OCEANIC MAMMALS 433 



Apparently the fur-seal population of Kerguelen has not 

 been large during recent times. As early as 1830 vessels in 

 pursuit of elephant seals visited it and doubtless obtained a 

 few fur seals as well. In 1874 there were four expeditions 

 there to observe the transit of Venus, the German with the 

 ship Gazelle, the English on the Challenger, and a French and an 

 American expedition. Moseley of the Challenger wrote that 

 in January, 1874, two of the whaling schooners then at the 

 island killed over 70 fur seals in one day and upwards of 20 on 

 another at some small islands off Howes Foreland, and he 

 deplores the wantonness and shortsightedness of their destruc- 

 tive methods. At the same time J. H. Kidder (1876) who 

 spent four months on Kerguelen, saw none of this species but 

 notes that "sealers speak of a few scattering fur-seals upon 

 this and Heard's Islands, but they have never been found in 

 large numbers." The latter island, though a favorite resort of 

 elephant seals, seems to have been less attractive to fur seals. 

 J. A. Allen (in Jordan and others, 1899, p. 316) quotes Capt. 

 George Comer as to the seals at Kerguelen. He spent five 

 months there in the winter of 1883-84 and obtained only six 

 skins. He adds, "About 1850* this island was visited by an 

 American who practically cleaned off the seals. The captain 

 I shipped with Joseph Fuller visited the island in 1880 and 

 took 3,000 seals practically all there were and this was the 

 increase for thirty years from 1850." 



The St. Paul and Amsterdam Islands lie about 11 north of 

 Kerguelen and may be taken as the northward limit of this 

 fur seal. They were visited by Capt. Henry Cox in 1789, in 

 May, who on landing "found the shores covered with such a 

 multitude of seals that we were obliged to disperse them before 

 we got out of the boat . . . We procured here a thousand 

 skins of very superior quality, while we remained on the island 

 of Amsterdam, besides several casks of good oil." Lord 

 Macartney, who touched at Amsterdam in 1773, found there 

 five men collecting seal skins for the Canton market. He says 

 of the seals: "In the summer months they come ashore, some- 

 times in droves of 800 or 1,000 at a time, out of which 100 are 

 destroyed, that number being as many as five men can skin 

 and peg down to dry in the course of a day . . . Most of 

 those which come ashore are females, on the proportion of 

 more than thirty to one male." In 1874, Charles Velain of the 



