INLAND FISHERIES. 11 



mond Trumbull, who has devoted much research to determiniDg the 

 modern equivalents of ancient Indian names of animals, and to whom 

 I am indebted for the hint. Mr. Trumbull also remarks that in a man- 

 uscript vocabulary obtained by President Stiles, in 1762, from a Pequod 

 Indian at Groton, Connecticut, there is mentioned the 'Aquaundunt or 

 blue-fish,' clearly the same as what now bears that name, which shows 

 that this fish was found in Fisher's Island Sound in 1762. 



" Again, according to Zaccheus Macy', the blue-fish were very 

 abundant about Nantucket from the first settlement of the English on 

 the island, in 1659 to 1763, and were taken in immense numbers from 

 the 1st of June to the middle of September. They all disappeared 

 however in 1764, a period of great mortality among the Indians of that 

 island. It has been suggested that the disease which attacked the 

 Indians may have been in consequence of an epidemic in the fish upon 

 which they fed, or else that it invaded both fish and Indians simul- 

 taneously, resulting in almost their entire extermination.' 



" According to Dr. Mitchell, this fish was entirely unknown about 

 New York prior to 1810 ; but they began to be taken in small numbers 

 about the wharves in 1817, and were abundant in 1825. 



Immense numbers were caught at the Highlands in 1841. The doc- 

 tor remarks, as has been done repeatedly by others, that as the blue- 

 fish increase, the squeteague or weak-fish diminished in about the same 

 ratio. 



"According to Mr. Smith, of Newport (Rhode Island), his father 

 used to catch blue-fish some time about the year 1800, when they were 

 abundant and of large size, weighing from sixteen to eighteen pounds. 



*' Captain Francis Pease, of Edgartown, also testified that his father 

 spoke of large blue-fish at the end of the preceding century, some of 

 them weighing forty pounds.. This leaves an interval between 1764 



1 Collections Massachusetts Historical Society for 1794, iii., 1810. 



2 " From the first coming of the English to Nantucket (1659) a large fal-fish, called the blue-fish, 

 thirty of -which would fill a barrel, was caught in great plenty all round the island from the first of 

 the sixth month (June) till the middle of the ninth month (September). But it is remarkable that 

 in the year 1764 . . . they all disappeared, and that none have ever been taken since. This has 

 been a great loss to us.*'— Ibid., 1792, p. 159. Zaccheus Macy's Account of Nantucket. 



