SEALS AND WHALES OF THE BRLTLSH SEAS. 9 



Seals were said to have been captured by two vessels, concludes thus : — 

 "Previously all Dundee vessels were employed at the Greenland seal-fishing, 

 but Captain Adams has for some years been of opinion tliat that ground 

 is practically used up, and hence his visit to Newfoundland." 



I will spare the reader, as much as possible, a repetition of the horrors of 

 this cruel trade, and make only a single quotation from a letter written by an 

 old and experienced sealer. Captain David Gray, of the steamship Eclipse. 

 He says that five ships in 1873 shot among the old Seals for four days 

 until the pack was utterly ruined. " I suppose," he continues, " about 

 10,000 old Seals had been taken. Add 20 per cent, for Seals mortally 

 wounded and lost, gives an aggregate of 12,000 old ones; add 12,000 young 

 ones which died of starvation (their parents being killed before the young 

 ones were of any value or able to shift for themselves), gives 24,000. . . . 

 Tlie whole of the young brood was destroyed, and had these Seals been 

 left alone for eight or ten days, I am quite within the mark when I say 

 that, instead of only taking 300 tons of oil out of them, 1,500 could as 

 easily have been got, and that without touching an old one."* So great 

 are the cruelties perpetrated by the crews of the sealers, that even the men 

 themselves, hardened as they are, sicken at the work, and cry shame that 

 the law does not put a stop to them. Let anybody who cares to know 

 what fearful cruelties man is capable of perpetrating for gain, read Captain 

 Gray's letter. As a remedy for this waste of life (of course its cruelties can 

 only be modified) Captain Gray suggested that the ships should be kept 

 from sailing before the 25th of March, about a month later than they then 

 started ; they would then not reach the fishery and find the young Seals 

 until they were sufficiently grown to be worth killing, and the frightful waste 

 of life which occurred from the destruction of the old Seals before the young 



* Land and Water, May gth, 1S74. 



