The Leaping Tuna 55 
Rev. Ambrose informs me that it regularly visits 
St. Margaret’s Bay every summer, several speci- 
mens being taken and rendered down for oil. 
They were particularly abundant in 1876. They 
are never seen in the Basin of Minas.’” 
That the Atlantic species, so far as seen, are 
mainly giants is shown by the condition of nets 
after their visits, Captain Atwood describing an 
eighty-yard net which had forty-seven round holes 
after a raid of these fishes; the tunas had gone 
through it as through paper. In the Canadian 
Fishing Report of 1863 Dr. Fortin states that 
the fish is “quite abundant in the Gulf of St. 
Lawrence, especially the Bay of Chaleur and off 
Gaspé, and also in the straits of Belle Isle and 
Blanco Sablon Bay. It is also taken at Cara- 
quette.” Dr. Fortin adds, “The fishing is quite 
exciting, although tiresome and requiring a good 
deal of skill (steel hooks are used, tied to solid 
lines), as in the efforts to escape they pull with 
such violence as to endanger the lives of the 
fishermen by dragging them overboard.” In the 
Mediterranean, the catch is entirely by a vast 
net, known as a madrague, which is very suc- 
cessful at Favignana, where as much as seventy 
tons of the fish, here known as the tunny, is taken 
