MARINE MAMMALS — KELLOGG 303 



limited provisions and huge 250-gallon trying pots were put ashore 

 in shalloi:)S at accessible beaches from sealing vessels anchored in safe 

 harbors. Partial and sometimes full cargoes of elephant seal oil 

 were shipped to ports in the Old and the New Worlds. 



From 1799 to 1818, sealing vessels from Nantucket and New Bed- 

 ford were bringing back elephant seal oil from Patagonia and Staten 

 Island. Similarly, many vessels sailed from New London, Conn., 

 for the Falkland Islands and South Georgia. 



The absence of accurate records of the catch made by vessels engaged 

 in this business makes it impossible to estimate the number of elephant 

 seals killed on southern rookeries. Some sealers held that an average 

 of 3 barrels (94.5 gallons) of oil was obtained from an adult elephant 

 seal, but both young and adults were killed. The cargo of 1,500 barrels 

 of oil brought back to Stonington, Conn., by the schooner Free Gift 

 in April 1822 represented a kill of at least 500 elephant seals, assuming 

 that all were adults. Weddell in 1823 recorded that 20,000 tons of 

 elephant seal oil, representing the death of at least 62,000 animals, 

 had been shipped to London alone from South Georgia. 



So oblivious were these elephant seals to the killing that was going 

 on around them and so indiscriminately were the young and old 

 slaughtered, that in a comparatively few years they were exterminated 

 or reduced to a mere remnant along all the coasts and on the islands 

 that had once been their refuge. Elephant seals disappeared suc- 

 cessively from the Falklands, Juan Fernandeg, South Shetlands, South 

 Orkneys, South Georgia and the coast of South America. 



During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, elephant seal 

 hunting was carried on chiefly by those engaged in fur sealing, but 

 after the fur seals had been killed off some sealers continued their occu- 

 pation of killing the elephant seal and boiling out the oil. The dis- 

 covery of the Pennsylvania oil fields in 1859 brought a cheap illumi- 

 nant on the market and gave the southern elephant seal some respite 

 from the hunter. Nevertheless, at South Georgia, particularly, so 

 many elephant seals were killed that they were practically extinct 

 there by 1885. 



Discouraged by the general scarcity of elephant seals and by in- 

 ability to compete with the low production costs of petroleum products, 

 southern sealing was largely abandoned before the close of the nine- 

 teenth century. With the revival of whaling in Antarctic seas, the 

 Government of the Falkland Island Dependencies began in 1910 to 

 issue licenses for the taking of elephant seals. These regulations 

 seem to have obtained the desired result since Matthews in 1927 (1929 

 p. 246) estimated that there were at least 100,000 elephant seals on 

 the South Georgia beaches. 



