PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY OE THE GULP OF MAINE 
513 
INTRODUCTION 
This memoir is the third and final part of the general report on the oceanographic 
survey of the Gulf of Maine . 1 
Key charts to the stations will be found in the preceding part of this volume 
(Bigelow, 1926, figs. 1-9) ; the dates and positions are tabulated below (p. 976) with the 
physical data. 
The chapter on hydrodynamics has been made possible by Lieut. Commander 
E. H. Smith’s collaboration; R. Parmenter tabulated the physical data for the Fish 
Hawk cruises of 1925, collaborating also in the charts and discussion based thereon. 
Records of temperature or salinity have been contributed by R. A. Goffin, 
Wm. C. Schroeder, Capt. G. W. Carlson, Capt. G. W. Greenleaf, C. G. Corliss, and Dr. 
C. J. Fish of the Bureau of Fisheries. Capt. John W. MacFarland, from his schooner 
Victor, and Henry Stetson and T. C. Graves, from their yachts, also have taken 
welcome observations. 
I owe a debt of gratitude also to Dr. A. G. Huntsman, who has generously 
allowed quotation from his report on Canadian drift-bottle experiments in advance 
of publication, and who contributed other data acknowledged in the appropriate 
connections; to Dr. J. P. McMurrich, who has offered the use of his unpublished 
data on temperatures at St. Andrews, New Brunswick; and to the late Dr. A. G. 
Mayor, who contributed the colorimetric tubes used in the determination of alkalinity 
on the Albatross and Halcyon cruises of 1920-21. 
OCEANOGRAPHIC HISTORY 
1. GULF OF MAINE PROPER 
The first Gulf of Maine temperatures, so far as I can learn, were taken in October, 
1789, by Benjamin Franklin’s nephew, Jonathan Williams, who read the “heat of 
the air and water at sunrise, noon, and sunset” (1793, p. 83) on a voyage from 
Boston to Virginia, and found the surface 8.9° C. (48° F.) off the mouth of Massa- 
chusetts Bay on October 11, warming to 11.1° (52° F.) off Chatham on Cape Cod, 
to 15° (59° F.) over the outer part of the continental shelf south of Nantucket, and 
to 18.3°-19.4° (65° to 67° F.) in the inner edge of the Gulf Stream outside the edge 
of the continent on the 13th — readings that agree very well with the usual distribu- 
tion of temperature for that season. On another voyage (from Halifax to New York) 
during the last week of July, 1790, he again took temperatures on Roseway Bank, 
Browns Bank, and in the gully between them; also along the southern side of Georges 
Bank (53° to 64° F.). 
Enough readings of the surface temperature of the Gulf of Maine had accumulated 
during the first half of the nineteenth century to permit Maury (1855 and 1858) to 
show its coastal belt and the Bay of Fundy as between 50° and 60°, its southern side 
out to the continental edge as between 60° and 70° in July, and the entire gulf as 
colder than 50° in March. 2 
1 The first part was devoted to the fishes (Bigelow and Welsh, 1925); the second to the plankton (Bigelow, 1926). 
2 Petermann (1870) more correctly interprets the individual readings reproduced on Maury’s (1852) thermal chart by showing 
the inner parts of the Gulf of Maine as 54.5° to 59° and the Georges Bank-Nantucket Shoals region as about 59° to 65.5° in July 
about 32° and 32° to 41°, respectively, in January 
