LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN PETRELS AND PELICANS. 217 



It begins with Jacques Cartier's account of his voyage to Canada in 

 1534, at which time there were apparently three ishmds in the group, 

 of which he says, according to Gurney's (1913) rendering of Hak- 

 hiyt's translation : " These ilands were as full of birds as any medow 

 is of grasse, which there do make their nestes ; and in the greatest of 

 them there was a great and infinite number of those that wee cal 

 margaidx, that are white and bigger than any geese." There is very 

 little doubt that the birds he referred to were gannets. For three 

 centuries the persecution of these birds was not sufficiently severe 

 to reduce materially their numbers, for when Audubon (1897) visited 

 Bird Rock in 1833 it was a most wonderful sight, as the following 

 graphic description, taken from his journal for June 14, 1833, well 

 illustrates : 



About ten a speck rose on tlie horizon \\hich I was told was the rock. We 

 sailed well, the breeze increased fast, and we neared this object apace. At 

 eleven I could distinguish its top plainly from the deck, and thought it covered 

 with snow to the depth of several feet ; this appearance existed ou every portion 

 of the flat, projecting shelves. Godwin said, with the coolness of a man 

 who had visited this rock for ten successive seasons, that what we saw was 

 not snow, but gannets. I rubbed my eyes, took my spyglass, and in an instant 

 the strangest picture stood before me. They were birds we saw — a mass of 

 birds of such a size as I never before cast my eyes on. The whole of my 

 party stood astounded and amazed, and all came to the conclusion that such a 

 sight was of itself sufficient to invite anyone to come across the gulf to view 

 it at this season. The nearer we approached the greater our surprise at the 

 enormous number of these birds, all calmly seated on their eggs or newly 

 hatched brood, their heads all turned to windward and toward us. The air 

 above for a hundred yards, and for some distance around the whole rock, 

 was tilled with gannets on the wing, which, from our position, made it appear 

 as if a heavy fall of snow was directly above us. 



At that time the whole top of the rock was covered with their 

 nests and it was regularly visited by the fishermen of that vicinity, 

 who killed the gannets in large quantities for codfish bait. The stupid 

 birds were beaten down with clubs as they tumbled over each other 

 in their attempts to escape. Sometimes as many as 540 of them have 

 been killed by half a dozen men in an hour, and as many as 40 fishing 

 boats were supplied regularly with bait each season in this way, the 

 birds being roughly skinned and the flesh cut off in chunks. 



When Dr. Henry Bryant visited Bird Rock on June 23, 1860, 

 the colonies were very much reduced in numbers, although the light- 

 house had not been built at that time and the gannets were nesting 

 over all of the northern half of the flat top of the rock. He estimated 

 that there were at least 100,000 birds in this colony and about 50,000 

 that were nesting on the side of the rock. Mr. C. J. Maynard visited 

 the rock in 1872, three years after the lighthouse was built, and found 



