PHYSICAL OCEANOGBAPHY OF THE GULF OF MAINE 
897 
Why the bottle last mentioned (No. 280) escaped the drift setting northward 
toward the Bay of Fundy is not clear. However, that it did escape, to continue east- 
ward, proves that the surface current that sometimes flows westward past cape 
Sable was not active at the time. On the other hand, the fact that only two bottles 
of all this group were found on the outer Nova Scotian coast east of the cape, while 
so many turned toward the Bay of Fundy, is conclusive evidence that there was no 
general flow past the latter, but that its offing was comparatively a dead water at 
the time so far as any nontidal current is concerned. 
It is not possible to reconstruct the track of the “Salvages” bottle in its rounding 
of the cape; it may have held farther offshore than its line, as laid down on the 
chart, would suggest, and then have veered inshore again. Bottle No. 165, which 
drifted from a point a few miles inshore of Cashes Ledge to Scotts Bay, 50-odd miles 
beyond Cape Sable, may have been caught up in the Nova Scotian eddy, judging from 
the considerable interval between release and recovery (113 days). 
More interesting, in connection with the general circulation of the Gulf of Maine, 
are the two bottles (Nos. 210 and 284) that went from the outer section of line A 
to the mouth of Penobscot Bay. The direct route for these would be to the north, 
of course, but it is most unlikely that they followed such a course at right angles 
to the general easterly drift followed by the other bottles that went to Nova Scotia 
from this same section of the line. The fact that they were afloat about as long 
(85 and 103 days) as several of the bottles that reached the Bay of Fundy 76 also makes 
it likely that all the bottles of this group drifted southeastward and eastward at 
first. On this basis the most reasonable explanation for the eventual separation is 
that while most of the bottles approached the Bay of Fundy close enough to the 
Nova Scotian shore to be swept inward, reproducing the drifts of Mavor’s bottles in 
1919 (p. 868), others, circling on a shorter radius, hence following a more northerly 
route, crossed the mouth of the Bay of Fundy instead of entering it, were picked up 
in the current that flows out of the bay past Grand Manan, and so were carried 
westward again. This is made the more likely by the fact that several drift bottles 
put out in the Bay of Fundy in 1919 traveled by this same route to points along the 
Maine coast, one of them to the same destination (Penobscot Bay; p. 870). It is 
probable, therefore, that the two bottles that went from the vicinity of Cashes Ledge 
to Penobscot Bay in 1922 made a partial, anticlockwise circuit, which brought them 
well over toward the eastern side of the gulf en route, so that they approached their 
eventual destination from the east or southeast, not directly from the south. 
The route of the Matinicus bottle is carried the farther eastward of the two on 
the chart (fig. 180), because of its longer interval; but there is no means of knowing 
whether this apparent difference is actually significant. 
On the whole, the most instructive feature of this group is the uniformity of the 
drifts and the very definite and comparatively rapid movement of the water which 
these show along a narrow track from the center of the gulf to the Nova Scotian 
side of the mouth of the Bay of Fundy. 
78 No. 190 to Grand Passage, 116 days; No. 206 to Digby Neck, 90 days; No. 241 to Port Lome, 88 days; No. 242 to the offing of 
Digby, 70 days; Nos. 248 and 255 to the vicinity of Point Prim, 75 and 90 days; No. 264 to Long Island, at the mouth of the Bay 
of Fundy, 81 days; No. 299 to Advocate Harbor, Nova Scotian shore of the Bay of Fundy, 107 days. 
