122 THE INHABITANTS OF THE SEA. 



Unfortunately, our own countrymen and the Americans have 

 done no better in the southern seas. Thousands of sea lions 

 used formerly to be killed on the South American coast, while 

 at present the number of the animals is so much diminished as 

 scarce to reward the sealer's trouble. Sir James Eoss informs 

 us that the sea elephant was formerly found in great numbers 

 on Kerguelen's Land, and yearly attracted many vessels to those 

 desert islands. But at present, after such incessant persecution, 

 the animals have either migrated, or been almost totally extir- 

 pated. English and American captains often set some men 

 ashore on the uninhabited coasts and islands of the southern seas, 

 for the purpose of catching seals, boiling their oil, and stripping 

 their skins. After a few months the ship generally returns to 

 fetch the produce of their labours, or to bring a fresh supply of 

 provisions to the seal catchers, who often remain several years 

 in their solitary hunting grounds. But sometimes the poor 

 wretches are abandoned by their associates, and then their 

 despair may be imagined when week after week elapses without 

 the expected sail appearing ! Dumont d'Urville found one of 

 these adventurers in the Straits of Magellan among a horde of 

 Patagonians, who, though hospitably inclined, were themselves 

 so poor as hardly to be able to keep body and soul together. 

 He was a watchmaker from Geneva, who, having emigrated to 

 New York, and finding himself disappointed, had listened to the 

 fair promises of a skipper, who carried him out to Tierra del 

 Fuego, and not finding the business answer, had left him to his 

 fate. The French navigator took the poor man on board, and 

 gave him a passage to Talcahuano in Chili. 



On the east coast of North America seal catching is still 

 carried on with considerable success. Newfoundland intercepts 

 many of the immense fields and islands of ice which in the 

 spring move south from the Arctic Sea,. The interior parts, 

 with the openings or lakes interspersed, remain serene and 

 unbroken, and form the transitory abodes of myriads of seals. 

 In the month of March upwards of three hundred small vessels, 

 fitted out for the seal fishery, are extricated from the icy 

 harbours on the east coast of Newfoundland ; the fields are now 

 all in motion, and the vessels plunge directly into the edges 

 of such as appear to have seals on them ; the crews, armed with 

 firelocks and heavy bludgeons, there land, and in the course 



