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Show 652 MR. J. W. CLARK ON EARED SEALS. [Dec. 7, Island] to discover whether the sealing business might not have been carried on there " *. In the same year they were sighted by D'Entrecasteaux, who commanded the first expedition sent out to search for La Perouse. One of the islands was on fire, caused, it was supposed, by sealers, " as an American vessel had landed a party of men to obtain oil from the seals, which are very numerous there." The expedition did not land ; but they " saw plenty of seals swimming among masses of seaweed, about three-quarters of a mile from the coast" f. In February 1773, the vessels conveying Lord Macartney to China touched there. They found five men on tbe island, three French and two English, who were engaged in collecting Seal-skins, 25,000 of which they were bound to supply in a given time for the Canton market. " One of them, an Englishman, had been there for some time on a former adventure." " The seals," says the narrator"]:, " whose skins are thus an article of commerce, are found here in greater numbers in the summer than in tbe winter, when they generally keep in deep water, and under the weeds, which shelter them from the inclemency of the weather. In the summer months they come ashore, sometimes in droves of eight hundred or a thousand at a time, out of which about a hundred are destroyed, that number being as many as five men can skin and peg down to dry in the course of a day. Little of the oil which these animals might furnish is collected, for want of casks to put it in ; part of the best is boiled, and serves those people instead of butter. The seal of Amsterdam is the Phoca ursina of Linnaeus. The female weighs, usually, from seventy to one hundred and twenty pounds, and is from three to five feet in length ; but the male is considerably larger. In general they are not shy ; sometimes they plunge into the water instantly upon any one's approach, but at other times remain steadily on the rocks, bark, and rear themselves up in a menacing posture; but the blow of a stick upon the nose seemed sufficient to dispatch them. Most of those which come ashore are females, in the proportion of more than thirty to one male. Whether, in those animals, nature has fixed on such an apparent disproportion between the two sexes, or whether, while the females have occasion to seek the shore, the males continue in tbe deep, has not hitherto been ascertained by any observations here. Iu the winter season great numbers of Sea-lions (Phocee leoninee), some eighteen feet long, crawl out of the sea upon the causeway, making a prodigious howling noise . . . It is thought that both Seals and Sea-lions are somewhat less numerous here of late, since the place has been frequented by vessels for the purpose of getting their skins." H.M.S. Megsera was run ashore on St. Paul's, June 19, 1871. * A n Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson, &c.,' by John Hunter, Esq., 4to, London, 1793, p. 557. t ' Relation du voyage a la recherche de La Perouse, pendant les annees1791-2, par le Citoyen Labillardiere, un des Naturalistes de l'Expedition' (2 vols. 4to Paris, 1801), vol. i. p. 110. I 'An authentic account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China,' by Sir Q. Staunton (2 vols. 4to, London, 1797), i. p. 210. |