I was anxious to get some pictures of the white porpoises, but it would have been useless to think of photographing in all that rush of wind and spray, so the four men put off in the canoes while I continued work upon the dead whale. In about three hours they returned, each towing a full-grown porpoise and almost exhausted. It had been hard and dangerous work to kill the whales and bring them in, for the wind drove with tremendous force across the clear stretch of river, catching the tops of the waves and whirling the spray like snow. We stayed at the island for three days, killing two more porpoises and taking the skin, oil, and skeletons. After the blubber had been scraped from the skins they had a value, in the raw state, of about seven dollars, and a considerable amount of oil was obtained from the fat. The skeletons were what I was particularly interested in, and with four in the hold of the yawl and a freshly killed porpoise towing behind, we sailed down the river, past the rocky entrance to the Saguenay, and into the beautiful harbor where three hundred years before the hardy French explorers had dropped anchor and on its shores built the quaint little town of Tadoussac. CHAPTER XXIV THE BOTTLENOSE PORPOISE IN CAPTIVITY For two hundred years a porpoise fishery has been conducted in a somewhat desultory manner at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The animal which forms the basis of this industry is the bottlenose porpoise (_Tursiops truncatus_), one of the commonest species of the Atlantic coast, which is especially abundant at Hatteras during the winter. The present fishery is owned by Mr. Joseph K. Nye of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a gentleman who fortunately appreciates the opportunities offered at Cape Hatteras for studying this porpoise and its life history. Through his courtesy several live specimens were presented to the New York Zoölogical Society and were transported to the New York Aquarium under the direction of Dr. Charles H. Townsend, its Director. Dr. Townsend deserves the greatest credit for his perseverance, after several failures, in finally bringing to this city nine porpoises, four of which lived seven months and one twenty-nine months in a circular pool thirty-seven feet in diameter and seven feet deep, in the Aquarium. This is a record which has never been equaled and, indeed, I am not aware that any other aquarium of the world has a pool large enough to contain a school of such lively ocean rangers. [Illustration: _Photo by Dr. C. H. Townsend._ “They are taken with a net of extra heavy twine, about 1,000 feet long, which is placed about 200 yards outside the line of surf and parallel with it.” ]