Kite Fishing

The earliest scholarly discussion on kite fishing I have been able to discover is by Henry Balfour in 1913. It is not easily obtainable now since it was published in a volume of Essays and Studies Presented to William Ridgway, a book not in every library. It has, however, been scanned in and is available at www.archive.org, but the optical character recognition has introduced, as always, some errors of its own and the text has not been proofread; and the diagrams have been omitted. Fortunately a modern French translation is available which George Webster lent me, so I was able to resolve any doubtful readings in the scanned text by reference to the French version, which also provided me with the original diagrams and the very attractive front cover picture. I strongly recommend the use of a good modern atlas instead of the rather poor maps provided in the original paper. Many of the geographic names in the text are are currently (March 2009) unknown to Google Earth.

Right-click on the front cover (above, right) to download my version of Balfour's original text (pdf; 31 MB).