Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/352

338 and old sailors will in good faith describe the enormous fish which they saw at sea but could not capture; one well-authenticated instance of accurate weighing, however, is much more valuable. The average extreme length seems to be eleven feet, of which the sword is nearly four feet. A fish has been taken by Captain Benjamin Ashby, a New England sword-fisherman, whose sword measured almost six feet. The fish when salted weighed six hundred and thirty-nine pounds, so that its live weight must have been as much as seven hundred and fifty pounds.

The sword-fish ranges along the Atlantic coast of America from Jamaica to Nova Scotia; it is abundant on the shores of Western Europe, entering the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas, and is found also on the west coast of Africa, about New Zealand, and along the Pacific coast of America from Peru to California. On the coasts of Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island they abound in the summer months; their occurrence off New York is not unusual, but in our Southern waters they do not appear to remain.

A sword-fish when swimming near the surface usually allows its dorsal fin and the upper lobe of its caudal fin to stand out of the water several inches. It is this habit which enables the fisherman to detect the presence of the fish. It commonly swims so slowly that a fishing-smack with a light breeze has no difficulty in overtaking it, but when excited its motions are very rapid and violent. Many curious instances are on record of attacks by this fish upon ships. Ælian, who wrote a little later than 200 says that the sword-fish has a sharp-pointed snout with which it is able to pierce the sides of a ship and send it to the bottom. He describes the sword as like the beak of the ship known as the trireme, which was rowed with three banks of oars. In 1871 the little yacht Redhot, of New Bedford, was out sword-fishing, and a sword-fish had been hauled in to be lanced, when it attacked the vessel and pierced her side so as to sink her. The London "Daily News" of December 11, 1868, contained the following paragraph, probably from the pen of Professor R. A. Proctor: "Last Wednesday the Court of Common Pleas—rather a strange place, by-the-by, for inquiring into the natural history of fishes—was engaged for several hours in trying to determine under what circumstances a sword-fish might be able to escape scot-free after thrusting his snout into the side of a ship. The gallant ship Dreadnaught, thoroughly repaired and classed A 1 at Lloyd's, had been insured for three thousand pounds against all the risks of the seas. She sailed March 10, 1864, from Colombo for London. Three days later the crew while fishing hooked a sword-fish. Xiphias, however, broke the line, and a few moments after leaped half out of the water, with the object, it should seem, of taking a look at his persecutor, the Dreadnaught. Probably he satisfied himself that the enemy was some abnormally large cetacean, which it was his natural duty to attack