some by law, but not to great effect. The same was done in the United States in the mid and late 1800s, but with even less success.
The Atlantic salmon became more a sport fish than a commercial fish. The English made salmon a popular fish and they would make sport fishing a popular activity. The wealthy were the first recreational anglers; later members of the British military popularized it, but neither invented it. It was an activity known in ancient times. The word angling didn't refer to the use of a rod, but meant to fish with a hook or angle. The earliest visual evidence of the use of a pole is in a 2000 B.C. Egyptian temple drawing. Another 1400 B.C. Egyptian drawing shows a regal figure at a pool with flying insects on the end of a line.
Englishman Isaac Walton, considered the father of modern angling, wrote The Complete Angler in 1653 glorifying the sport. Others wrote similar books at the time, suggesting it had become a fad, at least in the British Isles. The anglers may have been among the people who attempted to do something about the steep decline in Atlantic salmon stocks.
In America the salmon had been driven to near extinction because they were unable to reach their spawning grounds. As early as 1866 restoration efforts had begun on the Merrimack River. With less industrialization, stocks in the rivers of mid coast Maine were not as bad off as western Maine and southern New England rivers. It was from the Penobscot that salmon were caught and eggs gathered for artificial spawning in other New England rivers. Soon eggs were being shipped from the Penobscot to many states with restoration projects in the late 1800s.
A station was established at Orland, Maine and later Bucksport to catch egg-bearing salmon. Eggs were collected here, processed, packed and shipped. Salmon cars were used to ship egg-bearing salmon up the Penobscot to spawning grounds. Salmon cars were dories with holes in them to let water run though while the salmon were in transit. A canvas cover shaded the fish while the cars were hauled in groups by steamer or singly by a rowboat. These heavy, half-submerged dories were difficult to haul by rowed boats up stream.
Over one hundred years of restoration effort did not do much to bring the salmon back to New England rivers. Though many dams had fishways built alongside them, they were poorly maintained and there was little enforcement of regulations protecting the salmon. Blocked access to spawning by dams was the primary problem, but access was also blocked in effect by polluted rivers.
Salmon return to the river where they were born. Is it the result of thousands of generations returning to a particular river? The minerals or microbes in that river? Bioglobal positioning systems? Someone is no doubt working somewhere on the answer to this mystery. Cleaning up the rivers in the last thirty years has made them more attractive to salmon. This and more protections for salmon than there were 100 years ago has improved restoration results. Progress is being made, but it is hard won progress. There won't be anyone crossing the Penobscot on the backs of salmon any time soon.