Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo13amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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250 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL amain as one enters the cove, which might be likened to a great caldron so filled with the macerated bones of whales that they not only bestrew its bottom, but also thickly incrust its rim to the farthest highwater mark. During the next few days I discovered that not King Edward Cove alone, but indeed the whole beach of the south fjord of Cumberland Bay, a shore line of more than twenty-five miles, is lined with an almost inconceivable number of bones, mostly of the humpback whale. Spinal columns, loose vertebra?, flipper bones, ribs and jaws are piled in heaps and bulwarks, and I could count seventy-five or one hundred huge skulls without moving from one spot. The region is one enormous sepulcher, yet no one can guess how many hundreds or thousands of flensed carcasses have been carried out to sea by the tide, and so have sunk their skeletons in the deep. Such reckless
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The whaling brig "Daisy" at anchor in the Bay of Isles waste of a material which when manufactured into fertilizer is worth several pounds sterling a ton, was due to the exceeding abundance of whales in South Georgia waters and consequent neglect of all products of secondary importance to the blubber oil. But now the companies are required by law to utilize the entire carcass of the whale, and they have either installed bone- boiling and guano plants at their stations, or have sub-let this branch of the industries to "floating factories," that is vessels especially fitted for the purpose. One of this type, a 2000-ton full-rigged ship, was so occupied at the time of our visit. During our sojourn in Cumberland Bay the time was occupied with trips into the surrounding mountainous country, particularly about the magnifi- cent west fjord of the bay, a section reached overland from Grytviken through a high, extinct glacier bed, parts of which are smoothly paved with small fragments of shale packed edgewise by the ice in the manner of a

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