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In the winter of 1916 I persuaded Captain Sam Johnson, otherwise famous as Horse-mackerel Sam, of Seabright, New Jersey, to go to Long Key with me and see if the two of us as a team could not outwit those illusive and strange sailfish of the Gulf Stream. Sam and I have had many adventures going down to sea.
I have hooked several very large tuna along the Seabright coast, and, though these fish got away, they did not give me the battle I have had with small tuna of the Pacific. Mr. Wortheim, fishing with my old boatman, Horse-mackerel Sam, landed a two-hundred-and-sixty-two-pound Atlantic tuna in less than two hours. Sam said the fish made a loggy, rolling, easy fight.
For many years he has been a market fisherman at Seabright, where on off days he pursued the horse-mackerel for the fun of it, and which earned him his name. Better than any man I ever met Sam knows the sea; he knows fish, he knows boats and engines. And I have reached a time in my experience of fishing where I want that kind of a boatman.
They swim about, they play, they sport, they go to school, as little boys here. They ride, some persons have told me, on the horse-mackerel, but of that I have no knowledge. I see for myself, however, that they play tops, the small sea-boys. Here, little gentleman, is the Imperial Top, very beautiful shell. You like to take it in your hand?"
James and I talk about Maine, and cordially agree that so far as pine boards and horse-mackerel are concerned, it is equalled by few and excelled by none. There is no place like home, as Clara, the Maid of Milan, very justly observes; and while J. Townsend would be unhappy in Maine, his heart evidently beats back there now and then.
John took the splendid thing, and straightway lost himself and the world in a dream of rapture, in which he descended to the depths that his soul desired, and played at spinning tops with the sea-boys, and rode a horse-mackerel, and did many other wonderful things. "The bat shell!" the Skipper went on, lifting one treasure and then another.
Unfitted, by the circumscribed character of their sea-craft, their tackle, and their skill, for pushing their enterprise out into the deeper water, where the shark might haply say to the horse-mackerel, "Come, old horse, let you and me hook ourselves on, and take these foolish tawny fellows and their brown cockle-shell down into the under-tow," they supplied their primitive wants by enticing from the shallows the beautiful, sunny-scaled shoal-fish, well named by ichthyologists Argyrops, the "silver-eyed."
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