354 HISTORY AND METHODS OF THE FISHERIES. 



would, as they exist to-day on Saint Paul, quickly multiply, by arithmetical progression, to so great 

 an extent that the island, nay, Bering Sea itself, could not contain them.' The present annual 

 killing of one hundred thousand out of a yearly total of over a million males does not, in an appre- 

 ciable degree, diminish the seal-life, or interfere in the slightest with its regular, sure perpetuation 

 on the breeding grounds every year. We may, therefore, properly look upon this aggregate of 

 four and five millions of fur-seals, as we see them every season on these Pribylov Islands, as the 

 maximum limit of increase assigned to them by natural law. The great equilibrium, which nature 

 holds in life upon this earth, must be sustained at Saint Paul as well as elsewhere. 



FOOD CONSUMED BY THE FUR-SEALS. Why, only think of the enormous food-consumption 

 of these rookeries and hauling grounds ; what an immense quantity of finny prey must pass down 

 their voracious throats as every year rolls by. A creature so full of life, strung with nerves, 

 muscles like bands of steel, cannot live on air, or absorb it from the sea. Their food is fish, to the 

 practical exclusion of all other diet. I have never seen them touch, or disturb with the intention 

 of touching it, one solitary example in the flocks of water-fowl which rest upon the surface of the 

 water all about the islands. I was especially careful in noting this, because it seemed to me that 

 the canine armature of their mouths must suggest flesh for food at times as well as fish; but fish 

 we know they eat. Whole windrows of the heads of cod and wolf fishes (AnarrMchas sp.), bitten off 

 by these animals at the nape, were washed up on the south shore of Saint George during a gale in 

 the summer of 1873; this pelagic decapitation evidently marked the progress and the appetite of a 

 band of fur-seals to the windward of the island as they passed into and through a stray school of 

 these fishes. 



How many pounds per diem is required by an adult seal, and taken by it when feeding, is not 

 certain in my mind. Judging from the appetite, however, of kindred animals, such as sea-lions 

 fed in confinement at Woodward's Gardens, San Francisco, I can safely say that 40 pounds for a 

 full-grown fur-seal is a fair allowance, with at least 10 or 12 pounds per diem to every adult 

 female, and not much less, if any, to the rapidly growing pups and young " holluschickie." 

 Therefore, this great body of four and five millions of hearty, active animals which we know on the 

 seal islands must consume an enormous amount of such food every year. They cannot average 

 less than 10 pounds of fish each per diem (and this is not half enough for an adult male), which 

 gives the consumption, as exhibited by their appetite, of over 6,000,000 tons of fish every year. 

 What wonder, then, that nature should do something to hold these active fishermen in check.* 



I feel confident that 1 have placed this average of fish eaten per diem by each seal at a starvation allowance, or, 

 in other words, it is a certain minimum of the whole consumption. If the seals can get double the quantity which I 

 credit them with above, startling as it seems, still I firmly believe that they eat it every year. Au adequate realiza- 

 tion by iethyologists and fishermen as to what havoc the fur-seal hosts am annually making among the cod, herring, 

 and salmon of the northwest coast and Alaska would disconcert and astonish them. Happily for the peace of political 

 economists who may turn their attention to the settlement and growth of the Pacific coast of America, it bids fair to 

 never be known with anything like precision. The fishing of man, both aboriginal and civilized, in the past, present, 

 and prospective, has never been, is not, nor will it be, more than a drop in the bucket contrasted with the piscatorial 

 labors of these icthyophagi in those waters of and adjacent to their birth. What catholic knowledge of fish and 

 fishing banks any one of those old "seecatchie " must possess which we observe hauled out on the Pribylov rool.< 

 each summer. It has, undoubtedly, during the eighteen or twenty year*, uf its lite, explored every fish eddy, bank, 

 or shoal throughout the whole of that vast immensity of the North Pacific and Bering Sea. It has had more piscine 

 sport in a single twelve month than Jznak Walton had in his whole 111'.-. 



An old sea captain, Dampier, who, cruising around the world just about two hundred years ago, wrote diligently 

 thereof (or, rather, one Funnel is said to have written for him), and wrote well. He had frequent reference to meeting 

 hair-seals and sea-lions, fur-seals, &c., and fell to repeating thismaxim, evidently of his own making : " For wherever 

 there be plenty of fysh, there be seals." I am sure that, unless avast abundance of good fishing ground was near by, 

 no such congregation of seal-life as is that under discussion on the seal islauds could exist. The whole eastern half 

 of Bering Sea, in its entirety, is a single fish-spawuiug bauk, nowhere deeper than 50 to 75 fathoms, averaging, 

 perhaps, 40 ; also, there are great reaches of fishing shoals up and down the northwest coast, from and above the 



