228 SEA FABLES EXPLAINED. 



rise above the surface on either side, eagerly surveying 

 those on board, in hope of obtaining food, or from mere 

 curiosity. 



The seals and their movements account for so many 

 mermaid stories, that all accounts of sea-women "with 

 prominent bosoms were ridiculed and discredited until 

 competent observers recognised in the form and habits of 

 certain aquatic animals met with in the bays and estuaries 

 of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the west coast of Africa, 

 and sub-tropical America, the originals of these " travellers' 

 tales." These were first, the manatee, which is found in 

 the West Indian Islands, Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and 

 Brazil, and in Africa in the River Congo, Senegambia, and 

 the Mozambique Channel ; second, the dugong y or halicore, 

 which ranges along the east coast of Africa, Southern Asia, 

 the Bornean Archipelago, and Australia ; and, third, the 

 rytina, seen on Behring's Island in the Kamschatkan Sea 

 by Steller, the Russian zoologist and voyager, in 1741, and 

 which is supposed to be now utterly extinct, in conse- 

 quence of its having been recklessly and indiscriminately 

 slaughtered.* Then science, in the person of Illeger, made 



* Almost all that is known of the living rytina is from an account 

 published in 1751, in St. Petersburg, by Steller, who was the surgeon 

 of Behring's ship wrecked on an unknown and uninhabited island in 

 the Kamschatkan Sea, thenceforth called "Behring's Island." When 

 the unfortunate crew landed there, on November i/th, 1741, the " sea- 

 cows," as they were named, pastured along the shore in herds ; but 

 during the ten months that the party remained on the island, they 

 found the flesh of this animal so palatable that the fame of it was 

 published by them on their return home, and it became a practice 

 for the crews of all Russian vessels fitted out for the capture of the 

 sea-otter to pass the winter on Behring's Island, in order to lay in a 

 sufficient provision of sea-cow meat to last them during the hunting 

 season. The rytina thus became more and more scarce, and until 

 within the last few years it was believed to have been exterminated in 

 the year 1768, only twenty-seven years after its first discovery by 



