MARINE MAMMALS — KELLOGG 307 



was accomplished at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a few 

 persisted for many years on inaccessible rocky ledges. As late as 1898, 

 50 fur seal pelts taken on Juan Fernandez were sold in London 

 (Cabrera and Yepes, 1940, p. 181). 



Although the English sealer George Powell and the American sealer 

 Nathaniel B. Palmer failed to locate any fur seals in December 1821 on 

 the South Orkneys, this does not necessarily indicate that fur seals 

 avoided these islands. There are no available records of fur seals 

 having been taken on the South Orkneys during the period of un- 

 restricted exploitation. Dallman, however, during the first 2 months 

 of 1874 took 145 fur seal skins in the Sandef jord Bay district at the 

 southwestern end of Coronation Island (Marr, 1935, p. 371). 



Spanish sealers were taking a relatively small number of fur seals 

 on the rocky islands along the Patagonian coast during the last decade 

 of the eighteenth century. Yankee sealers, however, were constantly 

 raiding these islands in defiance of prohibitions, but often in conniv- 

 ance with local officials. One such example was the ship Neptune of 

 New Haven, which from January 1 to February 16, 1798, took some 

 i;,000 fur seal skins from the rookery on a small island off Port Desire, 

 Patagonia (Clark, 1887, p. 462-464). 



Sealers rounding Cape Horn occasionally landed shore crews on 

 Diego Ramirez, Staten Island, and other nearby small islands for 

 the purpose of taking fur seals. It is evident that as late as 1828 fur 

 seals were fairly numerous at the southern extremity of South America, 

 since the schooner Penguin of Stonington, Conn., took 4,000 fur seals on 

 Staten Island that year (Balch, 1909, p. 485). The schooner Monti- 

 cello of Baltimore in 1833 and the schooner Benjamin WWolf of New- 

 port in 1839 returned from islands around Cape Horn with cargoes of 

 2,500 and 2,000 fur seals respectively (Clark, 1887, pp. 451, 453). 

 Intermittent slaughter of fur seals on these islands continued during 

 the remainder of the nineteenth century. During the summer of 

 1882-83, the shore crew of the American bark Thomas Hunt salted 

 down the pelts of 1,300 fur seals that had been killed on Diego 

 Ramirez. No information of a later date on the condition of the 

 rookery on this island seems to be available. Between 1882 and 1892, 

 the crew of the ship Nassau was reported to have killed annually an 

 average of 3,500 fur seals at Tierra del Fuego and neighboring islands 

 (Cabrera and Yepes, 1940, p. 181). The last reported catch from 

 rookeries near Cape Horn, and that only 936 fur seal skins, was 

 carried to Nova Scotia in 1906 by the Vancouver schooner Edith B. 

 Balcom (Anonymous, in Pacific Fisherman, vol. 4, No. 5, p. 20 ; No. 7, 

 p. 19,1906). 



Aside from the rather ineffectual attempts of Spanish and Argen- 

 tine governors to restrict the killing of the fur seals on the Falkland 



501591—43 21 



