272 FROM THE ANIMALS ’ POINT OF VIEW 
spears, and pitfalls. Some instances of the first 
contact of animals with man have, however, been 
preserved in the accounts of the early voyages collected 
by Hakluyt and others, though the hungry navigators 
were generally more intent on victualling their ships 
with the unsuspecting beasts and birds, or on noting 
those which would be useful commodities for 
“trafficke,” than in cultivating friendly relations with 
the animal inhabitants of the newly-discovered islands. 
Thus, we read that near Newfoundland there were 
u islands of birds, of a sandy-red, but with the multi- 
tudes of birds upon them they look white. The birds 
sit there as thick as stones lie in a paved street. The 
greatest of the islands is about a mile in compass. 
The second is a little less. The third is a very little 
one, like a small rock. At the second of these islands 
there lay on the shore in the sunshine about thirty or 
forty sea-oxen or morses, which, when our boat came 
near them, presently made into the sea, and swam 
after the boat.” Curiosity, not fear or hostility, was, 
then, the emotion roused in the sea-oxen by the first 
sight of man. The birds, whales, and walruses in the 
Wargate Sea and near Jan Mayen’s Land, were no 
less tame, and the sea-lions in the Southern Pacific, 
the birds that Barents first discovered in Novaya 
Zembla, and even the antelopes which the early 
explorers encountered in the least-inhabited parts of 
Central South Africa, seem all to have regarded the 
newly-discovered creature, man, with interest and 
without fear. Sir Samuel Baker, in his Wild Beasts 
