EXPEDITION TO SOUTH GEORGIA 



255 



exposing everything to the snow and sleet. Eventually it blew to shreds. 

 Very often blizzards made it impossible for a boat to leave the ship; and 

 sometimes we were stormbound for three successive days. 



Since the long-gone days of the fur seal harvest at South Georgia, when 

 a hundred thousand "golden fleeces" a season were sometimes taken by 

 "Argonauts" chiefly from Long Island and New England ports, the isle 

 has been best known as a home of the sea elephant. The Antarctic species 

 of this largest of seals differs markedly from the Californian race, and for- 

 merly had a circumpolar distribution. The great brutes being abundant as 

 well as comparatively inoffensive and easily killed, a relentless pursuit of 

 them was conducted wherever they could be taken on shore, or from Juan 

 Fernandez southward and eastward to the Falklands, and throughout the 

 isles of the South Atlantic and Indian oceans to the outliers of New Zealand. 

 In many of its ancestral haunts the sea elephant has long since been wiped 

 out of existence, but on South Georgia it had until recently a stronghold 

 second only to Kerguelen 

 Land. It is true that the 

 heavy toll of "elephant 

 oil" exacted of South 

 Georgia in the nine- 

 teenth century brought 

 the animals at several 

 periods near the verge of 

 extinction ; there is a rec- 

 ord that in 1885 the crew 

 of a Connecticut schoon- 

 er, which made a voyage 

 thither in search of both 

 oil and furs, were able to 

 find only two sea ele- 

 phants during a stay of 

 ten weeks. But this ex- 

 ample is perhaps without 

 a parallel, and in any case 

 sea elephants had been 

 fairly abundant of late 

 years in all suitable har- 

 bors and fjords of the 

 island until three or four 

 seasons ago. Since then 

 the existence of the much 



persecuted animals has ^ ea elephant rearing. In attacking, the bull sea elephants 



, , iii raise themselves until the fore flippers are clear of the 



been threatened pro bably ground and then hurl themselves forward 



