ELEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING. gI 
classing it among the whales. Subsequent authors have failed 
to find the scales represented in the figure given by the former 
and the teeth of which the latter spoke.’* 
ALLUSIONS TO THE SWORDFISH IN AMERICA BY EARLY WRITERS. 
The ancient city of Siena, secluded and almost forgotten 
among the hills of Northern Italy, should have a peculiar inter- 
est 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 discoverer when he first planted his feet on New World 
earth, his weapons, and the weapon of a warrior killed by his 
party when*approaching the American coast—the sword of a 
swordfish.t 
It is not probable that Columbus or some of his crew, sea- 
faring men of the Mediterranean, had ever seen the swordfish. 
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 
swordfish 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 Seabats, 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 Grandpisces,: or Herring-hogs, hunting 
the scholes of Herrings; in the afternoon we saw a great fish 
called the Vehuella or Swordfish, having a long, 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 sailors dived and brought it aboard.” 
+ 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 Detrozt Free Press, who visited the locality in 1879. 
