AWARD OF THE FISHERY COMMISSION. 2815 



this year. It was never recorded till I found it in 1871 in Martha's Vine- 

 yard, where it was in enormous numbers. It is a fish weighing about 25 

 pounds, and it is something like the horse mackerel, but they never grow 

 more than 25 pounds. Not unfreqtiently 500 or 1,000 of them are taken 

 in a single night in one of the pounds, but the people make no use of them 

 and consider them valueless. They sell the fish weighing 25 pounds for 

 25 cents. It is a coarse fish and very dark meat, but still it is a food 

 resource when other fish are not taken. These fish are found in the 

 Mediterranean, where they are very much looked after and bring very 

 good prices, they being specially salted and put up in oil. The Ameri- 

 can tunny is undistinguishable from the European, though efforts have 

 been made to separate them. 



Q. The pound-fishing which has come into general use in the southern 

 part of New England, what is its effect on the supply of fish ? A. That 

 is a question which I think will require a longer period of years than 

 we have had for its definite determination. In 1871 I made my first in- 

 quiries into these pounds, and satisfied myself then that they must have a 

 positive influence upon the abundance of fish, in view of the concurrent 

 enormous destruction of bluefish. I considered the bluefish was the 

 greatest agency in the destruction of our food fishes. Its relation to 

 scup and squeteague has long been established that when bluefish 

 are abundant the other fish are rare, and the moment bluefish dimin- 

 ish the other fish become enormously common. The squeteague in 

 1862 was unknown as a fish east of the waters of New Jersey except 

 in small numbers, and was not found in Martha's Vineyard or Buzzard's 

 Bay. In 1872, ten years subsequently, so plentiful were they that I 

 know myself of 5,000 fish being taken at a single haul, averaging five 

 pounds each fish. The bluefish then began to diminish, and from that 

 time were much less abundant than in 1850 or 1860. Those pounds and 

 the bluefish together I considered produced the decrease in the abun- 

 dance of scup, sea bass, and tautog that has been so much complained 

 of. I urged very strongly, and I still maintain my view, on the legisla- 

 tures of Massachusetts and Rhode Island the propriety of exercising 

 some sort of restriction upon the indiscriminate use of this apparatus. 

 I recommended that one day and two nights, that is-, from Saturday 

 night, or, if possible, from Friday night till Monday morning, should be 

 1 established as a close time during which those fish should not be taken 

 by any of those devices, thus giving the fish a chance to get into the 

 spawning grounds inshore, thereby securing their perpetuity. 



I was quite satisfied in my own mind that unless something of this 

 kind was done, very serious results would happen. Very much to my 

 disgust, I must admit, the next year, even with all the abundance of 

 those engines, the young scnp came in in quantities so great as to ex- 

 ceed anything the oldest fisherman remembered, and thousands and 

 tens of thousands of barrels of what was called dollar scup were sold. 

 They were so thick in the pounds and so mixed with the fish that the 

 owners could scarcely pick out the marketable fish, and consequently 

 had to let large portions of the contents of the pounds go away. Since 

 then scup has been very much more abundant than it was when I wrote 

 my book and report. 



Q. flow do you account for this great increase! A. I think those 

 were scup, belonging to further* south, which took a northern trip to 

 northern waters and established themselves there. But I do urge in 

 the most earnest manner the propriety of some restriction being placed 

 on the pounds. I have not changed my views, although the evil has 

 not arrived as I thought it would, and there are indications of some 



