Fishing in the Hudson's Ancient Gorge

I

AT four o’clock in the morning of July 25, I was on the bridge of the Arcturus when the captain signaled for Slow Speed. For an hour we barely pushed through the water, while two sextants were leveled at our namesake, which glowed brightly in the heavens. At last a pencil made a tiny dot on the chart, Full Stop clanged in the engineroom, and we floated quietly over our objective — the marvelous sunken gorge of the Hudson River. There was just a hint of dawn in the star-flecked east as I went to my cabin for an hour’s sleep.

There are mirages and illusions of the senses and there are those of the mind, and in the full light of day I found myself laboring under both. The last mainland we had sighted was the old, pirate-famed harbor of Porto Bello; weeks later, by solar and sidereal observations, we had been close to Chesapeake to make connections with the Warrior, and dredged there in fifteen fathoms with no hint of land in view. Now we were one hundred miles from New York City Hall, on the word of the captain, and in six hundred fathoms of water, according to the sounding wire.

I found it quite impossible to realize that my city was only an hour away by plane and a day by steaming. Our homeward-bound pennant with its one hundred and eighty feet of length, for the ninescore days we had been away, was furled, ready to be broken out, and as yet no thought of packing had entered our minds. We were all still in woolen shirts, khaki shorts, and sneakers, which had been our garb for half a year. The odious stiff collars and shirts, the silly-colored strings of neckties, the funereal dinner-jackets, together with all the other uncomfortable and unlovely portions of civilized attire, were still packed away, snuggled among moth balls in the hold. The sea stretched unbroken to the horizon just as it had done week after week, month after month, in the Atlantic and in the Pacific, and both our senses and our minds insisted that we were still thousands of miles from anywhere.

My present plan was that our last station — Number One Hundred and Thirteen — should be here in the depths of this royal gorge of the Hudson River, within reach of what was once by far the greatest waterfall in the world, and yet is only a scant hundred miles from our city of New York. I was about to grope about beneath half a mile of water for vague hints of whatever life the fingers of my dangling nets might bring up, and so it seemed not unreasonable to look back through past ages to the time when this gorge roared with the thundering stream of the Hudson, and to attempt with pitifully feeble gropings of the imagination to repicture some of that distant scene.

As nearly as we can judge, the period of the early Pleistocene was something like a million years ago, and at this time the northeastern coast of the United States was elevated a mile or more above its present level. This made of Manhattan Island an elongated line of rugged hills about one hundred miles inland, while the great Hudson drained, not only its own valley, but all the water of the Great Lakes. This mighty flood rushed southward through the Palisades, past Manhattan, and on out toward the Atlantic, augmented by the tributaries of the Housatonic, the Passaic, and the Hackensack.

So low has the coastal region sunk since that time that to-day the Hudson, as far up as Albany, is little more than an elongated fjord, the ocean’s tides ebbing and flowing throughout this entire distance of a hundred and fifty miles. Even the Palisades and the Catskill bed of the river were much more imposing in olden times, for the glaciers had not then filled the latter with the hundreds of feet of rocks and gravel which now choke it. If we could then have floated down the Hudson, the Palisades would have towered four times as high above us.

In olden times the compound river rushed through the channel which on clear days can now be seen from an airplane as a dark streak beyond Sandy Hook. For a distance of fortyfive miles beyond what is now dry land the Hudson flowed rapidly but evenly through a fairly deep bed, between the level banks of the wide, sloping coastal plain. Then, without warning, its waters plunged into the maw of a canyon mightier than man has ever seen. At the head it was less than a mile wide and rapidly reached a depth of sixteen hundred feet. To-day our sounding line touches bottom four hundred feet down on the surface of the ancient plain, while a few hundred yards away the plummet sinks into the gorge to a depth of twenty-eight hundred feet. Four miles farther down the canyon, where the land of the ancient coast is now a thousand feet under water, to reach the bottom of the gorge requires forty-eight hundred feet or almost a mile of wire. Here the entire volume of the Hudson, plus the Great Lakes and the tributary rivers, dropped almost sheer over a precipice of more than eighteen hundred feet — more than a quarter of a mile. The only thing on the earth to-day to compare with this is Kaieteur Falls in British Guiana. This has a maximum drop of eight hundred feet, the highest waterfall in the world. To the chosen few who have seen this, the mind is able dimly to repicture the incomparable gorge of the Hudson as it once was. The thrill which came up over the vibrating piano-wire when we touched the very bottom brought to the imagination what the most marvelous piece of music conveys to the ear. It was a lost chord vibrant with all the wonder of past ages, before man or his kindred had begun to evolve.

During the successive glacial ages, when time after time the enormous masses of ice advanced and retreated, the coast slowly sank, and before the end of the Pleistocene Age it presented a contour much like that of to-day. During all this period the wild life of Manhattan and the adjacent country was diversified and wholly different from that of historical times. As the climate alternated from arctic to semitropical, successive faunas replaced one another. At Long Branch there lived, during widely separated times, such unlike creatures as walruses and giant ground-sloths. Mastodons were abundant even on Manhattan, while not many miles from the Hudson were wild horses, tapirs, peccaries, reindeer, musk oxen, bison, and giant beavers. Most of these animals lived long before the first evidences of mankind, and the great submarine canyon was never seen by eye of man or his immediate forbears.

And now, instead of thinking back through time forever lost to us, I was about to reach down through space equally forbidden to living man, into a region comparable to the ether beyond the neighborhood of comfortable planets and world sanctuaries — a region unthinkably cold, with ultimate silences, and darkness and pressure beyond all human imagination.

II

When our soundings revealed the fact that we were actually floating over the deepest part of the gorge, and had reached the point nearest New York City where we might expect to find the strange creatures of the abysmal depths, I gave orders to put out the string of nets that had yielded the best results during the past months. First there was paid out the otter trawl, a huge bag of netting forty feet in length, with its great gaping mouth held wide open by the oblique pull of two iron-bound boards. Then, at intervals of fifty fathoms, metre nets were lowered, each fifteen feet long and made of the finest, most costly silk, with a mouth composed of a brass ring a yard in diameter. Five of these nets were attached to the steel cable by guide ropes, and they trailed straight out behind at the various depths as the ship steamed at slowest speed through the water. For three hours they were pulled gently along at 500, 450, 400, 350, and 300 fathoms’ depth, blindly, uncontrollably, but usually successfully engulfing the weird beings that happened to float along in their path.

Although, as I have said, the expanse of open ocean conveyed no hint of the actual nearness of land and human beings, yet hardly had the last net disappeared beneath the surface when ships appeared on the horizon. A square-rigger drifted slowly along with slack canvas, while at her heels followed casually but watchfully a low subchaser. A line of smoke in another direction marked a dainty white revenue-cutter, which came tearing full speed toward us. We chuckled as we thought what a suspicious-looking craft we must be —all begrimed with the outboard trawling, six months of weed on our keel, and rolling in the swells for no apparent reason except an inexplicable steel cable leading obliquely down into the blue depths. We rather looked forward to the excitement of keeping up our mysterious character until we were boarded by this bootlegger policeman. We even anticipated offering the officer a cocktail, thereby breaking no law of which we were aware—being one hundred miles out at sea and having gauged our Panama supply to last exactly up to the moment before landing in New York. But the cutter’s captain knew what he was about and had evidently been expecting us, for as he encircled us he dipped his ensign and saluted us with the usual three blasts. The unexpected compliment thrilled us, and we answered with the deepest basso profundo roars of which our whistle was capable.

During the succeeding four days and nights, which we spent drifting over the gorge, we had not a moment’s idleness from lack of specimens. Throughout the day we kept up constant trawling or dredging, and at night we trawled with small surfacenets or harpooned and netted fish and other creatures from the pulpit and gangway. Even before the stormy petrels discovered we were a source of food-supply, the sharks came and circled us eagerly, not in hopes of any human being who might by chance fall overboard, — I had exploded this myth pretty thoroughly in my intimate association with them during the last six months, — but on the lookout for garbage.

The sailors borrowed some of my shark hooks and chains, and in quick succession caught three over the stern. All were Carcharhinus obscurus — the dusky ground-shark, which heretofore seems to have been almost unknown near New York, although common to the north at Woods Hole. The most noticeable character of these creatures was the pale color of the fins. The pectorals were grayish-white for half their length and in the sea appeared milk-white. These sharks arrived singly, converging toward the bow, and then drifted sternward. Perceiving the slowly dragging bait, they leisurely swam toward and engulfed it, with, however, none of the storybook-legend action of having to turn over on their backs before seizing their prey. A male shark measured over seven feet in total length and weighed one hundred and twenty pounds — after we had all estimated his weight at about three hundred!

At Porto Bello we had purchased two small puppies of doubtful — or rather of quite certain absence of — pedigree. They were most amusing little fellows and were thoroughly spoiled by everyone on board. Both unfortunately developed signs of mange, and much to their disgust we treated them thoroughly with the old reliable Glover’s. They had grown and thrived apace, but now the smaller of the two pups — Blanco Ugly, as we called him — by accident or intention (the SpanishAmerican temperament being so uncertain) fell overboard and drowned before anyone could see or save him. The first we knew of the tragedy was the sight of his little body drifting alongside the almost motionless vessel. Immediately a great shark rose beneath him, engulfed him with a single effort, and sank from view. As quickly as this had taken place, however, the shark reappeared and relinquished the puppy intact — Glover’s mange cure apparently not appealing to the palate of this scavenger of the sea.

The previous day we had received a generally broadcasted wireless, warning ships to be on their guard against a derelict — a schooner which had been run down in our vicinity but not sunk. This was brought to mind when a hatch drifted past, then a chair and pieces of masts and rigging. Once a huge squared beam was sighted, which at first we took for an upturned ship’s boat. I put over a small motor-boat, and the two men who went out to the floating object reported that the beam had been adrift for a long time, as it was covered with barnacles and weed. A host of fish swimming beneath it tempted me to use the last few sticks of dynamite that we had left. A number of fish were killed by the explosion, but all sank at once or were taken by sharks before we could secure them.

Whenever the vessel was moving we trolled with spoons and artificial squids for stray tunnies and mackerel. Large swordfish came several times to the shimmering bait, and an eight-foot individual even tasted it, but the slightly irritated nod of his head parted the stout cod-line as if it had been cobweb. I record all these casual occurrences to indicate the many ways in which it is possible to capture specimens at sea in addition to the usual nets and dredges.

III

Before we return to examine the contents of our deep-sunken nets let us see what the surface has to offer as we float where, long ago, great primitive eagles soared and looked down on ancient landscapes. In relation to those days this present year is more nearly 1001925.

The larger surface-life was abundant, and schools of tunnies passed now and then, looking from the deck like flocks of violet torpedoes, while pink-and-black dolphins came and inspected us, and went on their way rocketing. We watched one, which never failed to leap high, somersault, and fall back flat on his back with a resounding slap. If it was play, he was a confirmed humorist; if, unromantically, merely to dislodge barnacles or parasites from the skin of his back, he must have been assuredly successful. The most impressive visitors were schools of small whales or blackfish, which rolled in a dignified, elephantine manner through the waves and with huge sighs sent up spouts of mist.

Next to the general oceanographic machinery of nets and dredges the apparatus most constantly in use was the metal front porch or pulpit, which we let down over the bow close to the water. This was seldom vacant during the day and, when aquatic loot was abundant, two of the staff sometimes worked it at the same time, with long-handled net and pail. The objects thus captured, drifting over the sunken Hudson gorge, varied from scientifically rare, to beautiful, to merely amusing. Christopher Columbus hailed birds and floating grass as indicative of land — so the comic elements in our pulpit hauls adumbrated human proximity. Here is a catalogue of items taken on the first day, showing a pronounced lacteal dominance: —

We were well inshore, away from any strong influence of the Gulf Stream, in an eddy-like backwater with little current, so that we found creatures which had drifted out of the main Gulf Stream, as well as others which hailed from the shore. Although there was no strong offshore breeze, yet an astonishingly large number of insects had found their way these hundred miles from land, and we captured thirty altogether, including moths, grasshoppers, beetles, and dragon flies. Some were struggling their last in the water, others flew wearily aboard the Arcturus.

Scattered bits of sargassum weed floated here and there — sad little plants of the sea, for all were doomed. Better for them if they had clung to the northward-flowing stream, within a few days to sink to a quiet death in the cold northern waters, than to bask here for a time in fancied security in this pseudo-tropic warmth. With every patch of weed — less in extent than an open hand — a tiny cosmos of creatures kept faith, the faith of unconscious heritage. It was tragic to see a tiny fish or a crab clinging to a thin strand, with no hope beyond another week, the sargassum even now beginning to blacken and water-log. We caught sea horses with astonishing powers of color change, turning quite black at night and pale yellow-orange in the daytime.

The small people of the surface were seldom by themselves. If they were not in schools, then they haunted the bits of weed, or chummed with jellyfish. Great pulsating Cyanea jellies throbbed slowly along, umbrella-ing with graceful heaves of their massive amber bodies. Behind them trailed for yards the medusa tangle of poisonous, stinging tentacles, and in and out of this living maze of nettles small fish swam. They were young and inexperienced, and they gave me the same sensation that I once had when I saw a scout crawl through a snarl of barbed wire into No Man’s Land, where at any moment a Very light might shed its death ray upon him. I watched many of these small butterfish swimming carelessly along, protected from all outside dangers, while every now and then a small entangled corpse showed where the great jelly had taken toll of its pensioners.

Although the weed was so shredded and patchy, yet almost all its usual habitués were to be found: pipefish, sea horses, filefish, and Pterophryne — the latter magicked from weed to fish with scarcely any alteration of color, blemishes, floats, and fronds.

A host of other surface beings came to our nets, but I shall mention only two more. A few Portuguese men-ofwar had drifted hither from far-off tropical waters, still iridescent as opals, buoyant as balloons; and among their terrible, fire-searing tentacles there also swam small fish — fairy Nomeus, to whom color was as balls to a juggler, one moment banded with black, the next wholly monochrome silver.

Almost the only being who was independent of weed or jelly or the society of its fellows was a little triggerfish, who outcolored even Nomeus. Isolated amid this vast waste of waters, this midget would be seen swimming sturdily and unafraid. He was the despair of my artist. Swimming quietly in midocean or in an aquarium, he showed the usual oceanic coloring — ultramarine above, silvery white beneath. As the Arcturus bore down upon one of these diminutive triggers, or the face of the artist approached the glass behind which he hung poised, he became purply suspicious. Another emotion induced a pale-green cast, while darkness impelled him to lower the black drop, until he reflected the colors of this printed page. At times — but I am certain never through fear — he turned a strong saffron-yellow, while at the approach of death, as weakness seized upon fins and gills, the little spectrumpalette of his body was slowly dimmed and a veil of silvery gray drawn over all his scales. Through every pigmental vicissitude, every colorful emotion, only his golden eye and scarlet tail remained unchanged. This little Joseph garment of the sea was one of my greatest delights; in his scant two inches I saw and respected what to me typified fearlessness, dignity, poise, adaptation, besides incredibly kaleidoscopic beauty.

IV

I have said that the sea stretched unbroken to the horizon, but after we had floated quietly throughout the first day this was not strictly true. After dinner I went up on the flying-bridge as usual to watch the sunset, which, however, was wholly drowned in horizon mist. We had no wake, of course, as our engines were still; but broadside on, to windward, — which was southeast,— was a long and irregular trail, showing our slow, wind-pushed, crabwise movement. Slick after slick marked the places where the galley had poured out gravy, or the engine-room oil, and here were gathered a host of stormy petrels. At sunset there were two hundred and eighty-six, and more were coming every minute. I watched very carefully and saw eight Mother Carey’s chickens arrive singly upwind, appearing far away on the leeward side of the Arcturus, where they could not possibly have seen the oily slicks. Later three flew into vision at right angles to the wind, turning only when they were close. It seemed to me that these little birds, with their sharp eyes and long, tubular nostrils, probably make use of both senses under different conditions in discovering and directing their course toward a source of food such as this — doubtless getting a faint aroma of the floating débris from a long way down wind, or, on the other hand, perceiving and instantly interpreting any focused activity or unusually directed flight on the part of a distant fellow-bird, when upwind or far off to one side.

The mist on the horizon rose gradually after sunset and smudged out one star after another until there was only a handful overhead in the neck of the mist. This cloudiness presaged a good night for plankton — for all the floating organisms which love the darkness and which are kept down far below the surface by the rays of light from both sun and moon, seemingly as unable to face the light waves as if they were a rain of venomous fiery arrows.

I had the gangway put down after eight in the evening, and, with a cluster of electric lights focused on the water, sought to learn something of the surface night-life haunting the darkness here thirty leagues from Broadway. It is a curious thing that, while the creatures which swim on the surface at this time hate the light, yet when they come within the influence of a focused searchlight, or any beam of great concentration and strength, they are unable to resist it; there is aroused a reaction of fascination, and instead of fleeing they are compelled to enter its circle and swim back and forth in the glare of its influence. The first to come were the squids, but any hypnotic force that may have drawn them hither became subordinated to their ravenous hunger when any prey came within sight. On this night all were of a size, about a foot long, with a single individual twice that length. They shot back and forth across the circle of light, now scarlet, now pale rose, now white, and when we scooped them up in nets and transferred them to our big tanks neither their activity nor their shift of kaleidoscopic colors ever ceased. Once, and once only, there came to the light a great, silver-armored, fangjawed snake-mackerel, headed straight for the squids. Instantly the keen eyes of these mollusks perceived him; their bodies became colorless, and they melted into the blackness of the nocturnal sea.

After lunch on the first day we made ready to raise our nets, which for hours had been drawn slowly through the black, frigid depths of the Hudson gorge. This lunch, by the way, was an unusually delicious one of fried shark. No officer or seaman would share it with us, giving us thought concerning the human logic of refusing this, and yet with corresponding readiness consuming raw oysters and fried pork!

Up came the nets, sagging heavily, loaded to the very limits of their breaking-point. At first glance they seemed filled with a bushel of glass or solid water. A wild thought of submarine ice came to mind and instantly resolved into absurdity, and the moment the first net reached the rail the truth was evident. Our nets had passed through a zone of almost solid jelly composed of untold myriads of salpæ of three species. The tubfuls of salpæ on deck increased until our containers were all overflowing. These curious beings consisted of small, angular, double-pointed bits of glassy jelly, each with a pink nucleus, many connected so tenaciously in chains that they could be lifted up like a string of living pearls.

One of the officers, with the memory of his rejected shark steak still vivid, said, ‘Well, I suppose you people would even eat that stuff!’ whereat we all solemnly proceeded to eat a salpa. We got no enjoyment from this bit of bravado — just a sensation of very salty hard jelly. And then I aroused all the conventional, anti-Darwinian beliefs of our good skipper by informing him that in eating salpa I had, rather indirectly, been guilty of cannibalism — in that, far from being related to jellyfish, these oblong, glassy blobs of life claimed cousinship with ourselves and other backboned animals. But they have fallen to the lowest point in the scale — even the sea-squirts clinging to our wharf piles parading more highly developed offspring.

Salpæ have an intricate succession of alternating generations, so complex that no genealogy could ever straighten it out. The young larva grows attached to the blood system of the parent, and after a while swims off by itself, wholly unlike its parent in appearance, structure, and habits, and even quite sexless. After swimming for a time it develops a stolon on which buds form, which in time become adult sexual salpæ These are liberated in sets of long chains, which in turn swim off chummily together, ultimately separating into individuals, which become the parents of the larvæ that complete the cycle.

It looked at first as though we should have to imagine the old Hudson canyon filled with dilute jelly, but on sorting over the hosts of salpæ the more interesting creatures of the deep began to appear. Although in the short time at my disposal I was able to make only a few hauls, yet in this Hudson River gorge I took thirty-two kinds of deepsea fish, many of which are new to science. These were represented by seven hundred and sixty-eight individuals. The most abundant were the delicate little Cyclothones — pale ones living in abundance at three to four hundred fathoms, while a larger black species was more abundant from five to nine hundred fathoms. They were as delicate as tissue paper, with series of lights along the body and relatively enormous mouths with which they engulfed the tiniest of swimming creatures. When they came up they looked like minute bits of string stuck to the nets, but, floated gently out in water, all their exquisite structure and illuminating apparatus became visible.

From four hundred fathoms down we secured deep-water forms of the myctophid fishlets, which we took at the surface after dark. Some had gloriously brilliant gill-covers, with the eyes scarlet or green. In the lower mid-depths appeared the curious, elongate Chauliodus and Stomias, with glistening scales, huge mouths, and enormously long teeth. Blue-eyed flounders came up, packed safely among the salpæ, and eels never seen at the surface or in any light of day. Some of these were sturdily built, with smooth skin of glistening bronze and long, straight jaws which boded ill for lesser fish that swam within strikingdistance. Then there were spectral eels, which seemed more suitable adornments of a fairy tale — inmates perhaps of deep pools beyond Mluna; pale, slender eel-wraiths, with inconceivably evanescent fins, large staring eyes, and the most absurd and useless jaws imaginable. With lamentable belittling, some ichthyologist has named them Nemichthys, ‘snipe eels’ — the value of this simile being exactly one half of one per cent. Their remarkable jaws are threadlike, and just in front of the head they begin to diverge, each curving away from the other and ending in a conspicuous round ball. If tentacles were needed by this eel, why in the name of holy natural selection must the jaws be thus sacrificed! These eels were always quite dead when I found them in the heart of the salpa mass, and how they live and move and satisfy their appetites in the icy blackness half a mile beneath our keel I shall perhaps never know.

Close together in one net were a scarlet and wine-colored scorpion fish, all abristle with needle spines on fins and head and gill-covers, together with a lantern fish with glowing green eyes. Three other fish which I found living here within a hundred miles of New York City are typical of the depths of all the seas in the world. One has been appropriately named Argyropelecus — the Silvery Hatchet — and when young these fish look like nothing else. They are deep and narrow, with eyes that stare forever upward, the scales shining silver and interspersed with groups of luminous lamps. Another related form has the tail end of the body raised high, while the skeleton remains where it would be in a more normally shaped fish — the spare ribs being thus clearly visible and apparently outside the body.

Small and jet-black spots were occasionally seen embedded in the glassy piles, and in a dish of water these resolved into diminutive seadevils— usually a huge mouth with merely enough tail to propel it through the waiter, or another with a longarmed luminous candle waving about as living bait over the great maw, or again an inch of fish with such elongated fins that it could never have touched the bottom without injury, or in fact have come near anything more solid than the icy water in which it was born, lived, and died.