PHYSICAL OCEANOGKAPHY OF THE GULF OF MAINE 889 



If these drifts from the offing of Cape Ann to Nova Scotia stood alone, it would 

 be impossible to tell whether their tracks diverged to the left of the direct line along 

 the coast or to the right across the southern side of the basin. Comparison, how- 

 ever, with the bottles that went to the same general destination and eastward along 

 Georges Bank from the Cape Cod lines (figs. 174 and 176) makes the second alter- 

 native much the more lilvely; and when we add the fact that not a single bottle 

 from any of these three lines has ever been found along the coast between Cape 

 Cod and the Bay of Fundy, contrasting with the number of recoveries scattered 

 around the southern and eastern peripheries of the gulf from Georges Bank to the 

 Bay of Fundy, the anticlockwise movement from the offing of Massachusetts Bay 

 around the southern side of the basin and along its offshore rim, as indicated on the 

 charts, seems fully demonstrated for the summers of 1922 and 1923. 



The small number of recoveries from the Cape Ann line shows that only those 

 that kept farthest north on this eastward journey came within the influence of the 

 veering drift toward Nova Scotia. This is still more certainly true of the bottles 

 set out off Cape Cod in 1923 (line G). To all intents and purposes these were 

 entirely south of this set, for only odd ones among them were caught up by it. 

 Such of the bottles as dispersed farther to the south from both these lines no doubt 

 drifted to the Georges Bank region, and so, probably, out into the open Atlantic, 

 either circling around the eastern end of the bank or crossing it, probably by the 

 same tracks as were followed by the bottles that went to Europe. The fact that 

 all the recoveries from outside the Gulf of Maine, for the Cape Cod and Cape Ann 

 lines of 1923, were from the other side of the Atlantic, contrasting with the large 

 number of bottles that went west from the line south of Cape Cod in 1922, is suffi- 

 cient evidence that the eddy movement that carried the latter involved only the 

 western part of Georges Bank at the time. In short, bottles from these lines, which 

 drifted out of the Gulf of Maine in 1923, did so in a southeasterly direction across 

 the eastern end of Georges Bank, traveling to the northward and eastward of its 

 shoal ground. 



Of course, it is possible that bottles found along western Nova Scotia after long 

 intervals — say 100 or more days — may have followed this same route at first but 

 then have been caught by an indraft through the Eastern Channel (p. 866). How- 

 ever, we have no positive evidence of this, and the chance that any bottle would be 

 involved in the set toward Nova Scotia after it had once drifted south of latitude 

 42° is evidently very slight. 



It is interesting to find that the bottles that drifted from west to east across 

 the southern side of the gulf from the Cape Cod and Cape Ann lines tended to go 

 far up the Bay of Fundy in 1922, but stranded near its mouth and along the Nova 

 Scotian coast to the southward in 1923. Apparently the northerly set, which domi- 

 nates the eastern side of the gulf, hugged that coast more closely in the one year 

 than in the other, perhaps reflecting the prevalent winds at the time; but a differ- 

 ence of this sort is trivial, contrasted with the uniformity of these drifts and of those 

 to the eastern part of Georges Bank, just discussed. 



In 1919, the reader will recall, bottles from the Bay of Fundy stranded in Cape 

 Cod Bay, marking a set into the latter; but in 1923 the Cape Ann line, by contrast, 

 showed a drift past the mouth of Massachusetts Bay, not into the latter, proving a 



