PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY OP THE GULF OF MAINE 883 



north the New York line would have been involved in this same drift and so have 

 stranded along the coast of Long Island to the east of Fire Island lighthouse, where 

 only three of them actually were found. 



The combined evidence of these Cape Cod and New York lines thus points to a 

 dominant movement of the surface water along the edge of the continent, westward 

 and southward from the ofSng of Nantucket to Cape Hatteras, but complicated by 

 a clockwise eddy movement in toward the land west of Nantucket Shoals, just where 

 flotsam from the so-called "Gulf Stream" (gulf weed and various tropical animals) 

 most often drifts in to the coast. No such tendency for the surface water to set 

 inshore from the outer part of the continental shelf is reflected in the drifts to the 

 west of this, however, not a single bottle from the Cape Cod line having been found 

 between New York and Chesapeake Bay, though bottles from the New York line 

 were picked up all along this 250-mile sector. 



No further discussion of the bottles set out off New York is called for here, as 

 they do not immediately touch the Gulf of Maine, except to emphasize that neither 

 they nor the Cape Cod line afford any evidence whatever of surface water entering 

 the gulf around Nantucket from the southwest. It has long been known that the 

 southern angle of Cape Cod marks a rather abrupt faunal division between the 

 waters of Nantucket and Vineyard Sounds, on the one hand, and the more boreal 

 Gulf of Maine, on the other. It is obvious that a division of this sort, with no 

 change of latitude, is associated with the nontidal circulation of the water. 



It was to check the evidence of the drifts from line B and measurements with cur- 

 rent meters (p. 864) pointing to a set of water outward from the eastern end of Nan- 

 tucket Sound, and so toward the southeast, that lines H (p. 875) were set out along 

 three sections of the sounds during August, 1924. 



Thirty-seven of these 85 bottles have been recovered within the sounds, along 

 the outer shores of Nantucket, and still farther west, but not one of them within 

 the limits of the Gulf of Maine. 



The drifts from the western end of Marthas Vineyard (Pasque Island to Menemsha 

 Bight) may be passed over briefly. Eleven of these were picked up — 1 on Cutty- 

 hunk Island, 2 in Vineyard Sound, 1 on Tuckernuck Island, 1 within Buzzards 

 Bay, 2 at the mouth of the latter, 1 in Narragansett Bay, and 3 on the Rhode Island 

 shore (fig. 175). It is not easy to reconstruct the probable paths of all of these. 



The series was set adrift on the flrst of the ebb, which sets westward here through 

 Vineyard Sound and northward from the latter through the "holes" between the 

 Elizabeth Islands into Buzzards Bay. It is probable that the bottles found in 

 Buzzards Bay and on Cuttyhunk went north through Quick's Hole, because they 

 were put out close to Pasque Island at about high water and would soon have been 

 carried in that direction by the ebb. If this line had been put out on the flood 

 instead of at the beginning of the ebb it would probably have been carried far 

 enough up the sound before the tide changed to come within the easterly set that 

 appears to dominate Nantucket Sound. Actually, however, most of these bottles 

 must have drifted westward for the first 5 or 6 hours, carrying them about to the 

 mouth of Vineyard Sound, where a division evidently took place. Two bottles from 

 the northern end seem to have been carried back into the sound by the next flood, 

 one of them to be picked up two days later on the Marthas Vineyard shore, 6 miles 



