The annual seal hunt starts from St. John’s on March 13th. The sealing steamers carry from two hundred to three hundred and fifty men each, packed aboard like sardines in a can. The vessels make for the great ice floes off the northeast coast, and it is on the ice that the seals are taken. The animals spend the winter in waters farther south, but assemble in enormous herds each January and start north toward the ice. Within forty-eight hours after reaching the ice-field, some three hundred thousand mother seals give birth to as many babies. The baby seals gain weight at the rate of four pounds a day, and rapidly take on a coating of fat about two and a half inches thick. When they are six weeks old, they leave their parents and start swimming north. It is a matter of record that the parents reach the ice and the young are born in almost the same spot in the ocean, and on almost the same day, year after year. I visited one of the sealers. It happened to be the _Terra Nova_, the ship in which Captain Scott explored the Antarctic. It was a black craft, designed to work in the ice-fields and carry the maximum number of men and seals. I held in my hands one of the six-foot poles, called “bats,” with which the seals are clubbed to death on the ice. Once the ship reaches the ice-pack, the hunting parties scramble overboard and make a strike for the seals. The ice is usually rough and broken, and a man must make sure that he can get back to his ship. Each hunter kills as many seals as he can, strips off the skin and layer of fat, and leaves the carcass on the ice. The skins and fat are brought back to the ship. The baby seals are the ones that are preferred, for since they feed only on their mothers’ milk, the oil from their fat is the best. Seal hunting is exciting and dangerous work while it lasts, though from a sporting standpoint baby seals can hardly be considered big game. [Illustration: During the winter season the red iron ore from the Wabana mines is stored in huge piles. In the summer it is shipped by steamer to the company’s steel mills in Nova Scotia.] [Illustration: The annual race between schooners of the rival fleets from Nova Scotia and Gloucester, Massachusetts, is a unique sporting event. Every other year the contenders meet on a course off Halifax harbour.] The start of the annual seal hunt is a great occasion for St. John’s. Two thirds of the proceeds of each catch are divided among the crew, the steamer owner taking the balance. It is an old saying in Newfoundland that “a man will go hunting seals when gold will not draw him.” The ships usually return by the middle of April. In a good year each man may get about one hundred and fifty dollars as his share.