BONITOES AND TUNNIES. 
informs me that it regularly visits St. Margaret’s Bay every summer, 
several specimens being taken and rendered down for oil. They were 
particularly abundant in 1876. They are not seen in the Basin of 
Minas.” 
According to Dr. Fortin the Horse Mackerel is quite abundant in the 
Gulf of St. Lawrence, especially in the Days of Chaleur and of Gaspe, and 
also in the Straits of Belle Isle and Blancs Sablon Bay. It is taken in 
increasing numbers in the gulf, partly by spearing and partly by baiting. 
For this latter purpose strong steel hooks are used tied to solid lines and 
baited with herring. This fishing is prosecuted more particularly in the 
Bay of Chaleur and off Caraquette, where in 1863 over one hundred were 
captured. The fishing is quite exciting, although tiresome and requiring 
a good deal of skill, as in the efforts of the fishes to escape they pull with 
such violence as to endanger the lives of the fishermen by dragging them 
overboard.* 
Capt. Atwood contributes the following note on Horse Mackerel in 
Cape Cod Bay: 
“ They don’t come till the weather gets warm. We don’t see them at 
first when we begin setting mackerel nets, but about June they are liable 
to appear, and we find holes in the nets. Sometimes in September they 
gill them for the sake of their oil. My brother had forty-seven holes 
through one eighty-yard net in one night. When they strike a net they 
go right through it, and when they go through it the hole immediately 
becomes round. It looks as if you could put a half bushel through it. 
I said in my Lowell Institute lectures that a shark in going through a net 
would roll himself up in it, but the Horse Mackerel get right through, 
and the hole they cut could be mended in five minutes. The fishermen 
don’t dread them much because they do the nets so little injury. They 
remain with us through the summer and early autumn, when they are 
killed for the oil. When they are here they feed upon any small fish, and 
when menhaden were here I have seen them drive the harbor full of them. 
I have seen the Horse Mackerel swallow dogfish whole weighing eight 
pounds. As fast as we got out the livers of the dogfish they would catch 
them and eat them. There was a great deal of whiting here at that time. 
They have almost totally disappeared. The Horse Mackerel seems to be 
the enemy of all kinds of fish. There is nothing to trouble the Horse 
* Canadian Fishery Report for 1862-63. 
