932 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 17, 1911. 
Harper’s Weekly, which we would read in 
stormy weather, and for outside amusement we 
would be patroling the beach for something to 
eat, of which we always found plenty, such as 
it was, elephants, penguins and wild cabbage. 
We would burn the blubber of the elephants as 
fuel for cooking. 
“We had a trifle of powder and duck shot 
and in one of the cabins I found a Remington 
double-barreled gun, which had been left there 
some years before. In cleaning it, I broke the 
feather spring of the lock, so that the trigger 
was of no use; but I managed to shoot by hold¬ 
ing the hammer under my thumb until I could 
level her on the object and then letting go. 
After a short practice this answered about as 
well as if I had had the use of the trigger. 
When my shot gave out, I used small stones 
for ammunition. My gun lasted until August, 
1881. I had no timepiece nor compass, but 
plenty of nautical instruments, so I set to work 
to supply myself with a time-keeper. With a 
cooper’s compass I drew a circle on a board 
eighteen inches in circumference and put a peg 
in the center of it. Then with my quadrant 1 
found the apparent time and marked it off 
where the shadow of the peg showed on the 
circle, and by repeated observations I made a 
good time-keeper; in fact, the Captain used to 
come over from his shanty to set his watch and 
clock by my sundial. I also made a compass 
by the sun’s amplitude. So I was well 
equipped.” 
And now came a serious trouble, for while 
five of the white men went to Rocky Beach, 
about six miles distant, for elephant meat they 
were overtaken by a heavy storm of rain and 
sleet, and at night three of them returned, so 
exhausted that they could give little account of 
the other two. A search party the next day 
found the two dead men, who were buried there. 
In May, 1881, there was a terrible eruption of 
the volcano, and John Easmond says, “I was 
pretty badly scared. There was a great deal of 
excitement on the island while this thing lasted, 
and we all watched the flames with much 
anxiety, until finally the blaze died down and so 
did our fears vanish. This eruption was a grand 
and awful sight to see, but the next time I want 
to be further off.” 
They had now been a year on the island, and 
in all this time had heard nothing from their 
companions in Crinton Bay, for the chain of 
glaciers which lay between them kept the two 
groups of men apart. At length, however, the 
loneliness of the small party at Crinton Bay be¬ 
came too much for them; they built a boat from 
boards pulled off their shanty, and two of the 
white men paddled along the coast to the south¬ 
east point of the island. Their boat was a 
strange model, either for safety or speed. She 
was square built, 7 feet 7 inches long and 3 
feet 3 inches wide and about 1 foot deep. After 
a few days’ stay they made their way back again. 
All this time the main party had little to do 
except to hunt for food. This kept them busy 
much of the time, and “when we were not rob¬ 
bing the penguins’ nest or killing elephants, we 
were looking out for a ship to heave into sight 
and take us off the island, or else we were find¬ 
ing fault with the weather, which was bad all 
the year round, being foggy and windy and 
rainy and chilly, with sand storms blowing that 
will in time wear through the boards of a shanty 
if it is not kept well banked up with tussock 
and turf. In November of this year we had a 
sorry game of baseball, using a wooden ball to 
play with; but there was no fun in it for us 
and we did not try it more than that once. 
“First when we began to hunt penguins, 
when they would see us, they would come to¬ 
ward us; but it did not take them long to know 
our character, and then they would give us a 
wide berth. There are four kinds of penguins 
on this island, the Johnnies, maccaronies, rock- 
hoppers and kings. These birds have wings 
from eight inches to a foot long; they cannot 
fly nor run very fast on the land; any man can 
catch them; but when they get into the water 
and get their flippers into motion they would 
run down any locomotive. 
“The king penguins were from 2^/2 to 3 feet 
in height, and a right proud bird to look at. 
They did not breed on the island. 
“The maccaroni penguins, smaller than the 
rock-hoppers, went away from the island for 
nine months in the year, going off to the south, 
so people must conclude that there is 'land to 
the south of Heard’s Island; and, for one, I 
should like to go down there and explore 
for it. 
“The Johnny penguins were the most com¬ 
mon; they were there in great numbers, and 
stood up in long lines, a quarter of a mile long 
—truly a cruel* sight to look at in any Chris¬ 
tian country. They came ashore and stayed all 
day in the breeding season. The best time to 
catch them was just after sunset. They live on 
fish and were not so good to eat as the sea 
hens, but we thought them pretty good because 
they were all we had to stand by. They sleep 
lying on their bellies. It was always very hard 
to catch a penguin asleep, for they would be 
sure to hear you. They bred on the level tus¬ 
sock, of which their nest was built; and they 
would go right on making their nest when we 
were standing by within ten feet of them. They 
would lay two eggs each when we gave them a 
chance. Their eggs were our principal food. 
To be sure and have them fresh, we would rob 
the nest one day and then go over the same 
ground in two or three days again. The 
Johnnies would keep on laying as long as we 
would rob their nests. They would keep at it 
until their eggs had no yolks; and when they 
could not lay any more they would roll a stone 
into the nest and sit on that. They did not pro¬ 
pose to move so long as they were accommo¬ 
dated, even if their furniture was taken out of 
the house. We wanted fresh eggs all the time, 
but at last we would find only stones; but in 
November we generally got enough eggs to last 
us through December. The rock-hoppers would 
only lay one egg; if this was robbed that was 
the end of it. 
“About the first of November the penguins 
would begin to lay, but the eggs were not 
plenty until the fifth or sixth of the month. 
Then it was useless for any one to get sick, as 
we had to go to Rock Beach, six miles away, 
for the eggs. About 150 of these eggs made 
a fair load for a man to bring. When the 
weather was fair we would go in gangs for this 
glorious food. 
“Many of the eggs that I stored in my shanty 
would be broken, and I scolded my Portuguese 
‘Strange or wonderful. 
for their carelessness, but we found one day 
that the rats were to blame for it. When we 
first landed on the island there were only a 
couple of rats in the shanty, and by the time 
we left there were two hundred of them. 
“The gale birds came Nov. 18 and were with 
us until December. There were millions of 
them. They would come flying in for three 
hours at night, one-half hour after dark, or on 
moonlight nights for an hour. They are a white 
bird with black saddle on back and red beak 
and feet. They bred on the island, burrowing 
into the level tussock and some of them into 
the banked-up sides of our shanties. These 
burrows go down about three feet, slanting into 
the ground, and are just about large enough at 
the entrance for a man’s hand to get into. The 
he and she both went into the burrow. It was 
wonderful how when they came ashore they 
would pitch right down, each one at the mouth 
of his own burrow and dive right in. When 
they came out again they would fly from their 
burrows directly out to sea. They lay one egg, 
and when the young bird comes up out of his 
hole, he waddles around two or three hours and 
is then ready to go to sea—the first time he 
sees the light he is just as good as his parents, 
except that he hasn’t seen so much of the world 
—and he won’t see much of it either if a sea 
hen gobbles him up and takes him down, 
feathers and all. The gale birds look much like 
a small chicken; when you take their feathers 
off they weight about a quarter of a pound; 
they did not pay for the picking. They have a 
squeaky note, and are in fact good for feathers 
and noise and nothing else. We made beds of 
their feathers, and I gathered about two hun¬ 
dred pounds of them. Gale bird is their most 
common name because they are always seen in 
a gale, or when seen it’s a sign that a gale is 
coming, but all New London and New Bedford 
sailors call them whale birds. 
“The ice partridges were with us from June 1 
to Sept. 1. Some of the men called them white 
paddies, they are a guide for sailors to show 
them where the seals are on the ice. They ate 
meat and the seeds of the cabbage. They were 
very tame; we could kill them with sticks and 
sometimes I shot them from my cabin; their 
meat was very tender. About the first of Sep¬ 
tember they would fly up tjie island, but whether 
they left the land I don’t know, but think not, 
for there was no other land nearer than Ker¬ 
guelen and the prevailing wind was from the 
north, so that while they might have come from 
Kerguelen it would have been tough work for 
them to go back again. 
“The sea hens came in September, built nests 
like the partridge, laid two speckled eggs and 
hatched in December and left the island the first 
of June. Their flesh tasted very much like that 
of tame duck, of which they were the size. We 
usually boiled them about an hour. They would 
at first be very tame, but after a month ashore 
they came to know our ways. We killed some 
with the shotgun; when one was dead we threw 
it up and the rest would hover around it; but 
we got the most by snaring them. We would 
take a line thirty fathoms long, and making a 
noose at one end, would put into it on the 
ground a piece of blubber, then when they 
stepped into the noose, we would haul away on 
it, often getting two hens at a time. 
“Other birds that stopped on this island all 
