SEA-BIRD NUMBERS AND MAN 73 



Iceland (between 1752 and 1777); but when N. Mohr (1786) visited 

 nearby Djupivogur in 1781 he evidently found no news of occupation 

 in that year. If it was true, as Olafsson thought, that Tvisker (a skerry 

 which at present slopes up to a height of about 46 ft.), was a breeding- 

 place, its occupation must be put before 1764, the last year he was in 

 Iceland; there is no subsequent history here. In the eighteenth 

 century the Westmann islet of Geirfuglasker (which rises to 190 ft., 

 but, as we have seen, has a low platform on one side and low skerries 

 around), had a big colony but, as Friedrich Faber (1822), records, 

 the last known breeding-pair and egg were seen there in about 1800. 



The end of the great auk in Iceland, and in the world, took place 

 south-west of Gape Reykjanes. It seems probable that the great auks 

 nested only on Geirfuglasker and afterwards Eldey, and never on the 

 satellite stacks belonging to these rocks — Geirfugladrangur and Eldey- 

 ardrangur. It was known that great auks occupied Geirfuglasker, anc^ 

 were at least occasionally raided by Man, in the first half of the 

 seventeenth century. Though the accounts of the eighteenth century 

 (e.g. J. Anderson, 1746; N. Horrebow, 1752) sometimes slightly 

 conflict it seems clear that Geirfuglasker was occupied in 1729 and 

 that in some years of the first half of that century (if not, perhaps, in 

 that particular year) its great auk population was a "great multitude." 

 Nevertheless, it could have been exaggerated. Horrebow stated that 

 at his time the Geirfuglasker fowlers "filled their boats with the eggs 

 of the Garefowl." (All through the early, uncritical literature of fowling 

 we find boatloads of eggs — they have even been allegedly taken from 

 Rockall, where seldom have more than a couple of dozen guillemots 

 been seen in attitudes of incubation.) But a manuscript of ^.1760 

 (S. Grieve, 1885, p. 19) states that the "garefowl is there not nearly 

 so much as men suppose . . . the space he occupies cannot be reckoned 

 at more than a sixteenth part of the skerry . . . and this only at the two 

 landing-places; further upwards he does not betake himself, on account 

 of his flightlessness." Mohr, who visited Iceland in 1780-81, also 

 thought Horrebow's account exaggerated, though he did not go out 

 to the skerry himself. 



In the nineteenth century the doom of the auks was sealed by the 

 raid of the Salamine, a private pirate-ship which had plundered Tor- 

 shavn in the Faeroes on its way north. The crew of this ship was 

 ashore on Geirfuglasker on (it is said) 8 August (? a late date) 1808, 

 and killed many birds and their young. There may have been another 

 raid from the Faeroes in 1809 (H. C. Muller,i862) ; there was certainly 



