Atlantic Spanish Mackerel Vintage 1990 Fish Print S.A. Kilbourne

A colour print, rescued from a disbound book of Fish prints from 1990, with unrelated text on the reverse. Original printing date 1878, see text below.

Suitable for framing, image size is approx 12" x 8" or 30.5cm x 20.5cm edge to edge plus small white border.

This is a vintage print not a modern copy and can show signs of age or previous use commensurate with the age of the print. Please view any scans as they form part of the description.

All pictures will be sent bagged and in a board backed envelope for protection in transit.

While every care is taken to ensure my scans or photos accurately represent the item offered for sale, due to differences in monitors and internet pages my pictures may not be an exact match in brightness or contrast to the actual item.

Text taken from the opposite page. Please note this cannot be supplied with the print due to being on the reverse side of the previous print. Any spelling errors are due to the OCR program used.

Atlantic Spanish Mackerel
SPANISH MACKEREL, Gybium maculatum (now Atlantic Spanish Mackerel, Scomberomorus maculatus). Chromolithograph after a painting by G. A. Kilbourne, p1. 3 from S. A. Kilbourne and G. B. Goode's Game Fishes of the United States, 1878-80.

This spirited picture comes from one of the few nineteenth-century books about fish which attempts to show them as living creatures swimming in their natural environment. The Spanish mackerels, of which there are eighteen species, are predatory fish with streamlined bodies and are found in most tropical and subtropical seas. The Atlantic Spanish mackerel reaches a length of 36 inches and may weigh up to ten pounds. In winter it is to be found in the waters of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico but at other times may be found as far north as Cape Cod.
The Atlantic Spanish mackerels of the genus Scomberomorus should not be confused with the smaller Scomber japonicus, the Spanish mackerel of the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean. But how did these large fish acquire the same name as the smaller fish? The authors of Game Fishes of the United States offer a plausible explanation. 'English colonists, the world over,' they say, 'have always given to the native animals of the new country the names of those with which they were familiar in their ancestral home. The Spanish mackerel of England was a fish with spotted sides. The people of New England found a spotted mackerel and called it by the old, familiar name; those of the Middle States did likewise with a different kind of spotted mackerel.' They also suggest that the name 'Spanish mackerel' originated from a statement in a sixteenth-century French treatise alleging that the fish in question was particularly abundant in Spanish waters.