PHYSICAL OCEANOGRAPHY OF THE GULF OF MAINE 
883 
north the New York line would have been involved in this same drift and so have 
stranded along the coast of Long Island to the east of Fire Island lighthouse, where 
only three of them actually were found. 
The combined evidence of these Cape Cod and New York lines thus points to a 
dominant movement of the surface water along the edge of the continent, westward 
and southward from the offing of Nantucket to Cape Hatteras, but complicated by 
a clockwise eddy movement in toward the land west of Nantucket Shoals, just where 
flotsam from the so-called “Gulf Stream” (gulf weed and various tropical animals) 
most often drifts in to the coast. No such tendency for the surface water to set 
inshore from the outer part of the continental shelf is reflected in the drifts to the 
west of this, however, not a single bottle from the Cape Cod line having been found 
between New York and Chesapeake Bay, though bottles from the New York line 
were picked up all along this 250-mile sector. 
No further discussion of the bottles set out off New York is called for here, as 
they do not immediately touch the Gulf of Maine, except to emphasize that neither 
they nor the Cape Cod line afford any evidence whatever of surface water entering 
the gulf around Nantucket from the southwest. It has long been known that the 
southern angle of Cape Cod marks a rather abrupt faunal division between the 
waters of Nantucket and Vineyard Sounds, on the one hand, and the more boreal 
Gulf of Maine, on the other. It is obvious that a division of this sort, with no 
change of latitude, is associated with the nontidal circulation of the water. 
It was to check the evidence of the drifts from line B and measurements with cur- 
rent meters (p. 864) pointing to a set of water outward from the eastern end of Nan- 
tucket Sound, and so toward the southeast, that lines H (p. 875) were set out along 
three sections of the sounds during August, 1924. 
Thirty-seven of these 85 bottles have been recovered within the sounds, along 
the outer shores of Nantucket, and still farther west, but not one of them within 
the limits of the Gulf of Maine. 
The drifts from the western end of Marthas Vineyard (Pasque Island to Menemsha 
Bight) may be passed over briefly. Eleven of these were picked up — 1 on Cutty- 
hunk Island, 2 in Vineyard Sound, 1 on Tuckernuck Island, 1 within Buzzards 
Bay, 2 at the mouth of the latter, 1 in Narragansett Bay, and 3 on the Rhode Island 
shore (fig. 175). It is not easy to reconstruct the probable paths of all of these. 
The series was set adrift on the first of the ebb, which sets westward here through 
Vineyard Sound and northward from the latter through the “holes” between the 
Elizabeth Islands into Buzzards Bay. It is probable that the bottles found in 
Buzzards Bay and on Cuttyhunk went north through Quick’s Hole, because they 
were put out close to Pasque Island at about high water and would soon have been 
carried in that direction by the ebb. If this line had been put out on the flood 
instead of at the beginning of the ebb it would probably have been carried far 
enough up the sound before the tide changed to come within the easterly set that 
appears to dominate Nantucket Sound. Actually, however, most of these bottles 
must have drifted westward for the first 5 or 6 hours, carrying them about to the 
mouth of Vineyard Sound, where a division evidently took place. Two bottles from 
the northern end seem to have been carried back into the sound by the next flood, 
one of them to be picked up two days later on the Marthas Vineyard shore, 6 miles 
