of Edinburgh, Session 1879 - 80 . 
671 
was visited by a Mr Hore “and divers other gentlemen,” 
who recorded having seen a “great number of foules” which 
were “ very good and nourishing meat ” — a hint which 
appears not to have been lost sight of by subsequent navigators. 
“A person of the name of Hore, says Forster [Robert Hore], set 
sail in 1536 from London with two ships — the ‘Trinity’ and the 
‘ Minion ’ — about the latter end of April. They arrived at Cape 
Briton, and from thence went to the north-eastward till they came 
to Penguin Island, an island situated on the southern coast of New- 
foundland, and which was named thus after a kind of sea-fowl which 
the Spaniards and Portuguese called Penguins on account of their 
being so very fat, and which used to build their nests and to live 
in astonishing quantities on this little rock.”* Four years later 
(1540) Jacques Cartier in his “Third Yoyage” refers to the slaughter 
of these birds by himself and his crews, and speaks of loading his 
two vessels with dead Penguins in less than half an hour, as 
he might have done with stones, so that, not reckoning those that 
were eaten fresh he had in each vessel four or five tons of them put 
in salt. 
No species of bird, especially one to which the power of flight had 
been denied, could long survive such wholesale destruction as these 
French sailors narrate; and as we have already seen that subsequent 
traders continued to make very serious inroads upon the haunts of 
the doomed Penguin, it need excite no surprise that by the time the 
attention of scientific writers was drawn to the bird, it had almost 
become a rare species. In a published form there is but little to 
narrate, between the time of Whitbourne’s visit and the inquiries 
made by Audubon when preparing his work on the “ Birds of 
America,” in 1831. Writing in 1684, William Dampier f states that 
he had seen Penguins plentifully on the coast of Newfoundland; 
and in 1750 George Edwards, author of a meritorious work on the 
“ Natural History of Birds,” figured a Great Auk in vol. iii. pi. xlvii., 
which he states he procured from the master of a Newfoundland 
fishing-vessel who captured it with fish bait on the fishing banks 
about a hundred leagues off shore. 
* History of the Voyages and Discoveries made in the North, by John 
Reinhold Forster, J.U.D., London, 1786, p. 290. 
t New Voyage round the World, 3d ed., London, 1698. 
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