[25] MATERIALS FOR A HISTORY OF THE SWORD-FISHES. 313 
‘“‘ Gesner, Aldrovandus, and Jonston have represented the species with 
two ventral fins. Bellon and Bomare were wrong in classing it among 
« the whales. Subsequent authors have failed to find the scales repre- 
sented in the figure given by the former and the teeth of which the latter 
spoke.”* 
14.—ALLUSIONS TO THE SWORD-FISH IN AMERICA BY EARLY 
WRITERS. 
The ancient city of Siena, secluded and almost forgotten among the 
hills of Northern Italy, should have a peculiar interest for Americans. 
Here Christopher Columbus was educated, and here, in the height of 
his triumphs as a discoverer, he chose to deposit a memento of his first 
voyage across the seas. His votive offering hangs over the portal of 
the old collegiate church, closed for many years, and rarely visited save 
by enterprising American tourists. It. consists of the helmet and 
armor worn by the discoveror when he first planted his feet on New 
World earth, his weapons, and the weapon of a warrior killed by his 
party when appoaching the American coast—the sword of a Sword-fish. + 
It is not probable that Columbus or some of his crew, sea-faring men 
of the Mediterranean, had never seen the Sword-fish. Still, its sword 
was treasured up by them, and has formed for more than four centuries 
and a half a striking feature in the best preserved monument of the 
discoverer of America. 
The earliest allusion in literature to the existence of the Sword-fish 
in the Western Atlantic seems to occur in Josselyn’s Account of Two 
Voyages to New England, printed in 1674, in the following passage: 
‘First Voyage:—The Twentieth day, we saw a great number of Sea- 
bats, or Owles, called also flying fish, they are about the bigness of a 
Whiting, with four tinsel wings, with which they fly as long as they are 
wet, when pursued by other fishes. Here likewise we saw many Grand- 
pisces, or Herring-hogs, hunting the scholes of Herrings, in the after- 
noon we saw a great fish called the Vehuella or Sword-fish, having along, 
strong and sharp finn like a Sword-blade on the top of his head, with 
which he pierced our Ship, and broke it off with striving to get loose, 
one of our Sailers dived and brought it aboard.” 
A half century later the species is referred to in Catesby’s work. ¢ 
Pennant, though aware of the statement made by Catesby, refuses 
the species a place in his List of the Fishes of North America, § supposing 
him to refer to the orca or high-finned killer-whale: ‘I am not certain 
whether Catesby does not mean the high-finned Cachelot by his Sword- 
* Bloch, Ichthyologie, iii, pp. 24-26. 
t For this fact, which I do not remember to have ever seen on record, I am indebted 
to my friend Col. N. D. Wilkins, of the Detroit Free Press, who visited the locality 
in 1879. 
¢ Historia Naturalis Caroling, &c., 1731. 
§ Arctic Zoology, vol. iii, 1784, p. 364. 
