56 Big Game Fishes 
at once. Attempts have been made to take the 
tunny in these waters with rod and reel, but so 
far have failed. The game was found in great 
abundance on the Italian coast, but for some 
reason it would not bite. 
I first conceived the idea and fostered the hope 
of catching a tuna with a rod when measuring a 
giant specimen which hung in Fulton Market 
some twenty years ago. It had been harpooned 
in Massachusetts Bay, was about eleven feet 
long, and weighed in the neighborhood of one 
thousand pounds —a type of all that is ponderous 
and massive in the true fishes. The following 
year I confided my ambition to a professional 
fisherman, a man of great intelligence, with whom 
I often fished at Ogunquit, Maine, and made 
various trips to the offshore banks near Boon 
Island Light in quest of the game which he 
assured me was there; but though I fished with 
patience, trolling and anchored, tried all kinds of 
bait from moss bunkers to live pollock, I could 
never lure the Atlantic tuna, and indeed never 
saw one, though my companion related tales of 
monsters which came around his dory, feeding 
almost from his hand, when fishing for dogfish. 
In these waters the tuna never or rarely was seen, 
