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EVER shall a man who has once watched the slaughter of a fur seal herd forget the grisly sight. From the deck of the blunt-nosed sealing steamer you can count thousands upon thousands of seal families stretched out on the glistening ice floes, the dark, mottled bodies of the adults standing out in high relief against the blue-whiteness of their floating homes, while the snowwhite fur of the baby seals blends almost imperceptibly into the background. Out from the ship, hurrying over the ice, rush nearly 200 men of the crew, each armed with an iron-tipped club. From near and far go up the agonized cries of the terrified seals. Flopping along over the ice the adults rush frantically for the water, doing their best to hurry their young with them.

In most cases their way of escape is

cut off by the sealers. With a blow of the iron-bound club, the skull of the sealpup is crushed, its blood staining the whiteness of the floe, while its parents are allowed to get away in safety.

In a single day the crew of one sealer has killed 13,000 seals; and one season the sealer Neptune brought in a single ship-load which contained the bodies of 41,993 seals and was valued at $115,000.

But the hair sealer of the Labrador coast is more than a mere cruel butcher of defenseless baby seals. No men, anywhere, endure greater hardships, take greater risks, or display greater courage and resourcefulness than they.

Perils of the Sealer's Life

A hair sealer, caught by a fog or a blizzard on the floes, eight or ten miles from his ship, thinks little enough of a

them were frozen to death, and 63 others badly injured by the frost.

Fur Seal Not So Important Because the fur seal of Bering Sea has been a grave international issue the past twenty years, and the subject of such reckless killing that he is now depleted almost to extinction, comparatively few are aware of the importance of his congener, the hair seal or ice-riding pinniped of the North Atlantic, whose habitat is the coast of Newfoundland and Labra

fur, which is converted into one of the most fashionable of ladies' garments. His haunt is the rocky shores of the Pribilof Islands, and here the young are born, the families taking to the water when the "pups" are grown sufficiently to swim long distances. They are stalked on the beaches by the hunters, and also pursued when swimming, being speared or shot, this being the "pelagic" sealing which has provoked such friction between the nations interested in the preservation of the herds. A perfect skin

seaboard, and the seal-ships seek for them there and kill them by thousands until the floes break up, when they hunt them in boats with rifles, as in the Pacific. The Scotch, Canadians, and New Englanders ventured into this fishery at various times, but each abandoned it in turn, none but Newfoundlanders appearing to possess the hardiness and daring essential to successfully traversing the unstable floes, whereon this unique industry is prosecuted, so that now it is a monopoly of the Terranovans, as it has virtually been for generations.

reaching its zenith in 1860, when it numbered 600 sail.

Steam Sealers Come In

Then, however, steam was introduced into the business, powerful wooden ships were built and engined, and their superior strength and propulsive force sounded the knell of the old-time "windjammers," so that to-day there is not a vestige remaining of that once splendid aggregation of sailing craft. The modern sealing industry is carried on by about 25 of these specially-built steamers,