SEAL HUNTING 737 



crossing two glaciers. No boat can live to land on this shore, consequently men are 

 stationed on the beach, and live there in huts ; and their duty is constantly to drive 

 the sea-elephants from this beach into the sea, which they do with whips made of 

 the hide of the seals themselves. The beasts thus ousted swim off, and often ' haul 

 up,' as the term is, upon the accessible beaches elsewhere. In very stormy 

 weather, when they are driven into the sea, they are forced to betake themselves to 

 the sheltered side of the island. Two or three old males, termed 'beach masters,' 

 hold a beach to themselves and cover it with cows, but allow no other males to haul 

 up. The males fight furiously, and one man told me that he had seen an old male 

 take up a younger one in his teeth and throw him over, lifting him in the air. The 

 males show fight when whipped, and are with great difficulty driven into the sea. 

 They are sometimes treated with horrible barbarity. The females give birth to 

 their young soon after their arrival. The newly-born young are almost black, unlike 

 the adults, which are of a light slate brown. They are suckled by the female for 

 some time, and then left to themselves lying on the beach, where they seem to grow 

 fat without further feeding. They are always allowed by the sealers thus to lie, in 

 order to make more oil. This account was corroborated by all the sealers I met with. 

 I do not understand it. Probably the cows visit their offspring unobserved from 

 time to time. Peron says that both parent elephant-seals stay with the young with- 

 out feeding at all, until the young are six or seven weeks old, and that then the old 

 ones conduct the young to the water, and keep them carefully in their company. 

 The rapid increase in weight is in accordance with Peron' s account. Goodridge 

 gives a somewhat different account, namely, that after the females leave the young, 

 the old males and young proceed inland, as far as two miles sometimes, and stop 

 without food for more than a month, and during this time lose fat. The male sea- 

 elephants come on shore on the Crozets for the breeding season at about the middle 

 of August, the females a little later." 



SEAL HUNTING 



Although incidental mention has been made here and there of the annual catch 

 of various species of the true seals, nothing has yet been said as to the various 

 modes in which these animals are captured. The chief sealing districts, or, as they 

 are technically called, " sealing grounds," in the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans 

 are West Greenland, the Newfoundland district, the Jan-Mayen seas, Nova Zembla 

 and the Kara Sea, the White Sea, and the Caspian. The most important of these 

 is the Jan-Mayen area, where, as in all the other districts except the Caspian, the 

 Greenland seal is the species mainly hunted. So incessant and unremitting has 

 been seal hunting in the icy Jan-Mayen seas that the numbers of these animals have 

 been very sensibly diminished ; and as far back as 1871 attention was called to the 

 necessity of some stringent regulations being applied to the sealing trade. This 

 was followed in 1876 by an enactment on the part of the British Government estab- 

 lishing a close time for seals, so far as their own subjects were concerned ; and not 

 long after similar action was taken by the other governments interested. 

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