826 
BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 
Up to 1897 the supposed coldness of the coastal water along North America in 
general, and any definite evidences or reports of a current from northeast to south- 
west in particular, were usually classed as southward extensions from the Labrador 
Current. Without much analysis this Arctic stream was generally thought to flow 
down from the Grand Banks region, past Nova Scotia, and so southward along the 
whole eastern seaboard of the United States, carrying to New England the cold 
resulting from the melting of ice (floe and berg) in Baffins Bay or about the Grand 
Banks. Some such southerly branch of the Labrador Current is taken for granted 
in most of the older textbooks, charts, and discussions of North American hydrog- 
raphy. Thus Libbey (1891, 1895), in his studies of temperature south of Marthas 
Vineyard, definitely identified as such the cool band that he recorded along the con- 
tinental edge in the offing of southern New England. This view was widely held 
until recently. Sumner, Osburn, and Cole (1913, p. 35), for example, state, on the 
authority of the United States Navy Department, that the Labrador Current flows 
from the Grand Banks past Nova Scotia and so southward as far even as Florida, 
narrowing from north to south. Kriimmel (1911) believes the polar water tends to 
drift southwest ward across the Grand Banks and so to Nova Scotia. Engelhardt 
(1913, p. 9, chart B) did not doubt that the Labrador Current bathes our coasts at 
least as far as the Gulf of Maine. Johnston (1923, p. 271) describes it as hugging 
the coast of North America from Halifax to Cape Cod; and as recently as 1924 Le 
Danois (1924, p. 14) wrote of the “dernieres eaux du courant du Labrador qui 
longuent la cote des Etats Unis.” 
On the other hand, Verrill (1873, p. 106; 1874), in the early days of the United 
States Fish Commission, had maintained that the actual temperatures of the deep 
strata of the Gulf of Maine did not suggest the effects of any Arctic current, though 
he qualified this generalization by adding that the gulf receives accessions of cold 
water, ultimately coming from the north, by the tides. 
It is obvious that for the Labrador Current to follow the track usually ascribed 
to it implies a dominant cold drift setting southwestward from the Newfoundland- 
Grand Banks region across the oceanic triangle that separates the Newfoundland 
from the Scotian Banks, and so in over the latter toward the coast; but although a 
current of this sort is represented on many charts, its supposed extension westward 
from the Grand Banks to Nova Scotia seems to have been based more on theoretic 
grounds (the assumed necessity for connecting the cool coastal water to the south- 
ward with the Arctic flow from Baffins Bay) than on direct observation. Schott 
(1897), who first attempted a detailed study of oceanography of the Grand Banks 
region, also failed to find any dominant set from northeast to southwest across 
the banks, in spite of the proximity of the Labrador Current, which has long been 
known to skirt their eastern edge and sometimes to round the so-called “tail of the 
bank” for a short distance westward and northwestward. He did, it is true, record 
sporadic movements of this Arctic water in over the banks, but he believed them 
too small in volume and too irregular in occurrence to be anything but temporary 
surface currents caused by the northeast winds, which often blow fresh there. His 
conclusions were based on so many records of temperature and on measurements of 
the current taken from fishing vessels lying at anchor on the banks that they form 
