452 Canadian Record of Science. 
J. S. Polock, in his work ‘Travels and Adventures in 
New Zealand.”' says: ‘Some fifteen years back seals were 
very prolific [plentiful] on the southerly parts of the coun- 
try, many shore parties procuring 100,000 skins in a season. 
So few are now procurable that a single vessel employed 
solely in this trade would make a losing speculation. The 
favourite grounds frequented by these animals was the 
whcle of the west coast of the Island of Victoria (Middle 
or South Island), from Cape Farewell to the South Cape, 
including the rocks called the Traps, the Snare Islands, 
Antipodes Islands, Bounty Rocks, Auckland Isles and the 
Chatham Groups. All these places were infested by the 
various phoce, which have since been annually cut up.” 
This writer, though his figures are astonishing, is recognized 
as one of the safest authorities on subjects relating to the 
early days of New Zealand. Dumont D’Urville, in 1830, 
notices the great decline of the seals in recent years. 
Sealing was, in the early years of the century and pro- 
bably up to 1830 or even later, pursued with declining suc- 
cess in Foveaux Strait, on the coast of Stewart Island. Mr. 
Kast, in his evidence before a select committee of the House 
of Commons in 1844, says: ‘The seals, what few there are, 
are in the southern part of the island, near the settlements 
of the Middle Island. Formerly they abounded, but they 
have been attacked so by the Australian colonists in times 
past that they have nearly left.” 
Old narratives, sometimes founded on fact, sometimes 
mythical, tell strange tales of those wild days. Tommy 
Chaseland, a noted sealer and afterwards a famous head- 
man of the later whaling days, was the son of an Austra- 
lian woman and a white man. He navigated his open 
sealing boat from the Chatham Islands to New Zealand in 
the stormiest of seas, and lives in the memory of a few of 
the oldest inhabitants as the hero of numerous bold adven- 
tures. Probably the cold seas of the north teem with bold 
spirits of this kind, 
On all these southern and eastern coasts, however, a seal 
1 London, 1838, vol. i, p. 316. 
