FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 475 



and the Newfoundland Banks to the region of Nantucket Shoals, and occasionally 

 as far south as New York. The Greenland side of Davis Strait likewise supports 

 a productive halibut fishery, and they are caught well beyond the Arctic Circle 

 along this coast. As there are no definite records of halibut from the east coast of 

 Labrador north of the Straits of Belle Isle, however, it seems that they shun the 

 icy Labrador current. Further evidence that halibut are not at home in truly Polar 

 temperatures is afforded by the fact that while it is taken at Spitzbergen, about Bear 

 Island, and off the Murman coast, it is not known on the Arctic coasts of Asia or of 

 North America. 



In the eastern side of the Atlantic the waters around Iceland and the Faroes 

 are the seat of important fisheries, and halibut are regularly caught from northern 

 Norway south to the Irish Sea, North Sea, and English Channel, while odd fish are 

 even landed from the Bay of Biscay. 



Occurrence in the Gulf of Maine. — The history of the halibut in the Gulf of 

 Maine, like that of the salmon, must be written largely in the past tense for it is 

 one of the species the stock of which has been seriously depleted there by over- 

 fishing. In Colonial days the halibut was a familiar and apparently very abundant 

 fish on the northern New England coast but considered hardly fit for food. Wood 

 (1634, p. 37), for instance, writes "the plenty of better fish makes these of little 

 esteem, except the head and finnes, which stewed or baked is very good; these 

 hollibuts be little set by while basse is in season." They seem to have maintained 

 their numbers down to the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when, as con- 

 temporaries remark, halibut were extremely numerous in Massachusetts Bay and 

 along Cape Cod, in fact around the whole coast line of the Gulf of Maine. They were 

 discovered in abundance on Nantucket Shoals, on Georges Bank, on Browns Bank, 

 and on the Seal Island ground as soon as fishing was regularly undertaken offshore. 

 During the early years of the nineteenth century many were caught in Massachusetts 

 Bay, particularly on Stellwagen Bank, and all along the eastern shore of Cape Cod, 

 and in fact the cod fishermen of those days looked upon them as a nuisance and seldom 

 worth bringing in to market. However, a demand for halibut arose in the Boston 

 market sometime between 1820 and 1825 and ever since then they have been pur- 

 sued relentlessly, first inshore and then farther and farther afield. During the 

 early years of the fishery the Massachusetts Bay-Cape Cod region yielded large 

 numbers of these great fish. For instance, four men are reported to have caught 

 400 in two days off Marblehead in 1837, a party of equal size is said to have landed 

 13,000 pounds off Cape Cod in three weeks, while it was discovered some time prior 

 to 1840 that halibut congregated in winter in the 25 to 30 fathom gully between 

 the tip of Cape Cod and Stellwagen Bank. However, a shrinkage in the supply had 

 been noticed along shore even before 1839, for we find halibut described in that year 

 (in the Gloucester Telegraph) as "formerly" caught along Cape Cod and Barnstable 

 Bay, and they were so nearly caught out in the Massachusetts Bay region by about 

 1850 that it no longer paid even small boats to go out especially for them. Halibut 

 held out better in the northeast corner of the Gulf where there was not as ready a 

 market as in Boston. Perley, indeed, wrote of them as plentiful enough to be a 



