DESCRIPTION OF THE ISLANDS 373 



in the early part of December, begin to land ; and they are no sooner out of the water 

 than they are taken possession of by the males, who have many serious battles with 

 each other, in procuring their respective seraglios." Had they tried, then, to reach 

 the South Orkneys in November and December, it is clear that unless they were 

 capable of travelling long distances over sea-ice the seal must generally have been 

 seriously handicapped or held up altogether by the pack which blocked the coasts. This 

 would appear to be the only possible explanation of the scarcity of the species on these 

 islands. It is interesting to note in this connection that even at the height of the slaughter 

 at the South Shetlands, the southern side of the Bransfield Strait, which like the 

 South Orkneys is usually blocked by ice in November and December, appears to have 

 been equally unproductive of fur seal. Indeed, as far as I am aware, there is no record 

 that any were ever captured there. 



Elephant Seal {Mirounga leonina, Linn.) 



The elephant seal, although very far from plentiful, is found in moderate numbers on 

 the South Orkneys to-day. As far as our scanty evidence shows it would appear to have 

 been even less plentiful in the past. At one time it used to frequent the South Shetlands 

 in vast numbers, and for the sake of the oil it yielded perished in thousands along with 

 the fur seal during the wanton destruction of 1820-2.^ So heavy had the slaughter of 

 elephant seal been that when the 'Chanticleer' arrived at the South Shetlands in 1829 

 not one was to be seen,^ although no doubt the species still survived, as did the fur seal, 

 on various out-of-the-way sites unfrequented by sealers. Offering a relatively small 

 commercial reward it escaped extermination and is to be found to-day in some parts 

 of the South Shetlands, particularly on Elephant Island where several hundred were 

 seen by the Shackleton-Rowett expedition^ in the autumn of 1922. For all its former 

 abundance at the South Shetlands the early sealers between 1821 and 1823 do not record 

 a single elephant seal at the South Orkneys. The earliest record of its presence there 

 dates from January 1874, when Dallmann landed and found it established in some 

 strength at or very near Sandefjord Bay. Dallmann unfortunately does not give figures, 

 merely stating that many elephant seal were seen of which all were evidently killed. 

 Since then it has apparently not been found in numbers at the South Orkneys until 

 within comparatively recent times. None was seen by Larsen on the northern side 

 of the group in November 1892 and none by the Scottish expedition on Laurie Island 

 in 1903-4. Laurie Island, perhaps, has never been much frequented by this animal. 

 A seal, thought to have been an elephant, was sighted near Saddle Island on February 4, 

 1903, and a young bull elephant 13-I feet long came ashore in the neighbourhood of 

 the meteorological station on April 11, 1904;* but throughout the whole period of the 



1 See A Voyage towards the South Pole, pp. 134, 141. 



2 Webster, W. H. B., 1834, Narrative of a Voyage to the Southern Atlantic Ocean in the years 1828, 

 1829, 1830, It, pp. 157, 276 (London). 



^ See Wild, F., 1923, loc. cit., p. 163. 



■* Brown, R. N. Rudmose, 1913, loc. cit., p. 186. 



