CARNIVORES. 
148 
leave the young, the old males and young proceed inland, as far as two miles 
sometimes, and stop without food for more than a month, and during this time 
lose fat. The male sea-elephants come 011 shore on the Crozets for the breeding- 
season at about the middle of August, the females a little later.” 
Seal-Hunting. 
Although incidental mention has been made here and there of the annual 
catch of various species of the true seals, nothing has yet been said as to the 
various modes in which these animals are captured. The chief sealing districts, 
or, as they are technically called, “ sealing -grounds,” in the Arctic and North 
Atlantic oceans are West Greenland, the Newfoundland district, the Jan-Mayen 
seas, Novaia Zemlia and the Kara Sea, the White Sea, and the Caspian. The 
most important of these is the Jan-Mayen area, where, as in all the other districts 
except the Caspian, the Greenland seal is the species mainly hunted. So incessant 
and unremitting has been seal-hunting in the icy Jan-Mayen seas that the numbers 
of these animals have been very sensibly diminished; and as far back as 1871 
attention was called to the necessity of some stringent regulations being applied 
to the sealing trade. This was followed in 1876 by an enactment on the part of 
the British Government establishing a close-time for seals, so far as their own 
subjects were concerned; and not long after similar action was taken by the other 
governments interested. 
The chief sealing-trade in the North Pacific was the capture of the elephant- 
seals on the Californian coast—a trade which has of necessity come to an end by 
the extermination of the object of pursuit. In the more southern seas the trade 
was likewise confined to the capture of elephant-seals. From their great numerical 
abundance and their large size, the pursuit of these animals was an extremely 
lucrative occupation in the early years of this century. Now, however, as we have 
seen, these seals are exterminated from most of their former haunts, and only 
remain in any numbers on Kerguelen and Heard Islands, where they would also 
long since have disappeared had it not been for the inaccessible nature of the 
beaches they frequent. Consequently, the southern sealing-trade has now shrunk 
to an inappreciable fraction of its former volume, although there is a prospect of 
its being revived in the neighbourhood of the Antarctic pack-ice. 
Of the various methods of capturing seals in the northern seas 
notably the oldest is that of harpooning from canoes, or kayaks, as 
now practised by the Eskimo. The kayak, which is made of skins, although 
upwards of eighteen feet in length, is so light as to be easily carried in the hand. 
In “ sealing ” the victim is approached within some twenty-five feet, when the harpoon 
is hurled from a wooden “thrower.” The harpoon, in addition to its line, is 
furnished with a bladder attached by another cord, which marks the course of 
the seal while below the water, and enables the hunter to follow its track and 
wound it with his lance time after time as it comes to the surface to breathe, 
until it is finally despatched. The lance, it should be observed, is thrown 
from the hand, and, after striking the seal, always detaches itself and floats on the 
surface. 
Harpooning. 
