330 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



the whalers in removing the skins. I had therefore to content 

 myself with skulls (and nearly all of these were injured by a 

 bullet having been fired into them). After a tedious job, I 

 succeeded in beheading two and hauling the heads up on the 

 beach, clear of the water. Fulmar Petrels and other birds were 

 very abundant, and came very close to me as I was working at the 

 whales' carcasses, and I was fortunate in shooting two brace 

 of Ivory Gulls ; a pair of these fell into the water and one 

 drifted away and was lost. While these birds were floating in the 

 water nearly my whole time was occupied in keeping the Fulmars 

 off them, and I had to continually throw stones at thein ; I hit 

 one flying at twenty or twenty-five yards distance, but even that 

 did not much frighten him. I saw some of the others in a boat; a 

 little way farther up the Fjord shot several Glaucous Gulls, of 

 which there were a good many about. At night the steamer 

 again moved southwards. 



July 30th. At 1.30 a.m. the steamer stopped, and a boat put 

 off to a haunt of geese. Chapman was one of the party, but 

 they only saw one lot of geese (Gray) arrive, just as they were 

 leaving. The " loomery " at which they landed he describes as 

 " truly a wonderful sight; millions of Auks, Guillemots, Dovekies 

 and a number of Skuas, Glaucous and Kittiwakes breeding in 

 a high craig." Here we saw a fox. I spent most of the 

 morning in skinning my seal, an operation which I have seen 

 described somewhere — I think in Captain Markham's ' Whaling 

 Voyage to Baffin's Bay,' but cannot find the reference — as having 

 been performed by a professional sealer in less than a minute ! 

 Certainly none of our crew whom I saw skin seals — and several 

 of them were old Spitzbergen hands — had acquired this rapidity. 

 Flensing a seal is not a nice occupation for cold weather ; the 

 " spek " of the Hinged Seal (in these latitudes and at this time 

 of year) is about two inches thick all over the body, and is 

 removed with the skin, which is then held over a board and the 

 spek shaved off with a long, sharp knife, kept on purpose. The 

 blubber is then put in casks. The skins having been rubbed 

 with salt and alum we packed away in pickle-tubs, according to 

 the Norwegian fashion, but it is not a good plan. Blubber and 

 seal flesh are very different matter to the corresponding substances 

 of land animals ; the blubber cannot be stripped cleanly off the 

 flesh, which is of a flabby consistency, and altogether the opera- 



