A VISIT TO SOME STRANGE PLACES. 121 



jaw made it an object of great curiosity to all of us who 

 were new to the whale-fishing. Such malformations are 

 not very rare. They are generally thought to occur 

 when the animal is young, and its bones soft ; but whether 

 done in fighting with one another, or in some more 

 mysterious way, nobody knows. Cases have been known, 

 I believe, where the deformed whale does not appear to 

 have suffered from lack of food in consequence of his 

 disability ; but in each of the three instances which have 

 come under my own notice, such was certainly not the 

 case. These whales were what is termed by the whalers 

 "dry-skins; " that is, they were in poor condition, the 

 blubber yielding less than half the usual quantity of oil. 

 The absence of oil makes it very hard to cut up, and 

 there is more work in one whale of this kind than in two 

 whose blubber is rich and soft. Another thing which I 

 have also noticed is, that these whales were much more 

 difficult to tackle than others, for each of them gave us 

 something special to remember them by. But I must 

 not get ahead of my yarn. 



The end of the week brought us up to the Aldabra 

 Islands, one of the puzzles of the world. For here, in 

 these tiny pieces of earth, surrounded by thousands of 

 miles of sea, the nearest land a group of islets like unto 

 them, is found the gigantic tortoise, and in only one other 

 place in the wide world, the Galapagos group of islands 

 in the South Pacific. How, or by what strange freak of 

 Dame Nature these curious reptiles, sole survivals of 

 another age, should come to be found in this lonely spot, 

 is a deep mystery, and one not likely to be unfolded 

 now. At any rate, there they are, looking as if some of 

 them might be coeval with Noah, so venerable and 

 storm-beaten do they appear. 



