ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 
79 
he had no evidence that swordfish ever attack 
whales. 
The swordfish hunters at Block Island tell 
me that sharks and the swordfish do not asso¬ 
ciate, but actually keep away from each other. 
Why should the thresher shark be an exception ? 
Here is an old time example of the story, 
dated 1609: 
“Whale, Swordfish and Threasher .—The 
swordfish swimmes under the whale, and 
pricketli him upward. The threasher keep- 
eth above him, and with a mighty great 
thing like unto a flaile, hee so bangeth the 
whale, that hee wfill roare as though it 
thundered, and doth give him such blowes, 
with his weapon, that you would think it 
to be a crake of a great shot.” 
Buckland, the naturalist, was given the fol¬ 
lowing by Hill, an English captain: 
‘‘I have seen these ’ere thrashers fly out 
of the water as high as the masthead and 
down upon the whale, while the swordfish 
was a-pricking of ’im up from underneath. 
There is always two of ’em, one up and one 
under, and I think they hunts together.” 
It seems to us that the masthead leap is a 
bit too high even for the active thresher. 
Here is a version that confirms the killer as 
the aggressor: 
‘‘The swordfish is the whale’s greatest 
enemy, and when he kills one lie eats 
nothing but Ids tongue, leaving the rest to 
the shark, walrus, and birds of prey.” 
Naturalists know that the inoffensive walrus 
neither would nor could bite into a whale with 
its clam-digging tusks placed altogether in the 
way of its jaws. 
Another version of this hoary tale appeared 
in a New Zealand newspaper: As usual, the 
toothless swordfish was trying to ram his sword 
into something he couldn’t eat and from which 
he probably couldn’t withdraw his deeply driven 
and brittle weapon. The “swordfish,” finally 
knocked out by a whack of the whale’s tail, was 
picked up by fishermen, who found that the 
whale’s blow had almost knocked off the back 
fin of the alleged swordfish. In this particular- 
case the ubiquitous thresher was reported as 
not being among those present. 
It would be difficult to demolish the back fin 
of a swordfish, which instantly folds down out 
of sight into the deep groove in which it is placed 
leaving nothing to knock off, while a blow suf¬ 
ficient to knock off the high, rigid dorsal of the 
killer would really mean something. The back 
fin of a large killer is more than five feet long. 
In this case it is clear that the aggressor was a 
small killer. 
Professor Goode refers to descriptions show¬ 
ing “how the swordfish and the killer whale have 
been confused.” Indeed, in some of the older ac¬ 
counts of attacks on the whale, the writers, de¬ 
scribing the killer’s work accurately enough, 
refer to its long back fin as its sword and call 
the creature “swordfish.” We should not take 
seriously the newspaper story and the excited 
fishermen’s identification of the creature making 
the attack. 
The real swordfish lias been charged with the 
murder of whales in sheer wantonness. It is not 
wantonness, but pain, that prompts the har¬ 
pooned and frenzied swordfish to ram a boat. 
The writer’s former shipmate, the late Willard 
Nye, sent Professor Goode this statement by 
Captain Dyer, a swordfish hunter: 
“A number of boats, large and small have 
been “stove” by swordfish on our coast, but 
always after the fish had been struck.” 
There is abundant evidence that swordfish 
have struck many ships and left their swords in 
the planking. We have seen in the Philadelphia 
Academy of Sciences a two-inch piece of plank¬ 
ing with a swordfish weapon rammed tightly 
into it. 
Professor Goode says: “No instance had 
ever been recorded in which a swordfish had 
been able to withdraw his sword after attack¬ 
ing a ship.” A swordfish without a sword lias no 
means of earning a living. However strong 
when driven with great force into a ship’s 
plank, the sword is rather brittle, one in my own 
collection having snapped in two when acci¬ 
dentally pushed off a table. Of course there 
can be no question about the force behind the 
sword when the big fish is in action. 
The swordfish was introduced into the whale 
killing stories long ago, simply because he bears 
a formidable weapon and is known to be dan¬ 
gerous when wounded. 
We once returned to Block Island from a 
swordfish hunt, and found one of the crew of 
another swordfish vessel being taken ashore with 
a lacerated leg. A swordfish had been struck 
and was rushing about dragging the buoy at¬ 
tached to the harpoon line. A boat was lowered 
to pick up the buoy, which he charged, pene¬ 
trating both the boat and the leg of the boatman. 
Roy Chapman Andrews, well-known natural¬ 
ist, in “Whale Hunting with Gun and Camera,” 
discusses this matter as follows: 
