236 



NATURAL HISTORY. 



opportunity permits, after the young are but a few days old, land and commence their slaughter. As 

 the young increase in strength and take to the water the female parents gradually leave them, and 

 join the males, which have already gone north. In July flocks of Seals, termed by Scoresby " Seals' 

 weddings," have been seen at times in the parallels of 76 and 77 1ST. lat. Opinions are at variance 

 respecting the migration from the west coast of Greenland towards Spitzbergen, and eastwards ; and 

 Rink, at least, holds that the Seals of Baifin's Bay go in the spring down the west side of Davis 

 Strait to Newfoundland and Labrador, where vast numbers are annually killed. 



At birth the Saddle-backs are pure woolly white, this gradually assuming a yellowish tint when they 

 take to the water a few weeks old. They then begin to change to a dark speckled, and afterwards a 



SADDLE-BACKS ON THE ICE. 



spotted hue, and are called "Hares" by the sealers. Next they become dark-bluish on the back, while 

 the breast and belly are of a sombre silvery hue. They are now " blue-backs." Getting more spotted, 

 the peculiar saddle-shaped band begins to form as they approach maturity. While in the fifth and 

 last stage, the male acquires that well-developed half-moon-shaped mark on each side, the veritable 

 saddle from which this Seal derives its vernacular name. An adult male is five or six feet long, the 

 female seldom as much. The former is tawny-grey, or with a tinge of yellow or even reddish-brown in 

 the spots, and marked by the saddle or lyre-shaped dorsal bands ; hence also the cognomen of Harp 

 Seal. The muzzle and head are dark. The adult female is dirty-white or tawny-bluish, or dark-grey 

 on the back, with widely-distributed irregular spotting, but seldom or never shows the saddles. 



Rink says a full-grown Saddle-back weighs about 250 Ibs., the skin and blubber over, and the flesh 

 under, 100 Ibs. The winter blubber may amount to 801bs., but in summer little more than a quarter of 

 that. In Danish Greenland alone about 35,000 are captured annually. Its skin forms the useful 

 covering of the "kayaks," or Eskimo canoes. The above number is, however, not a tithe of the 

 enormous quantities of these creatures that are each year destroyed in the Greenland (i.e., Spitzbergen), 

 and Newfoundland Seal-fisheries. Of this important branch of British commerce it does not behove 

 us to enter into detail, however interesting or appropriate to the subject. Suffice it to say, now chiefly 

 from Dundee, a fleet of ships and powerful steamers built for the trade, proceed, at the end of February 

 and the beginning of March, with a stoppage at the Shetlands to ship hardy seamen, to the pack-ice in 

 the Arctic Sea. Heavy, dark, and dreary weather often awaits the mariners as they coast along the fields 





