SriTZUERGEN AND GREENLAND. 85 



the skin, and we do flea it off as a skin : this fat yields the best 

 train-oyl; the flesh is quite black. They have abundance of 

 blood, as if they were only filled up with it. They have 

 great livers, lungs, and hearts, which we eat after we have 

 drawn out the rankness with water ; we boil them, but this 

 dish is very loathsora, so that I could not eat it, it tasted so 

 of train-oyl. He hath abundance of guts, which are very 

 small : I found no fat within them ; their parts of generation 

 is a hard bone, like imto that of a dog, about a span long, 

 covered with sinews ; some were hardly so long as your little 

 finger, and yet they were not young ones neither. The 

 crystal of their eye is not of the same colour always, for some 

 •were like a crystal, others white, others yellowish, others 

 reddish ; they are bigger than a pea ; if one will keep them 

 he must let them dry gently, or one may wrap them in linnen 

 rags, and so lay them in a moist place, for else they fly or 

 crack to pieces. I am informed, that when they couple they 

 are very fierce, so that a man dares not come near them upon 

 the ice, then they bring their long boats near the ice, and so 

 kill them out of the boats. They do not quickly dye when 

 the blood is almost all run out ; after they have been mortally 

 wounded and flea'd, they still live, and it looks ill to see 

 them tumble themselves about in their own blood. AVe had 

 an example of that in him that was eight foot long, for when 

 he was flea'd, and most of the fat cut ofl", notwithstanding all 

 the blows he had had vipon his head and nose, he would still 

 snap at us and bite about him, and took hold of a short pike 

 with his teeth, after such a rate as if nothing ailed him. 

 Then we run a short pike through his very heart and liver, 

 and there ran out as much blood as if it had been a bullock. 

 The masters of the ships will not suffer these nasty doings in 

 their ships, for it fouls them mightily. Not only this was so 

 vivacious, but all the rest are the same, for when we thought 

 that they lay dead in our long boats, they snapt about them, 

 so that we were forced to kill them. 



