but the moment our treacherous musician replaced his violin in its canvas bag, an appalling scene of butchery began.
The batmen rushed about as if a frenzy had seized them, striking the seals on their round bullet-like heads, knocking them over, stunned and motionless. Others followed, with long sharp knives, by five slashes of which the expert hunter will denude the largest cub of his smooth glossy skin, to which the thick white fat adheres, and after being thus denuded, on more than one occasion I have seen the miserable animal, bared to its slender ribs, when stung, as it were, by the intense frost reaching its vitals, revive for a minute, and make efforts to crawl along the ice, or drop into the sea!
The whole ice-field, which a moment before had been so white in its spotless and untrodden purity, now, within the radius of a mile, presented the aspect of a battle-field, strewn with gashed carcases and heaps of bloody skins that were steaming in the sunshine. Cuffy seemed in his element—in his glory! Flourishing his long knife, he uttered yells as if every seal he stripped had been the Chenoo wife who sold him into slavery, or the Yankee taskmaster whose whip had skinned him more than once.
This wholesale butchery sickened me.
The attachment of the mother-seal to her offspring is very great; and here I saw a great hooded one carrying off a little wounded cub in her mouth toward the edge of the ice-field, where they dropped into the sea, escaping Cuffy, who pursued them. There are times when the mother turns fiercely with tusks and claws upon the destroyers of her young, and then the long gun with its charge of slugs is brought into action; for on the old seals (Buffon avers that some of them live for more than a hundred years) the sturdiest batman's arm would swing the knotted club in vain. The membrane of the hooded seal can be drawn over the nose, and inflated, so as to protect the head like a helmet of gutta-percha.
Leaving our people engaged in the work of slaughter, halloing, shouting, and encouraging each other, as they threw their bloody and greasy spoil upon little sledges, to be dragged by ropes alongside the brig, I proceeded over the hummocks in search of—I scarcely knew what.
Our men seldom fired their guns, as shot destroys the skin, which, after the cargo is brought into port, has the fat or blubber carefully removed and placed in the great wooden tanks or vats of the oil-merchant; while the pelts are cleaned, spread, and, after having layers of coarse salt placed between them, are packed in bales for transport to other countries.
CHAPTER XI.
COMBAT WITH A SEA-HORSE.
We continued to fish, or rather to hunt, the seals here with considerable success, warping the brig from day to day along the outer edge of the ice, between which and her side we placed strong and soft fenders; and the satisfaction of Hartly and his crew increased in proportion as the piles of pelt and blubber replaced in the hold the stone ballast which we had brought from the island of Newfoundland.