The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-02-17
HUNTING ATLANTIC SEAL.
ITS HAUNTS ARE OFF THE LAB-
 RADOR COAST.

Valued Chiefly for Skin md Fat
 Sometimes as Many as One Hundred
 Thousand Seals In a Herd-Peris off
 Seamen on the Ice FlOes-.-One of
 Their Besettine Sins.
 The Atlantic seal is covered with tlair and is chiefly valued for his skin and fat, tho former being converted into leather and the latter into oil The fe- males bring forth their young on the ice foes which every winter skirt the dreary Labrador seaboard, and the seal ships seek for them there and kill them by thousands until the foes break up, when they hunt them in boats with rifles, as in the Pacific. The Scotch Canadians and New Englanders ven tured into this fishery at various times, says the Technical World Magazine, but each abandoned 1t in turn, none but Newfoundlanders appearing to pos- ses the hardness and daring essential to successfully traversing the unstable foes whereon this unique industry is prosecuted, so that now it is a mo- nopoly of the Terranovans, as 1t has virtually been for generations.
 The earliest settlers of Newfoundland captured the seals In nets fixed along the coast, and converted the skins to varied uses. Later, men went off from the shore across the foes and hunted fishing boats were used to chase the creatures among the open ice. In time stouter craft were employed for this purpose, until about 100 years ago a Meet of some scores of vessels was fit tedout every spring for the seal hunt, this armada reaching its zenith in 1860, when 1t numbered 500 sail.
 Then, however, steam was introduce cd into the business powerful wooden ships were built and engined, and their superior strength and propulsive force, sounded the knell of the old-time wind jammers,' so that today there is not a vestige remaining of that once splendid aggregation of sailing craft The mod ern sealing industry is carried on by about twenty-five of these specially built steamers, constructed of oak and sheathed with ironwood, to withstand the rasping of the Jagged ice masses through which they cruise, their bows several feet thick with solid timber and shod with steel bands that they may be hurled at the crystal barriers and batter their way through like a war ships ram. Their holds are traversed by beams and blanks which enable their sides better to resist crushing Arctic nip.
 So stanch are these vessels that they are in general demand for polar expe- ditions. Greedy went north in one-the Proteus-and was rescued by two oth- ers-the Bear and Thetis--both of which are now American revenue cruisers on the Alaskan coast. Pery has had New foundiand sealers for all his expedi- tions but the present one, and even now is using the Erikasa, supply ship The Canadian government chartered the Neptune to explore Hudson Bay and winter there, The British admi- ralty purchased the Terra Nova to re- lleye the Antarctic expedition in the Discovery, and on reselllng her in Feb ruary last she was bought to convey a relief expedition to Franz Josef Land, to seek for the Fiala-ziegler party, which had been two years there and unreported on a pole seeking expedi- ton.
 While many details of the natural history of the hair seal are at best merely conjectural, the story of his birth, habits and migrations is among the most fascinating in geological rec ords. The seal, like the whale and the walr,is, formerly abounded in tine shoal waters near the Grand Banks; but now he has been forced further north though he has defied the attempts tc exterminate him which have been we'll nigh successful in the case of his larg- CT kindred It is supposed that dur ing the summer he frequents the Green land ocean, feeding on the fish life there and that as that area becomes ics-clad he moves south. Early in Feb ruary he leaves the open water and mounts the ice foes of Labrador, where the females deposit their young, which at the time of birth are covered witt creamy fur, pallid as the snow-clad waste on which they lie. They are known to the seal men as white coats and the chief prize of the hunt, theil fat yielding the finest oil and theil skins the softest leather.
 The instinct of the seals is some. thing marvellous. They select the same area every year to whelp in, and the whelping ice can be easily detected by experienced seal men. The herds are of two species-''harps" and hoods "-ant the latter, which are larger, fierce ant solitary, and obtain their name from 2 cowl-like appendage behind their necks are invariably found out further iron land than the more peaceful and gre. garious ''harps," whose appellation it due to lyre-shaped mark on the back The mother seal when she goes off al daylight to seek food in the water: below the ice-f1elds, will inevitably find her own offspring when she returns al sundown, and when seal men have charged about some whltecoats to pug. gle the creatures the maternal instinc has sufficed to expose the fraud an6 send each mother to her own offspring
 The young seals grow with amazing rapidity; at birth they weigh abou five pounds, but within a month in, crease to about fifty, at which weight they are fit to kill, their coat of fat be- ing three to four inches thick, though their only subsistence during all tha s1arlod ia fbni- r17ofhpr's n,ill vThaxr rs