of Northern Europe. What had I found to observe in the neighbourhood
of Port Egmont after my explorations of the first few days? Nothing
but the signs of a sickly vegetation, nowhere arborescent. Here and
there a few shrubs grew, in place of the flourishing firs of the
Norwegian mountains, and the surface of a spongy soil which sinks
and rises under the foot is carpeted with mosses, fungi, and
lichens. No! this was not the enticing country where the echoes of
the sagas resound, this was not the poetic realm of Wodin and the
Valkyries.

On the deep waters of the Falkland Strait, which separates the two
principal isles, great masses of extraordinary aquatic vegetation
floated, and the bays of the Archipelago, where whales were already
becoming scarce, were frequented by other marine mammals of enormous
size--seals, twenty-five feet long by twenty in circumference, and
great numbers of sea elephants, wolves, and lions, of proportions no
less gigantic. The uproar made by these animals, by the females and
their young especially, surpasses description. One would think that
herds of cattle were bellowing on the beach. Neither difficulty nor
danger attends the capture, or at least the slaughter of the marine
beasts. The sealers kill them with a blow of a club when they are
lying in the sands on the strand. These are the special features
that differentiate Scandinavia from the Falklands, not to speak of
the infinite number of birds which rose on my approach, grebe,
cormorants, black-headed swans, and above all, tribes of penguins,
of which hundreds of thousands are massacred every year.

One day, when the air was filled with a sound of braying, sufficient
to deafen one, I asked an old sailor belonging to Port Egmont,--

"Are there asses about here?"

"Sir," he replied, "those are not asses that you hear, but
penguins."

The asses themselves, had any been there, would have been deceived
by the braying of these stupid birds. I pursued my investigations
some way to the west of the bay. West Falkland is more extensive
than its neighbour, La Soledad, and possesses another fort at the
southern point of Byron's Sound--too far off for me to go there.

I could not estimate the population of the Archipelago even
approximately. Probably, it did not then exceed from two to three
hundred souls, mostly English, with some Indians, Portuguese,
Spaniards, Gauche from the Argentine Pampas, and natives from Tier
Del Fuel. On the other ha