Tarpon Tales
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SILVER KINGS AND THE ANGLERS WHO STALK THEM
By J.P. “Gator” Wilson (Adapted from Legends of the Florida Flats - Publication Pending)
We will never know for sure who caught the first tarpon (Megalops Atlanticus), but it was probably one of the indigenous peoples occupying the sub-tropical coastal regions of North, Central or perhaps South America. The flesh from what one of these largest shallow-water species could feed a small village for several days or more.
The Florida Keys is thought to be where the first tarpon were consumed in the U.S. But in those days, other species such as sharks, alligators, crocodiles, manatees even bottlenose dolphin were also regularly eaten as a matter of survival by native Americans and early white settlers. Either before or after those settlers arrived woodcutters, turtle hunters and fishermen migrating from the Bahamas, who took their share too.
After coming under British rule in 1763, the Keys continued to see increasing numbers of fishermen crossing the Gulf Stream. The early use of a harpoon to fish tarpon was refined during these years, and hunting from dugouts, canoes and rowboats became the most viable way to fish for them.
It is thought by some historians that the first known reference of a tarpon caught on a hook was 10 years after Spain conceded control of Florida. This occurred in a freshwater lagoon adjacent to the sea at Tanna Island in the New Hebrides on Capt. Cook’s second voyage in 1773. The ship’s naturalist, Johann Forster, brought back to the ship an Indo-Pacific tarpon or oxeye herring (Megalops Cyprinoides) according to Valenciennes in the 19th volume of Histoire Naturalle des Poissons (1846). Although Forster may have been the first angler to catch a tarpon using a hook, he accomplished this with a hand line and not a rod and reel. Accurate or not, by Cook’s third voyage three years later, written logs attest that anglers utilized fishing rods to dangle baited hooks.
One evidence of early tarpon angling comes from Henry Thomas in his book “The Rod in India.” In 1873 he talks about catching oxeye tarpon with white flies in the following account:
Megalops Cyprinoides ... also takes a bait well at times. I have come across them coming up an estuary in a shoal, and it was like hauling in Mackerel; they run about the same size. There was a fish on as fast as ever you could get your line in the water. But the fun was very short-lived. It was in mid stream and they were all past the boat in very little time. I am told they, as well as Elops Saurus, have been caught in Madras Fort ditch with a white fly. My fishing for them was with a small dead-bait.
What knowledge existed of the Atlantic tarpon (Megalops Atlanticus) was slow to emerge, primarily due to the lack of development of Florida and the Gulf states. Coastline wilderness and inaccessibility locked away secrets from the large East Coast cities and their scientific institutions. But that was all about to change. Shortly after Forest and Stream began publishing in 1873, Samuel Clarke, the publication’s southern correspondent, published an article on the game fishes of Florida with no mention of tarpon. A year later he wrote an article titled “The Jew-Fish and Tarpum” but was unsure of the fish’s real identity. In this article he gave the following account:
The Tarpum I have not seen. It also is rare and is
described to the mackerel family, growing to a weight of 80-100 pounds. A surface fish, very active and strong, with brilliant silvery scales the size of a dollar. It is rarely taken with hook and line, as it generally carries away the tackle, however strong. It goes in schools and leaps from the water when struck, either with hook or spear. The only successful way of killing the Tarpum, I am told, is to strike it with a harpoon, to which is attached, by a strong line, a small empty cask; the fish by struggling with the buoy, exhausts itself so that it may be approached in a boat and killed with a lance.
Around 1874, some of the earliest published information on the Atlantic tarpon came from an American naturalist, G. Brown Coode. He had seen the fish in the Bermudas where they were known as tarpum, the same name used by coastal Florida and Keys fishermen. Coode had also seen tarpon in Barbados where they were known as caffum, possibly an aboriginal name for the fish originating many years before.
At this stage in history, two types of anglers were coming into focus. The social club angler usually hailed from a large city and was wealthy and well educated. He (and less often she) probably belonged to a northern sporting, hunting or fishing club and could take extended vacations to southerly waters. The second type was the resident fisherman. Usually poor, these locals were sometimes known as “crackers” and they fished for sustenance. Often they learned fishing techniques from Indians. The northern anglers contained men
of the natural sciences.
Dr. James A. Henschall authored “Camping and Cruising in Florida” in 1878. It became a must-read for high-society fishing clubs and was perhaps the earliest of American publications to describe tarpon fishing. He describes a fishing expedition to Florida in 1878 where Henschall and three companions fished both coasts of the Lower Peninsula, landing tarpon, redfish, seatrout, snook, jack crevalle, bluefish and other species with freshwater fly rods. The tarpon catches may have been the first published accounts of the feat occurring with a fly rod. It would be 10 years later before another angler would lay claim to landing a tarpon on fly: On April 3, 1888, while exploring Bowley’s (Bowlegs?) Creek, Sarasota, Dr. George Trowbridge caught a baby tarpon on fly.
In 1885, the first year tarpon were recognized as a game fish, certain events followed that literally caused an explosion for the budding pursuit of silver kings. Fishing destinations at the Halifax River, Indian River, Charlotte Harbor, Lake Worth Inlet, Jupiter Inlet and Indian River were now accessible through rail heads at Punta Gorda, Titusville and Daytona. These rail spurs had pushed through the wilderness from the Florida Tropical Trunk Line’s terminal in Jacksonville. By 1889 there were over 650 miles of railways and 250 miles of connecting steamship lines advancing toward remote Florida coastal destinations. Punta Gorda on Charlotte Harbor was the end of the rail line for Southwest Florida. A short boat ride through the inside passage of Pine Island down to Punta Rassa took one to The Tarpon House, believed to be the oldest tarpon fishing resort in America, and for that matter, probably the world.
Another of the early tarpon resorts was the San Carlos at St. James City, also at the southerly end of Charlotte Harbor. However, Tarpon House would be mentioned by Forest and Stream in issues published in 1885 as the camp from which a New Yorker named W.H. Wood caught tarpon on rod and reel, along with a Frank S. Pinckney, also from New York. Pinckney would go on to write (under the pseudonym of Ben Bent) what is thought to be the first work ever dedicated exclusively to Atlantic tarpon. The “Silver King” published in 1888 would help ignite a craze that would elevate tarpon as Florida’s most sought-after game fish. Pinckney recalls in his first chapter, “Now I have learned the arts and methods of his capture from actual and careful observation and experience. I have fished with Mr. W.H. Wood in his boat, watching his every movement, gathering from him all the hints he gives of his large experience to those who frankly confess themselves novices in the art.”
From 1885 to 1988, Pinckney caught 45 tarpon on rod and reel. But who had truly caught the first tarpon in America on rod and reel? The great debate was on.
Two amazingly durable outdoorsman, the father and son team of A.W. Dimock and Julian Dimock, spent years exploring the southwest coast of Florida through the Ten Thousand Islands and Florida Bay’s river systems to Key Largo. While camping out and living off the land, A.W. began his incredible “Book of the Tarpon,” believed to have originally been published in 1900 and again in 1926. This rare text chronicles their expeditions as some of the first Caucasians to fish these remote wilderness areas, and they did so primarily from wooden canoes and open rowing skiffs. They were lucky to survive their adventures, as early fishermen held the incorrect belief that Florida’s sharks would not prey on humans in bay and inland shallows. Time and again, Dimock recalls how sharks devoured large tarpon next to their canoe, sometimes resulting in a capsize.
While trolling for channel bass (redfish) and cavally or revailla (snook) in the mouth of the Homosassa River, Dimock claims to have landed his first tarpon in February 1882, three years prior to Wood’s fish. At first Dimock and his oarsman Tat were unsure of what had taken their bait. They became astonished by the size of the fish and its leaping ability. In his book he tells of a furious fight that ended with this description: “I handed my rod to Tat and taking the gaff from him, stuck the Tarpon in the throat with it. The fish gave a lurch and as I threw my weight back on the gaff it straightened out and I went over backwards into the Homosassa River.” Dimock goes on to say, “ ... I failed to receive recognition and that I missed the glory of his capture is due to my unskillful handling of the gaff after the contest was over.”
Two years after Dimock’s catch and one year after Clark’s publication in Field and Stream, Clark wrote of a Philadelphia angler named Samuel Jones who he believed caught a tarpon on rod and reel in Florida’s Indian River four years before Dimock’s feat. Henschall later confirmed Jones’s first tarpon catch in his 1890 book which W.H. Cregg later substantiated in 1902. Although both confirmed the priority of Jones’s fish, they disagreed as to the date.
Regardless of who was first, the publicity of Wood’s 1885 silver king triumph captured the imagination of sportsmen worldwide. His tarpon set off a mad rush to Florida’s coastal waters by competitive northern anglers and international thrill-seekers alike, vying to match or better Wood’s success. English anglers, who had mastered their own oxeye tarpon, became fevered with visions of landing a 180-pound, seven-foot monster which they heard lurked in Florida shallows and river mouths. The London Observer had this to say on August 26, 1886, just 17 months after Wood’s capture:
Here, at last, there is a rival to the black bass of North America, to the Siluria glanis (a giant catfish) of the Danube, to our own European salmon, and possibly even to the sturgeon ... Sportsmen may go to Florida for the tarpon, as they now go to the Arctic Zone for the reindeer, walrus and musk-ox!
Soon legends such as Zane Grey would want to test their mettle with silver kings. By 1900, the focus shifted from Florida to Aransas Pass, Texas, and Tampico, Mexico. However, Henry Flagler was completing his East Coast Railway in Florida and by 1906 the railroad had pushed its way through Long Key in the Florida Keys. Flagler decided to build a fishing club which would be operated by his Flagler East Coast Hotel System. The Long Key Fishing Camp, later renamed the “Club,” would soon rival the great tuna clubs of California in both notoriety and fame. In 1917 Zane Grey became its first president and members included President Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon (Secretary of the Treasury.
The silvery tarpon reigned for more than a quarter of a century as the sport-fishing king, and still ranks by many flats-fishing aficionados as the greatest challenger of them all on light tackle or fly.