rie Island

After the severe weather experienced, the relaxation made us all feel
like a band of schoolboys out on a long vacation.

A small sandy beach barred the inlet, and the whaleboat was directed
towards it. We were soon grating on the sand amidst an army of Royal
penguins; picturesque little fellows, with a crest and eyebrows of
long golden-yellow feathers. A few yards from the massed ranks of the
penguins was a mottled sea-leopard, which woke up and slid into the sea
as we approached.

Several hours were spent examining the neighbourhood. Webb and Kennedy
took a set of magnetic observations, while others hoisted some cases of
stores on to a rocky knob to form a provision depot, as it was quickly
decided that the northern end of the island was likely to be more
suitable for a permanent station.

The Royal penguins were almost as petulant as the Adelie penguins which
we were to meet further South. They surrounded us, pecked at our
legs and chattered with an audacity which defies description. It was
discovered that they resented any attempt to drive them into the sea,
and it was only after long persuasion that a bevy took to the water.
This was a sign of a general capitulation, and some hundreds immediately
followed, jostling each other in their haste, squawking, whirring their
flippers, splashing and churning the water, reminding one of a crowd of
miniature surf-bathers. We followed the files of birds marching inland,
along the course of a tumbling stream, until at an elevation of some
five hundred feet, on a flattish piece of ground, a huge rookery opened
out--acres and acres of birds and eggs.

In one corner of the bay were nests of giant petrels in which sat
huge downy young, about the size of a barn-door fowl, resembling
the grotesque, fluffy toys which might be expected to hang on a
Christmas-tree.

Here and there on the beach and on the grass wandered bright-coloured
Maori hens. On the south side of the bay, in a low, peaty area overgrown
with tussock-grass, were scores of sea elephants, wallowing in bog-holes
or sleeping at their ease.

Sea elephants, at one time found in immense numbers on all sub-antarctic
islands, are now comparatively rare, even to the degree of extinction,
in many of their old haunts. This is the result of ruthless slaughter
prosecuted especially bY sealers in the early days. At the present time
Macquarie Island is more favoured by them than probably any other known
locality