The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries Part 42

"What is it, Colin?"

"It just occurred to me, sir," the boy answered, "that perhaps some parasite which would prey on the drill might be found."

"It might--but I have as yet found none."

"Or perhaps," Colin again suggested, "some chemical which would unite with lime might be put into the water so that the oyster sh.e.l.l might be poisonous to the drill, but not for food, because we eat the oyster and not the sh.e.l.l."

The director laughed.

"That suggestion is new, at least," he said, "but I don't think it would work because this is a marine question and the water changes continuously. There must be some solution, there's always a way of doing everything, and some one will find it out. I'm going to stick at it till I do, that is, when I'm not engaged on other Bureau work. But I'm always glad of suggestions, and when you can help me in any way I'll let you know."

"Thank you ever so much, Mr. Prelatt," Colin answered; "I'll be glad to do anything I can."

The boy had a fertile brain, and, before a week had pa.s.sed by, a line of experiment suggested itself to him in connection with the oyster-drill problem and he explained it to the director.

"To work that out properly would take several years!" the latter said tentatively.

"I thought it would," said Colin, "but perhaps some one else could carry it on, and the work ought to be done, anyway."

"You have the right idea," the director replied; "it's the problem, not the man who solves it. Now," he continued, "I have a surprise for you.

Dr. Jimson, who has been working on swordfish for some time, is anxious to try and capture a large specimen and is going out with a swordfish sloop next week. I can probably arrange for the trap to be looked after, if you are off for a day or two. Do you want to go?"

"Indeed I do," said Colin. "Mr. Wadreds was telling me some stories just the other day about swordfish-catching."

"I suppose he told you the famous story of the swordfish which charged a vessel and drove its sword through 'copper sheathing, an inch board under-sheathing, a three-inch plank of hard wood, the solid white oak timber twelve inches thick, then through another two and a half-inch hard-oak ceiling, and lastly penetrated the head of an oil cask, where it stuck, not a drop of the oil having escaped?'"

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHAT SHALL WE GET THIS TIME?

_Courtesy of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HERE'S A NEW ONE, BOYS!

The veteran collector of the Woods Hole Station is seen in the foreground of both pictures.

_Courtesy of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries._]

"Yes, Mr. Prelatt," Colin answered, "and if he hadn't told me that the record was authentic and that the sword and section of timber had been in the National Museum, I might have doubted it."

"They're enormously powerful, one of the best boatmen I ever knew was killed by a swordfish," said the director.

"How was that, sir?"

"He had harpooned the swordfish and had gone out in the small boat to lance it, when the huge fish dived under the craft and shot up from the bottom like a rocket, his sword going through the timbers as though they were paper and striking the boatman with such force that he was killed almost instantly. Boats used often to be sunk by the rushes of a swordfish, but nowadays the greater part of the work is done directly from the deck of a schooner. No amount of changes, however, can take all the excitement out of a swordfish capture."

"Will they attack a boat unprovoked?"

"There are lots of cases in which they are supposed to have done so,"

the director replied, "but I think any such instances were probably swordfish who had been wounded--but not fatally. You knew that the swordfish was the Monarch of all the Fish?"

"No," Colin answered, "I didn't."

"He was so elected at one of the meetings of the International Congress of Fisheries," said the director, smiling. "We were waiting for the chairman or the speaker or somebody and in casual conversation the query arose as to who was the real master of the seas, in the same way that the lion is regarded as the King of Beasts."

"And the swordfish got the award?"

"After quite a little debate. Plenty of people had their own favorites, the white shark and the killer whale among others, but when it came to a sort of informal vote, the swordfish was chosen almost unanimously."

"I shall be glad to pay my respects to His Majesty," answered Colin with a laugh, as the director wheeled his chair to his desk, "and I'm ever so much obliged for the opportunity."

The next morning, after having hauled the trap, Colin jumped aboard the _Phalarope_, which was going to New Bedford for supplies for the station, and which was to take him there to join Dr. Jimson on a swordfish schooner. A large portion of the surface of Buzzards Bay was dotted with billets of wood, about six inches thick and painted in all manner of colors. Some were red, some white, some black, some yellow and blue, some striped in all manner of gaudy hues.

"I've been wondering," said Colin, as he stood in the pilot house chatting to the captain of the little steamer, "what all those sticks in the water are?"

The captain took his pipe out of his mouth to stare at him in surprise, as he turned the wheel a spoke or two.

"Don't you know that?" he said. "Those are lobster-pot buoys."

"You mean there's a lobster-pot attached to every one of those?"

"Yes, of course."

"But there are thousands of them! Why, right now, I can probably see forty or fifty, and they're not so awfully easy to catch sight of with a little sea running. And why are they painted all different colors?"

"Different owners," was the reply, "every man has his own color. Every day, or every other day at least, he sails out to the grounds--some of 'em now have motor-boats--and makes a round of his pots. A chap whose buoy is yellow has perhaps a hundred or two yellow buoys scattered about the harbor."

"That sounds like work," said Colin.

"It's hard work," was the reply. "A lobster-pot is weighted with bricks and it's a heavy load to pull up in a boat. It's an awkward thing to handle, too. Then a lobsterman has to rebait his traps, and as he does that with rotten fish, it's not a sweet job. And he can only bring in lobsters over a certain size; anything less than nine and a half inches in length he has to throw back. Sometimes it'll happen that the traps are full of lobsters that are too short or too small, 'shorts' they call 'em, and his day's work won't bring him in much. There's a living in it, but that's about all."

Finding that the captain of the _Phalarope_ knew the lobster business well, as do most men who are natives of the region, Colin kept him busy answering questions until they ran into New Bedford. As the old center of the whaling industry, the harbor had a great interest for Colin, but there was but one of the whaling s.h.i.+ps in at the time, and the ancient fisher-town atmosphere was greatly marred by extensive cotton mills that had been built along the river, just below where the whaling piers used to be. The swordfish schooners were at the pier, however, large as life, and Colin felt quite a thrill of excitement as he stepped aboard the little vessel on which he was to live for the next couple of days, and saw the narrow dark bunks in the entirely airless cabin in which four men were to sleep. Dr. Jimson and Colin practically were going as members of the crew, the two men, whose places they were taking, staying home from the trip.

Long before sunrise the following morning they were up, and by daybreak the schooner was standing out of the harbor for Block Island, one of the famous haunts of the swordfish. Colin, who had good eyesight, and who was always eager to be up and doing, volunteered to go to the crow's-nest and keep a lookout for the dorsal fin of a swordfish, which, he was told, could be seen a couple of miles away. There was no advantage in going aloft, however, until toward noon, when, the water being still, the swordfish come up to sun themselves.

Once Colin was quite sure that he saw a swordfish, but just as he was about to shout, there flashed across his mind a sentence that he had read somewhere of the likelihood of confusing a shark's fin with that of a swordfish, and soon he was able to make out that it was a shark. As it grew toward noon and the sun's rays beat directly on him, Colin began to realize that sitting on a scantling two inches by four at the top of a schooner's mast in a bobbing sea, under a broiling sun, was a long way from being a soft snap, but he would have scorned to make a complaint.

He was more than glad, though, when the cook hailed all hands to dinner, and one of the sailors went to the crow's-nest.

At dinner Colin turned the conversation to swordfish and their ways.

"There's one thing I don't quite understand, Dr. Jimson," he asked, "is a spear-fish the same as a swordfish, only that the weapon is shorter?"

"Not at all," was the reply, "the spear-fish is a variety of the great sailfish, which you see in West Indian waters six or seven feet long, with a huge dorsal fin, blue with black spots, looming above the water like the sail of a strange craft. But the real difference is in the spear or sword. In the case of the spear-fish it is bony, being a prolongation of the skull; in the case of the swordfish it is h.o.r.n.y, and horns, as you probably know, are formations of skin rather than bone.

Now the narwhal's tusk," he continued, "is again an entirely different thing."

"That's a tooth, isn't it?"

"Yes," was the reply, "it seems to be the mark of the male narwhal.

Sometimes a narwhal has two tusks, but generally only one--on the left side. The females have none at all. You know the unicorn is always represented with a narwhal's tusk? One of the early travelers, Sir John de Mandeville or Marco Polo, I forget which, brought back a narwhal's tusk which, he had been told, had been taken from a kind of horse. I really suppose that the native who sold it believed it was from some species of antelope. But to this day the arms of Great Britain show a horse having a fish's tooth sticking out from his forehead like an impossible horn."