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Among bony fish, Conseil noticed some blackish marlin three meters long with a sharp sword jutting from the upper jaw, bright-colored weevers known in Aristotle's day as sea dragons and whose dorsal stingers make them quite dangerous to pick up, then dolphinfish with brown backs striped in blue and edged in gold, handsome dorados, moonlike opahs that look like azure disks but which the sun's rays turn into spots of silver, finally eight-meter swordfish from the genus Xiphias, swimming in schools, sporting yellowish sickle-shaped fins and six-foot broadswords, stalwart animals, plant eaters rather than fish eaters, obeying the tiniest signals from their females like henpecked husbands.
It is my impression that this species is larger. The Indians, with whom I fished in the Caribbean, tell of a great swordfish in Spanish the Aguja de casta, and this species must be related to Xiphias, the magnificent flatbilled swordfish of the Atlantic and Pacific.
By this name it has been known ever since, and only one additional name is included in its synonym, Xiphias rondeletic of Leach. The swordfish has been so long and so well known that its right to its peculiar name has seldom been infringed upon.
The wary eye of the whale saw the long, dark mass coming, and, like a practised pugilist, coolly swerved, taking for the nonce no notice of those worrying wolves astern. So the blow glanced, revealing a white streak running diagonally across the eye, while the great XIPHIAS rolled helplessly over the top of that black bastion.
The various species of Tetrapturus have sometimes shared its title, and this is not to be wondered at, since they closely resemble Xiphias gladius, and the appellative has frequently been applied to the family Xiphiidæ the swordfish which includes them all. Spear-fish is a much better name. The "sailfish," Histiophorus americanus, is called by sailors in the South the "boohoo" or "woohoo."
He says: 'The comet was of the kind called Xiphias, because their tail resembles the blade of a sword, and this would apply fairly well to Halley's comet as seen in 1682, 1759, and 1835; though it is to be remembered that comets vary very much even at successive apparitions, and it would be quite unsafe to judge from the appearance of a comet seen eighteen centuries ago that it either was or was not the same as some comet now known to be periodic.
Upon this memorable occasion, however I guess the two ORCAS were starving, and they had organized a sort of forlorn hope with the XIPHIAS as an auxiliary who might be relied upon to ensure success if it could be done.
In the West Indies and Florida the scabbard-fish or silvery hairy-tail, Trichiurus lepturus, a form allied to the Xiphias, though not resembling it closely in external appearance, is often called "swordfish." The body of this fish is shaped like the blade of a saber, and its skin has a bright, metallic luster like that of polished steel, hence the name.
Boschen would not fish for anything except tuna or swordfish, and up to this visit to Clemente he had caught many tuna, but only one swordfish, a Xiphias. This is the broadbill, or true, swordfish; and he is even rarer, and certainly larger and fiercer, than the Marlin, or roundbill, swordfish.
Many boatmen and anglers believe that the broadbills follow the albacore. It seems safe to predict that when the albacore cease to come to Catalina there will not be any fishing for the great flat-sworded Xiphias. The worst that came to pass in 1918, from an angler's viewpoint, was that the market fishermen found a way to net the blue-fin tuna, both large and small.
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