1/4 kerguelen's land. 



cabbages. On one of my teal-shooting excursions I met with 

 a Sea-Leopard {Stejioryiichus leptonyx, Gray). The beast is 

 very Hke the common British seal in appearance. It is spotted 

 yellowish white and dark grey on the back, the under surface 

 being of a general yellowish colour. 



The one in question was small, not more than five feet long. 

 It was asleep, lying almost on its back on the grass in a little 

 bay. The poor beast showed no fight at all, and never snarled 

 or showed its teeth. I killed it with a stone and my hunting 

 knife, and sent it on board to be made into a skeleton. 



The Sea-Leopard seems still pretty abundant on the coasts. 

 I saw one much larger in Royal Sound, and Von Willemoes 

 Suhm killed another. The sealers said they intended to visit 

 Swain's Island, a small outlier, to kill a herd of 400 of these 

 seals reported to be in a rookery there. 



Farther along the coast, on the same day, I encountered a 

 small herd of Sea-Elephants consisting of four females and two 

 males. One male was much larger than the other, and the four 

 cows were reclining beside him, the younger and less powerful 

 male lying apart from the rest. All were resting on a thick bed 

 of seaweed cast up by the tide on a beach of large pebbles. 



The male was 12 feet long and enormously heavy and fat. 

 The females were about eight feet in length. All were of a 

 light fawn colour, except one female, which was shedding her 

 coat, and was covered over with patches of reddish hair. 

 Though I fired my gun at some teal close by, the Elephants 

 were little disturbed. The males just raised their heads and 

 then went to sleep again ; the females took no notice. 



I went up close to the older male and excited him in the 

 hope of seeing him raise his trunk-like snout, and he was 

 roused again later on, but this had not the effect of making 

 him move from his ground or frightening him at all ; but on 

 one of the ship's cutters, for which I had sent a petition to the 

 ship, coming into the bay full of men in order to kill specimens 

 of the Elephants and take them on board, the Elephants 

 became immediately alarmed, as if accustomed only to expect 

 danger from boat parties. 



I had forgotten that the Tristan da Cunha people had told 

 me that they always shot the male Sea-Elephant and lanced 

 the cows, and I thought the beast could be stunned by blows 

 on the snout like Fur-Seals, so Lieutenant Channer, who had 

 been out shooting with me, went up to the big male and began 

 hammering him on the snout with a stick heavily loaded with 

 lead, but without any effect beyond enraging the beast to the 

 utmost. The animal was not stunned by the blows, because 

 the skull of the Sea-Elephant is protected above by a high 



I 



