[1] These birds were guillemots,
puffins, great auks,[2] gannets (called by Cartier _margaulx_), and
probably gulls and eider duck. To his sailors--always hungry and
partly fed on salted provisions, as seamen were down to a few years
ago--this inexhaustible supply of fresh food was a source of great
enjoyment. They were indifferent, no doubt, to the fishy flavour of
the auks and the guillemots, and only noticed that they were
splendidly fat. Moreover, the birds attracted Polar bears "as large as
cows and as white as swans". The bears would swim off from the shore
to the islands (unless they could reach them by crossing the ice), and
the sailors occasionally killed the bears and ate their flesh, which
they compared in excellence and taste to veal.
[Footnote 1: Funk Island--called by Cartier "the Island of Birds"--is
only about 3 miles round, and 46 feet above the sea level. It is 3
miles distant from the coast.]
[Footnote 2: The Great Auk (_Alca impennis_), extinct since about 1844
in Europe and 1870 in Labrador, once had in ancient times a
geographical range from Massachusetts and Newfoundland to Iceland,
Ireland, Scotland, N.E. England, and Denmark. Perhaps nowhere was it
found so abundantly as on the coasts of Eastern Newfoundland and on
Funk Island hard by. The Great Auk was in such numbers on the
north-east coast of Newfoundland that the Amerindians of that country
and of southern Labrador used it as fuel in the winter time, its body
being very full of oil and burning with a splendid flame.
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