Read Online Island of the Lost by Joan Druett - Free Book Online

us.” Then they steered up the western arm of the harbor, finding an outlet at the other end that confirmed that Carnley Harbour was a strait, not enclosed. “Here we found there was a narrow passage out to the sea, about three-quarters of a mile long, and the quarter of a cable’s length in width,” wrote Musgrave, “proving the land to the southward to be not a peninsula, but an island.”
    This passage between Adams Island to the south, and Auckland Island to the north, was an ancient gorge bounded by massive lava flows that plunged precipitously to the shoals below. Musgrave didn’t try to negotiate this, considering it too dangerous for a small boat, “as the tide was rushing rapidly through it and there was a heavy swell running and breaking on both sides. It runs nearly north and south,” he added, “the south end opening to the sea—I should suppose not far from the South Cape.”
    So, instead of venturing further, the men stilled their oars and gazed about, overwhelmed by what Raynal called the “wild and majestic beauty” of the scene—“Let the reader figure to himself a kind of ravine, about five hundred yards wide andthree thousand long, pent up between two cliffs as perpendicular as walls, and from eight hundred to twelve hundred feet in height.” The sound effects, too, were awesome, as the great stone ramparts were “hollowed with numerous caverns, into whose depths the waves plunged with hoarse wild murmurs, which, repeated in all directions,” echoed on and on, seemingly for ever.
    Musgrave, much more mundanely, recorded, “At this place we saw hundreds of seals; both the shores and the water were literally swarming with them, both the tiger and black seal; but in general the tiger seals keep one side of the harbour, and the black seals, which are much the largest, the other side.”
    This definition of two kinds of seal, “black” and “tiger,” has puzzled biologists ever since Musgrave’s journal was first published. Four seal species visit the Auckland Islands—the sea leopard (
Hydrurga leptonyx
), the southern elephant seal (
Mirounga leonina
), the New Zealand, or Hooker’s, sea lion (
Phocarctos hookeri
), and the New Zealand fur seal (
Arctocephalus forsteri
). However, only these last two establish breeding colonies there, so Musgrave had to be referring to fur seals and/or sea lions.
    All seals belong to a group called Pinnipedia, which have streamlined bodies and flippers for limbs. Both fur seals and sea lions belong to a subgroup, the eared seals, Otariidae, which have small external ear flaps and can turn their hind flippers forward when they are on land, so that they are surprisingly nimble. However, while they have all this in common, New Zealand fur seals and New Zealand sea lions are easily told apart. Not only are sea lions a lot bigger than fur seals, a full-grown sea lion bull being three times the size of a male fur seal, but fur seals, as the name suggests, have much longer fur, thesoft, shimmering inner coat stiffened with a top layer of guard hairs. And, though fur seals have pointed noses and long whiskers, the nose of a sea lion is broad and blunt.
    The fur seal is chocolate brown in both sexes. While the big, aggressive sea lion bulls are dark brown, too, their much smaller wives are a very pretty caramel color, quite often striped or spotted. Fur seals could perhaps be called “black,” especially when wet, but it is highly unlikely that they would have been present in the numbers that Musgrave described. It was just thirty-four years since the Connecticut explorer Benjamin Morrell had described the complete disappearance of fur seals from the Auckland Islands, and, unless augmented by new arrivals, the population could not possibly have reestablished itself to that extent. Later evidence, too, suggests that sea lions would have greatly outnumbered fur seals in