APPENDIX TO CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 743 
1882, but it did not; possibly, the gravity of the change was not then fully appreci- 
ated by the sealers themselves, either through ignorance or inattention. 
But, when in 1882 it became absolutely necessary to draw from that time on until 
the end of the present season, heavily and repeatedly, upon these hitherto untouched 
sources of supply for the rookeries, in order to get the customary annual quota—at 
that time that fact, that glaring change from the prosperous and healthy precedent 
and record of 1870-81, should have been—it was ample warning of danger ahead; 
it seems, however, to have been entirely ignored—to have fallen upon inattentive or 
incapable minds; for not until the Report of 1889 from the Agent of the Government 
in charge, who went up in the spring of that year for his first season of service and 
experience—not until his Report came down to the Treasury Department has there 
been the slightest intimation in the annual declarations of the officers of the Goy- 
ernment of the least diminution or decrease of seal-life on these islands since my 
work of 1874 was finished and given to the world. 
On the contrary, strange as it may seem, all the Treasury Agents since 1879 have, 
whenever they have spoken at all, each vied with the other in their laudation of the 
“splendid condition of the rookeries,” ‘‘fully up to their best standard,” &c., and 
one Report in 1886 and 1887 declares a vast increase over the large figures which I 
published in 1872-74, which is again reiterated by the same officer in 1888. 
But how could these gentlemen reconcile their statements with that remarkable 
evidence of the decrease in supply of young males from the records made and before 
them—staring them in the face—of 1872-74? When they saw and daily reeorded the 
fact that sealing gangs were being daily sent out from the village, miles and miles 
away to hitherto undisturbed fields, for killable seals—the regular customary haul- 
ing grounds, then at the point of exhaustion, from which an abundant supply had 
been easily secured during the last thirty years, and grass growing all over the haul- 
ing grounds of 1871, how, indeed, did that fact escape their attention? It did, how- 
ever; it was utterly ignored. 
I can see now, in the light of the record of the work of sixteen consecutive years 
of sealing, very clearly one or two points which were wholly invisible to my sight 
in 1872-74. I can now see what that effect of driving overland is upon the physical 
well-being of a normal fur-seal, and, upon that sight, feel warranted in taking the 
following ground. 
The least reflection will declare to an observer that, while a fur-seal moves easier 
on land, and freer than any or all other seals, yet, at the same time, it is an unusual 
and laborious effort, even when it is voluntary; therefore, when thousands of young 
male seals are suddenly aroused to their utmost power of land locomotion, over 
57 rough, sharp rocks, rolling clinker stones, deep loose sand, inossy tussocks, and 
other equally severe impedimenta, they in their fright exert themselves most 
violently, crowd in confused sweltering heaps one upon the other, so that many are 
often ‘‘smothered” to death; and, in this manner of most extraordinary effort, to be 
urged along over stretches of unbroken miles, they are obliged to use muscles and 
nerves that nature never intended them to use, and which are not fitted for the 
action. 
This prolonged, sudden, and unusual effort, unnatural and violent strain, must 
leave a lasting mark upon the physical condition of every seal thus driven, and then 
suffered to escape from the clubbed pods on the killing grounds; they are alternately 
heated to the point of suffocation, gasping, panting, allowed to cool down at inter- 
vals, then abruptly started up on the road for a fresh renewal of this heating as 
they lunge, shamble, and creep along. When they arrive on the killing grounds, 
after four or five hours of this distressing effort on their part, they are then suddenly 
cooled off for the last time prior to the final ordeal of clubbing; then when driven 
up into the last surround or “ pod,” if the seals are spared from cause of being unfit 
to take, too big or too little, bitten, &c., they are permitted to go off from the kill- 
ing ground back to the sea, outwardly unhurt, most of them; but I am now satisfied 
that they sustain in a vast majority of cases internal injuries of greater or less degree, 
that remain to work physical disability or death thereafter to nearly every seal thus 
released, and certain destruction of its virility and courage necessary for a station 
on the rookery even if it can possibly run the gauntlet of driving throughout every 
sealing season for five or six consecutive years; driven over and over again as it is 
during each one of these sealing seasons. 
Therefore, it now appears plain to me that those young male fur-seals which may 
happen to survive this terrible strain of seven years of driving overland are rendered 
by this act of driving wholly worthless for breeding purposes—they never go to the 
breeding grounds and take up stations there, being utterly demoralized in spirit and 
in body. 
With this knowledge, then, the full effect of ‘‘driving” becomes apparent, and that 
result of slowly but surely robbing the rookeries of a full and sustained supply of 
fresh young male blood, demanded by Nature imperatively, for their support up to 
the standard of full expansion (such as I recorded in 1872-74),—that result began, it 
