HISTORY OF THE ISLANDS 319 



ments. Although Dallmann ahnost certainly exterminated the fur seals in the vicinity 

 of the south-western corner of Coronation Island in 1874, this is not sufficient reason 

 for supposing that he had then taken the last of the species from the group. Some at 

 least of the many localities he did not visit may still have been harbouring fur seals 

 after 1874; and the fact that none has been recorded in recent years suggests that the 

 South Orkneys, on more occasions than one, must have been the haunt of sealers, 

 probably towards the end of last century. The last remnants of this once-flourishing 

 stock appear to have been taken from the South Sandwich Islands by Canadian sealers 

 about 1907,^ and Dr R. N. Rudmose Brown, who met and spoke with some of these 

 sealers at Port Stanley in 1903, would seem to imply- that they were involved in the 

 final extermination of the species at the South Orkneys as well : " since then"^ he writes 

 "apparently, no sealer has thought these islands worthy of his attention, unless it be 

 perhaps some of the little Canadian sealers who still, to the number of over a dozen, 

 frequent these southern seas, making the Falkland Islands their headquarters. Some of 

 them have as likely as not been to the South Orkneys : I have it from their own lips that 

 they know the South Sandwich Group and the South Shetlands, but a canny northern 

 discretion forbids them to say much of what they found there". 



Elsewhere* the same author states that the sealers who used to winter their small 

 schooners at Port Stanley were Nova Scotian and British Columbian. "They are natur- 

 ally" he says "unwilling to divulge the exact whereabouts of their sealing-grounds ; 

 but doubtless many sub-Antarctic islands are well known to them — better known, 

 perhaps, than scientific geographers would believe." 



RECENT RESEARCH AND COMMERCIAL EXPLOITATION 



THE SCOTTISH NATIONAL ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION^ 



At the beginning of the twentieth century the South Orkneys were still virtually an 

 unknown scientific field, but it was at last opened up as a result of the work of the 

 Scottish National Antarctic Expedition under the leadership of W. S. Bruce in the 

 S.Y. 'Scotia'. In the course of her first southerly voyage into the Weddell Sea the 

 'Scotia' sighted the South Orkneys on February 3, 1903, and on the following day a 

 party landed on Saddle Island, where it made the first important geological and bio- 

 logical collection since D'Urville's landing on Weddell Island in 1838. The 'Scotia' 



1 Brown, R. N. Rudmose, 1927, The Polar Regions, p. 140 (London). 



2 See The Voyage of the 'Scotia', p. 73. 



3 Since Weddell's second visit to the South Orkneys in 1823. 

 ^ The Voyage of the 'Scotia', p. 199. 



^ Except where otherwise indicated, the bulk of this account, and part of that of the Argentine Meteoro- 

 logical Station which follows, is taken from The Voyage of the 'Scotia' by R. N. Rudmose Brown, R. C. 

 Mossman, and J. H. Harvey Pirie, 1906 (Edinburgh and London), which contains an excellent account of 

 the life and general work of the expedition on Laurie Island. Full details of the scientific work of this im- 

 portant expedition may be found in the Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of S.Y. 'Scotia', i-vi, 

 1907-20 (Edinburgh), and in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 



