Besides the savages of the north, the civilised nations also give chase to the seals, or rather wage a barbarous war of extermination against these helpless creatures. Thus, from the year 1786 to 1833, more than 3,000,000 sea-bears were killed on the Pribilow Islands, in Behring's Sea. At Unalaschka, the chief staple-place of the Russian Fur Company, 700,000 skins were cast into the water in the year 1803, on the same principle as that which induced the Dutch to burn their superfluous nutmegs, viz. "not to glut the market." As a well-merited punishment for this stupid slaughter, the products of the chase diminished rapidly from that time until within the last few years, when a better husbandry has again increased the number of the sea-bears. Unfortunately, our own countrymen and the Americans have done no better in the southern seas. Thousands of sea-lions used formerly to be killed on the South American coast, while at present the number of the animals is so much diminished as scarce to reward the sealer's trouble. Sir James Ross informs us that the sea elephant was formerly found in great numbers on Kerguelen's Land, and yearly attracted many vessels to those desert islands. But at present, after such incessant persecution, the animals have either migrated, or been almost totally extirpated. English and American captains often set some men ashore on the uninhabited coasts and islands of the southern seas, for the purpose of catching seals, boiling their oil, and stripping their skins. After a few months the ship generally returns to fetch the produce of their labours, or to bring a fresh supply of provisions to the seal catchers, who often remain several years in their solitary hunting grounds. But sometimes the poor wretches are abandoned by their associates, and then their despair may be imagined when week after week elapses without the expected sail appearing! Dumont d'Urville found one of these adventurers in the Straits of Magellan among a horde of Patagonians, who, though hospitably inclined, were themselves so poor as hardly to be able to keep body and soul together. He was a watchmaker from Geneva, who, having emigrated to New York, and finding himself disappointed, had listened to the fair promises of a skipper, who carried him out to Tierra del Fuego, and not finding the business answer, had left him to his fate. The French navigator took the poor man on board, and gave him a passage to Talcahuano in Chili.