My best bag in cock has been sixty-three in one day’s shooting alone.  I have lately taken to punting after ducks, and have been very successful.  One gets twenty to thirty a day, and occasionally a swan.  I once killed four of the latter with one shot from my punt gun (one of Holland & Holland’s).  Hares are not very numerous; to get three or four in a day is counted good luck; but one generally picks up one or two during a day’s shooting.  Thus the sum of what you have in this country is red deer, fallow deer, roe deer, pigs, wolves, and bears (as to the latter, rare), hares, pheasants, cocks, snipe, quails, and ducks; so that a man who lays himself out for sport and has a yacht can have plenty of amusement between September and March.

The coast of Karamania, taking in all the coast from some distance below Smyrna, passing Rhodes and so on to the Gulf of Ayas, affords all the way along capital sport to yachting men.  For example, in the large gulfs of Boudroum and Marmorice, capital anchorage will be found, and a country almost virgin as far as sport is concerned.

Some years since, while commanding an English ship-of-war, I had the good fortune to be sent on a roving commission against pirates that were supposed to infest that coast.  Somehow I always imagined that pirates were more or less sportsmen, so I hunted for them in places that looked gamey, and thus made the acquaintance of many almost unknown, or at all events unfrequented, harbours and creeks, in which I had famous sport.  On the coast of Karamania the ibex is to be found in considerable quantities; the red-legged partridge and the francolin are also very abundant, and give capital sport.

There are also at the head of the gulf I have alluded to large marshes for duck and snipe.  The most celebrated, because the best known place in the part I am alluding to, is the Gulf of Ayas, into which runs the well-known (to all naval sportsmen) river called the Jihoon.  A yacht must anchor at some distance off the entrance of this river, but the anchorage is quite safe in all weathers.  Getting over the bar of the river is a matter at times of considerable difficulty, but once inside the bar you are in the paradise of shooting.  A small steam launch is necessary to stem the strong current, and to tow another boat up with tents, provisions, &c.  It is true that in my time we had no steam launches, and I shall not forget the hard work we had to take two boats sufficiently far up the river to get well into the shooting grounds, and even after two days’ struggling we did not arrive so far as I should have wished (we, in fact, only got four miles up the stream).  Still we had some rare sport, the more especially with pigs and francolin.  The morning after we had pitched our tents some wandering Arabs came to us and offered to beat the woods, which they declared to be full of wild boar.  They told us that the habit of these animals was, on being driven, to take to the river