202 Fish Stories 



ever you catch a bass bigger than you are you can be pretty 

 safe in calling it a jewfish. 



Hugest of all fishes, a great clumsy mass of flesh almost 

 as inert as a sawlog, and quite as harmless to other fishes, 

 is the great basking shark. It reaches a length of sixty 

 feet and a weight that has to be measured in tons. As it 

 lies on the beach, where a successful whaler has landed it, 

 its dorsal fin rises higher than a man's head. It takes a 

 strong man to lift its lower jaw alone, and one of its gill 

 arches -is a burden for a good-sized boy. 



The basking shark has its home in the north in either 

 ocean. In the Pacific, these fishes come south in the 

 summer, usually in pairs, male and female together, lumber- 

 ing and blundering along, swimming at the surface of the 

 water and feeding on whatever little things may come into 

 their wide-open mouths. Sometimes a little school of half 

 a dozen may be found together, for they have at least brains 

 enough to love company, and do not go hunting alone like 

 the predatory sharks. For these sharks never hunt a prey 

 large enough to know of their existence. Their teeth are 

 blunt and very small, covering their jaws in hundreds, very 

 different from the few knife-like or lancet-like teeth of the 

 sharks that run down salmon, mackerel or men. 



On our Pacific coast the basking shark is most often seen 

 off Monterey. The trend of the coast is such that they come 

 near the shore at the Point of Pines, and now and then one 

 used to be taken at Verissimos Portuguese whaling station 

 in Monterey, and several have been taken off Santa Cat- 

 alina. They are easily harpooned, having neither speed nor 

 sense, and once beached, the great liver is taken out and 

 tried for oil, counting for as much as a small whale. In 

 1880 the writer saw one captured at Monterey, at which 

 time the British Museum offered $1,000 for the skin of one 

 in condition for mounting. Afterward the Museum secured 

 one from the coast of Norway, where it sometimes comes. 

 It was on the Norway coast where the basking shark first 



