150 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



on the coast of Nova Scotia, he caught twenty-seven great cods with hook and line, and 

 if the fish he procured in the Hudson were obtained in the same way, it would prove that 

 the salmon was not among them, as this fish is rarely got in any other way than by the 

 spear or net. But it appears that he also used a net. In one place he states, that the 

 men went in his boat on shore to fish, opposite against the ship, but could not find a good 

 place ; this shows that he employed the net. We can, therefore, place no reliance upon 

 this consideration. The migrations of salmon with us, are vernal, and after depositing 

 their spawn, they return to the ocean. It is presumed, that there are no salmon in our 

 eastern rivers, in September ; Hudson must, therefore, have meant some other fish. 

 Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae, has enumerated fifty-six different species of the salmon 

 genus. Hudson certainly did not intend the common salmon. I believe, that the fish he 

 meant, is our rock fish or streaked basse, which comes into the river about that time, in 

 great numbers. 



Hudson says, " The river is full of fish ;'* " our boat went ashore and caught great 

 store of very good fish." We know that this is not the case, except when the anadro- 

 mous fishes ascend the river, and that even they have experienced a great diminution. 

 Adrian Van der Donk, M. D. who had resided nine years in this state, when called New 

 Netherland, and who published in the Dutch language, in 1655, a topographical and Na- 

 tural History of New Netherland, &c. says, that the Hudson, the Mohawk, and all the 

 waters of the country, abound with every kind of fish in their respective seasons, and that 

 in March, 1647, at the time of a great freshet, two whales of considerable bulk, went up 

 the Hudson one hundred and sixty miles ; one of them, however, returned and grounded 

 about forty-eight miles from the sea shore, where four others, that same year, had also 

 stranded and perished ; the other grounded about one hundred and seventy-two miles up. 

 Notwithstanding the inhabitants had obtained a great quantity of train oil from it, yet by 

 reason of the swiflness of the current at that time, the whole river for two or three weeks 

 acquired an oily taste, and exhibited an unctuous appearance, and the noxious effluvia 

 were offensive eight miles off". Here it appears that in one spring, six large whales had 

 ascended the Hudson ; and they were, no doubt, allured in that direction by the multi- 

 tude of fish. A whale has recently ascended the Delaware as far as the falls at Trenton. 

 The Hudson is now not only a steril river, but all its tributary streams partake of the same 

 defect. Kahn says, that several gentlemen and merchants of New-York, between fifty 

 and sixty years of age, told him in June, 1749, that during their lives they had plainly 

 found several kinds of fish decrease in number every year, and that they could not get 

 near so many fish now as they could formerly. Kalin further says, " At the first settle- 

 ment, the bays, rivers, and brooks, had such quantities of fish, that at one draught in the 



