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Fish accounted for the most plentiful of the wild species recovered. The Manamet area of Sandwich was always considered to be an excellent fishing river. As early as 1622, Edward Winslow described the river as "It will bear a boat of eight or ten tons...This river yieldeth thus high, oysters, muscles, clams...and great abundance at all times; besides it aboundeth with divers sorts of fresh fish in their seasons." (Winslow 621: 306). This view of the plenty of the river was supported in 1853 by William Russell who stated that
"The river still holds its claim to be called 'provision rivulet'; and in the
summer season yields, in abundance, the bass (two species), bluefish,
scapaug, tautaug, besides five species of edible shellfish,-oysters, quahogs,
clams, winkles, and mussels. In the winter, besides the various of shell-fish,
we have the trout, frost fish (tomcod), and a rich, and literally enough,
and inexhaustible bed of eels. They form a continuous bed, occupying not
only the bottom (mouth) of the river, but nearly the whole extent of the
marshes." (Russell 1853: 150 ).
Bass (freshwater, striped and rock), called Missuckeke/ Missuckekequock (the great black ones), were considered one of the best eating fish by the colonists in the seventeenth century. These fish were and are very common on the south and east shores of Cape Cod and grow to a length of up to six feet (Bigelow 1953:389). They commonly occur in mixed waters such as that which would have been present at the mouth of the Manamet River up to the 1920s when the Cape Cod Canal destroyed so much of the riverine environment. In these waters they spawn from May to November and were so plentiful that Thomas Morton once commented that "At the turning of the tide I have seen so many go out of a river that I thought I could cross over them dry shod." (Morton 1972: 87).
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Hybrid Mode
