210 REPORT OF BRITISH COMMISSIONERS. 



By the end of tlie century there were not less than thirty New England 

 vessels so employed on that coast. Meanwhile, in 1783, Dame Haley, 

 of Boston, had sent a 1,000 tons ship, the "States," down to the Falk- 

 land Islands, where she inocured a cargo of 13,000 skins of fur-seal 

 which were sold in Boston at 50 cents apiece, shipped to Calcutta, 

 where under the name of "sea-otter" they were sold for 2 dollars, and 

 eventually reaching Canton, where they fetched 5 dollars per skin. 



856. The methods of slaughter involved rapid extirpation in any 

 given breeding place, and sealers came to be perpetually discovering 



and exhausting in succession every place to which seal resorted. 

 144 The islands around South America, Tristan d'Acunha, the South 



Orkneys, South Georgia, and Sandwich Land, were all in turn 

 discovered, and hundreds of thousands of skins taken from each for a 

 long series of years. Thirty vessels — eighteen being under the Ameri- 

 can, ten under the English, and two under the Russian flag, in the 

 three years 1819-22, took more than 600,000 seals from the South 

 Shetland group, completely exhausting the seal race there for the time. 



857. Sealing- vessels had as early as 1790 crossed the Atlantic and 

 worked uj) the coast of Western Africa as far as 20° north latitude, 

 obtaining many seals. Others worked steadily along the open sea to 

 the south, successively landing upon the various groups of islands — 

 Bouvet and Lindsay, Marian, and Prince Edward, the Crozets, Ker- 

 gueleu, and MacDonald. 



Yet further to the eastward, seals were obtained on the following 

 islands: Koyal Company, Emerald, Antipodes, Campbell, Macquarie, 

 Auckland, and Bounty, while one vessel reported in Sydney a catch of 

 40,000 from the Fiji Islands, probably a locality named to shroud the 

 real killing place. 



858. At this period, and especially from 1810-20, there sprung up 

 a very large transhipment trade in fur-seal skins in the new port of 

 Sydney, reaching hundreds of thousands in five years. 



Enterprising men chiefly on the Reports of Vancouver and Cook had 

 already found their way to the coasts of "JS'ew Holland," and away 

 round the islands of New Zealand. Bass had reported the reefs off 

 Cape Barren Island, off the north coast of Tasmania, "covered with 

 fur-seal of great beauty." Cook had found seals in great numbers on 

 the rocks in Dusky Bay in New Zealand in 1773. 



859. But the severe process universally adopted speedily exhausted 

 the different rookeries, and by the year 1830 we meet with strenuous 

 complaints that all the known killing grounds were depleted, and that 

 new grounds must be discovered. Fanning and others pointed out, 

 however, the significant fact that vast numbers of seals were still to 

 be seen cruizing about at sea, a remark of siiecial and new significance 

 to the owners of the North Pacific rookeries in 1892. 



860. It is a matter of some difiiculty to estimate the total number of 

 seals taken in the South Seas during the period of the excessive energy 

 of the great sealing industry. But there are actual records which, 

 added together, bring the acknowledged total to more than 16,000,000. 



These seals were taken from about thirty different island groups or 

 coast districts on the mainland, and they were all taken by the one 

 method of indiscriminate slaughter on shore. 



It is probable that this wholesale slaughter did not extend over more 

 than seventy years, but it is certain that at the end of the period the 

 fur-seals were so terribly reduced in numbers that even the sixty years 

 of subsequent rest and total cessation of killing have not sufficed to 

 bring about any effectual restoration of the numbers of years gone by. 



