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The eye looks less baleful, and even joyous; every movement discloses conscious power; the excitement of the sport sheds from him somewhat of the brutality which re-appears the moment he lands or seeks his food. So far as I could learn, the Farallon sea-lions are seldom disturbed by men seeking profit from them.
As the vessels pass out of the bay, they go near enough to hear them bark; but nothing frightens them away, nor discomposes them in the least, although they are only a few miles from the city, and have a great many visitors. They are protected by law from molestation. We looked off to the Farallon Islands, which are one of the chief landmarks for vessels approaching the Golden Gate.
There are, in various parts of the world, several sound-signals made by utilizing natural orifices in cliffs through which the waves drive the air with such force and velocity as to produce the sound required. One of the most noted is that on one of the Farallon Islands, forty miles off the harbor of San Francisco, which was constructed by Gen.
The tower on the South Farallon is, therefore, low; and this, no doubt, is an advantage also to the light-keepers, who are less exposed to the buffetings of the storm than if their labor and care lay at a higher elevation.
The four have a diameter of one hundred and sixty, one hundred and eighty-five, one hundred and twenty-five, and thirty-five yards respectively, and the most northern of the islets bears north 64° west from the Farallon light, six and three-fifths miles distant.
I asked some of the eggers how many murres nested on the South Farallon, and they thought at least one hundred thousand.
Farallon is a Spanish word, meaning a small pointed islet in the sea. These rocks, probably of volcanic origin, and bare and desolate, lie in a line from south-east to north-west curiously enough the same line in which the islands of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Island group have been thrown up. Geologists say they are the outcrop of an immense granite dike.
Instances of the combativeness of the sperm-whale are not confined to the records of the whale fishery. Even as I write I find in a current San Francisco newspaper the story of the pilot-boat "Bonita," sunk near the Farallon Islands by a whale that attacked her out of sheer wantonness and lust for fight.
Wild and fierce as it is, it seems to reconcile itself to the tank life very rapidly. If the narrow space of its big bath-tub frets it, you do not perceive this, for hunger is its chief passion, and with a moderately full stomach the animal does well in captivity, of course with sufficient water. The South Farallon is the only inhabited one of the group.
But the eggers say that when it leaves the island they do not know whither it goes, and they assert that it is not abundant on the neighboring coast. The young begin to fly when they are two weeks old, and the parents usually take them immediately into the water. The sea-parrot has a crest, and somewhat resembles a cockatoo. Its numbers on the South Farallon are not great.
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