FISHES OF THE GULF OF MAINE 253 



General range. — Atlantic coast of North America from the Gulf of St. Lawrence 

 to the Gulf of Mexico, running up into fresh water to spawn. 



Occurrence in the Gulf of Maine. — The striped bass is distinctly a coast-ndse 

 fish and seldom found at sea more than a mile or two out from land. It is equally at 

 home in salt, brackish, or fresh water. Furthermore, as its abundance in the Gulf 

 of St. Lawrence proves, temperatures even lower than those of the Gulf of Maine 

 are no barrier to it. At the time of the settlement of New England it was a very 

 familiar fish in sheltered bays, estuaries, off sandj^ beaches, and about rocky head- 

 lands all along the coasts of the Gulf of Maine from Cape Cod to and including the 

 Bay of Fundy. So plentiful was it, and so easy to captm-e, thanks to its large size 

 and its habit of coming into the mouths of streams and creeks, that it yielded an 

 important food supply to the early settlers. 



Wood (1634, p. 37) tells us that in what is now part of Boston Harbor "The basse 

 is one of the best fishes in the coimtry, and though men are soone wearied with other 

 fish, yet are they never wdth basse. It is a delicate, fine, fat, fast fish, having a 

 bone in Ms head which contains a saucerfull of marrow sweet and good, pleasant 

 to the pallat and wholesome to the stomach. * * * Qf these fishes some be 

 three and four foote long, some bigger, some lesser; at some tides a man may catch 

 a dozen or twenty of these in tlu"ee houres. The way to catch them is with hooke 

 and line, the fisherman taking a great cod line to which he fasteneth a peece of 

 lobster and threwes it into the sea. The fish biting at it, he pulls her to him and 

 knockes her on the head with a sticke. These are at one time (when alewives pass 

 up the rivers) to be catched in rivers; in lobster time at the rockes; in mackerel 

 time in the bays; at Michaelmas [September 29] in the sea. When they use to 

 tide in and out of the rivers and creekes the English at the top of an high water do 

 crosse the creekes with long seanes or basse nets, which stop in the fish; and the 

 water ebbing from them they are left on the dry ground, sometimes two or three 

 thousand at a set, which are salted up against winter, or distributed to such as have 

 present occasion either to spend them in their homes or use them for their grounds." 



Wood (1634, p. 47) also describes "shoales of basse have driven up shoales of 

 mackerel from one end of the sandie beach to the other, " near Salem, and mentions 

 them in the Merrimac. In fact, in early days there were more or less bass about 

 every river mouth tributary to the Gulf, except possibly on the west Nova Scotian 

 coast, where we find no mention of them. As far back as the record runs the cluef 

 centers of abundance for bass within the Gulf were Cape Cod Bay and the shores of 

 Cape Cod, the neighborhood of Boston Bay, the various bays and sounds near the 

 Kennebec River, and the larger rivers that drain into the Bay of Fundy. 



In the nature of things no large fish with a geographic range so narrow 

 can compare in abundance with such offshore species as herring, haddock, cod, 

 etc., a rule to wliich the bass was no exception. Inexhaustible though the 

 supply seemed in certain restricted localities, a decrease was reported as early 

 as the last half of the eighteenth century. At first tlus was apparent only 

 locally. For example, very few bass were seen in the Piscataqua after about 1792, 

 though an odd bass was caught there as recently as 1880. They seemed to have 



