June, 1918 
FOREST AND STREAM 
353 
The proportional difference in size between adult “bull” and “cow” sea-elephants is well shown in these photographs. Note 
the extraordinary trunk and thickened breastplate of the bull, whose portrait was made at Macquarie Island by a member of 
the Australasian Antarctic Expedition and is used by courtesy of the J. B. Lippincott Co. The photograph of the cow was 
taken at South Georgia by R. C. Murphy. 
careless also of the females who were now 
his by right of conquest, lay down in the 
centre of them and slept. 
“These war heroes do not pay the slight¬ 
est attention to their wounds, which heal 
so quickly that in two or three days they 
are cured. But to the end of their long 
lives they bear the scars of these great 
fights, and out of the water I have seen old 
sea-dogs climb with torn hides and eyeless 
sockets and missing or half-gnawed flippers 
as records of the titanic warfare they have 
waged upon their rivals and enemies. . . . 
"When undisturbed, the seals lay around 
on the rocks in families, each male sur¬ 
rounded by his dozen wives, like an old 
Turk, and keeping watchful, jealous eyes 
upon the other bulls. For hours they would 
rest lazily, sleeping and dozing in luxurious 
case. And with monstrous comicality they 
would scratch themselves with their flip¬ 
pers, rolling over a little to get at some 
ticklish spot or curling their tails up. How¬ 
ever awkward they were on shore, they 
were magnificent in their strength and grace 
in the water, swimming with the force and 
directness of a torpedo, and careless of 
breakers that would smash a boat to pieces. 
An enraged bull sea-elephant swinging 
around on his fore-flippers to meet an 
attack. Bay of Isles, South Georgia 
It was a great and glorious thing to watch 
one of those huge breakers rolling in, and 
to see the seals facing them unmoved with 
dauntless strength and courage. 
“But the little ones were the j oiliest 
things to watch, so mirthful and full of 
pranks and the sheer joy of life. When 
they are born, one baby to each mother, 
they are only three feet long, and they are 
covered with very smooth and very long 
black hair. After three weeks this falls off 
and a greyish or yellow hair, very close 
cropped, is left on their plump little bodies. 
As soon as they are suckled, the youngsters 
leave their parents and go off all together. 
They have the best of fun learning to swim 
in the shallow streams where all day long 
they play, frisking and barking like young 
dogs, so that the noise of a seal nursery 
may be heard for miles. They roll each 
other over and play all kinds of pranks in 
the water and on the shore, scuffling, crawl¬ 
ing, leaping, darting all together, until they 
get tired and go to sleep on the black sand 
under the basalt rocks, to wake again in a 
little while and begin the game again. The 
old men seals and the old women seals 
take no notice of these brawling youngsters, 
and soon they learn to fight like the old 
warriors, to catch fish while they shoot 
below the sea, to escape the killer whales, 
and to capture their sweethearts by those 
deadly combats on the rocks.” 
According to our still fragmentary infor¬ 
mation, there are two distinct species of 
sea-elephants. The surviving veterans of 
these two species are now widely separated 
geographically, for one occurs only at 
Guadalupe Island, off the coast of Lower 
California, 29 degrees north of the equator, 
and the other at the subantarctic islands. 
The northern sea-elephants were formerly 
distributed generally along the Californian 
and Mexican coasts, but after the historic 
days of ’49 they were hunted to the very 
verge of extermination. It has only lately 
been ascertained that any of these North 
American animals remain. In 1907 a col¬ 
lector obtained ten specimens for the mu¬ 
seum of Lord Rothschild at the desert islet 
of Guadalupe, while in 1911 Dr. Charles H. 
Townsend, Director of the New York 
Aquarium in Battery Park, found a herd 
of seven score still thriving at the same 
place. Dr. Townsend transported several 
young sea-elephants to the Aquarium in 
New York, where one or two of them lived 
many months. In his scientific report Dr. 
Townsend gave an account of the habits 
of the northern species, illustrated by ex¬ 
cellent photographs, and an exhibit of the 
sea-elephants that he collected is now to be 
seen in the American Museum of Natural 
History at New York City. 
A newborn “pup” sea-elephant, photo¬ 
graphed on the beach at Cumberland 
Bay, South Georgia, by R. C. Murphy 
