DESTRUCTION FOR SKINS AND OIL 173 



Some of the Natives wear a Girdle of the Seals Skin about their middle 

 to remove the Sciatica, as those of the Shire of ABERDEEN wear it to remove 

 the Chin-cough 



The Seal, tho' esteemed fit only for the Vulgar, is also eaten by Persons 

 of Distinction, though under a different name, to wit, Hamm. 



Sixty years later, Macaulay, describing the same sealing 

 ground, adds 



that the fat of the Seals, is by the people, to whose share that perquisite 

 falls, converted now into oil and sent to market. But in that writer's 

 [Martin's] time, and for ages immemorial before, this, together with the 

 flesh of these animals, was eaten either fresh or salted. 



And in 1830 Macgillivray could still write of "Gaskir [or 

 Haskeir] twelve miles from Harris" that "great numbers are 

 killed upon it annually, upwards of a hundred and twenty 

 having been destroyed in one day." 



Close on two hundred years before Martin wrote of the 

 Outer Hebrides, "Jo. Ben." (perhaps the Bellenden who 

 translated Boece's History] described, in a Latin manuscript, 

 a very similar seal-hunt which in the sixteenth century took 

 place annually at "Selchsskerry" in the Orkneys, and even 

 in 1795, Low in his Fauna Orcadensis relates that "a ship 

 commonly goes from this place once a-year to Soliskerry 

 [Suleskerry], and seldom returns without 200 or 300 Seals." 



Now the significance of the number of Seals killed 

 depends not upon its intrinsic greatness, but upon its relation 

 to the annual increase of the stock which inhabits the hunting- 

 grounds. There can be no doubt that the slaughter of 

 former days in Scotland exceeded the natural increase and 

 trespassed upon the breeding stock of Seals. The result has 

 been that the Seals of Scotland have been greatly reduced 

 in number, a result especially evident in the case of the 

 larger and more valuable species, the Grey Seal. This fine 

 creature, the object of the seal-hunts at Haskeir in the Outer 

 Hebrides, and amongst the Orkney and Shetland Islands, 

 is thought to have been at one time the commonest seal 

 on the east coast also. Its bones have been found in a 

 kitchen-midden on Inchkeith, and at an early Christian 

 settlement in Constantine's Cave near St Andrews. But 

 its numbers have been so reduced that it is now seldom 

 seen on the east coast, and the stock throughout the whole 

 of Scotland where it was once very numerous has been 



