122 TUE INHABITANTS OF THE SEA. 
Unfortunately, our own countrymen and the Americans have 
done no better in the southern seas. Thousands of sea lions 
used formerly to be killed on the South American coast, while 
at present the number of the animals is so much diminished as 
scarce to reward the sealer’s trouble. Sir James Ross informs 
us that the sea elephant was formerly found in great numbers 
on Kerguelen’s Land, and yearly attracted many vessels to those 
desert islands. But at present, after such incessant persecution, 
the animals have either migrated, or been almost totally extir- 
pated. English and American captains often set some men 
ashore on the uninhabited coasts and islands of the southern seas, 
for the purpose of catching seals, boiling their oil, and stripping 
their skins. After a few months the ship generally returns to 
fetch the produce of their labours, or to bring a fresh supply of 
provisions to the seal catchers, who often remain several years 
in their solitary hunting grounds. But sometimes the poor 
wretches are abandoned by their associates, and then their 
despair may be imagined when week after week elapses without 
the expected sail appearing! Dumont d’Urville found one of 
these adventurers in the Straits of Magellan among a horde of 
Patagonians, who, though hospitably inclined, were themselves 
so poor as hardly to be able to keep body and soul together. 
He was a watchmaker from Geneva, who, having emigrated to 
New York, and finding himself disappointed, had listened to the 
fuir promises of a skipper, who carried him out to Tierra del 
Fuego, and not finding the business answer, had left him to his 
fate. The French navigator took the poor man on board, and 
gave him a passage to Talcahuano in Chili, 
On the east coast of North America seal catching is still 
carried on with considerable success. Newfoundland intercepts 
many of the immense fields and islands of ice which in the 
spring move south from the Arctic Sea. The interior parts, 
with the openings or lakes interspersed, remain serene and 
unbroken, and form the transitory abodes of myriads of seals. 
In the month of March upwards of three hundred small vessels, 
fitted out for the seal fishery, are extricated from the icy 
harbours on the east coast of Newfoundland; the fields are now 
all in motion, and the vessels plunge directly into the edges 
of such as appear to have seals on them ; the crews, armed with 
firelocks and heavy bludgeons, there /and, and in the course 
