324 APPENDIX TO CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



Besides whalers and casual ships with which the Esquimaux are in 

 the habit of dealing, the commerce in furs on both sides of the conti- 

 nent north of the United States has for a long time been in the hands 

 of two Corporations, being the Hudson Bay Company, with its Directors 

 in London, and the Eussian-American Company, with its Directors iu 

 St. Petersbnrgh. The former is much the older of the two, and has been 

 the mostflourishing. Its original members were none other than Prince 

 linpert, the Duke of Albemarle, Earl Craven, Lord Ashley, and other 

 eminent associates, who received a Charter from Charles II in 1070 to 

 I^rosecute a search after a new passage to the South Sea, and to estab- 

 lish a trade in furs, minerals, and other considerable commodities in all 

 those seas and iu the British j)ossessions north and west of Canada, 

 with powers of government, the whole constituting a colossal monopoly, 

 which stretched from Labrador and Bafiin Bay to an undefined west- 

 At present this great Corporation is known only as a Fur Company, to 

 which all its powers are tributary. For some time its jiroflts have been 

 so considerable that it has been deemed advisable to hide them by 

 nominal additions to the stock. With the extinction of the St. Peters- 

 burgh Corporation, under the present Treaty, the London Corporation 

 will remain the only existing Fur Company on the continent, but neces- 

 sarily restrained in its operation to British territory. It remains to be 

 seen into whose hands the commerce on the Pacific side will fall now 

 that this whole region will be open to the unchecked enterprise of our 

 citizens. 



This remarkable commerce began before the organization of the 

 Company. Its profits may be inferred from a voyage in 1772, described 

 by Coxe, between Kamtchatka and the Aleutians. The tenth part of 

 the skins being handed to the custom-house, the remainder was dis- 

 tributed in fifty-five shares, containing each twenty sea otters, sixteen 

 black and brown foxes, ten red foxes, three sea-otter tails, and these 

 shares were sold on the spot at from 800 to 1,000 roubles each, so that 

 the whole lading brought about 50,000 roubles. The cost of these may 

 be inferred from the articles given in exchange. A Enssian outfit, of 

 which I find a contemporary record, was, among other things, "7 cwt. 

 of tobacco, 1 cwt. of glass beads, perhaps a dozen si)are hatchets, and 

 a few supertiuous knives of very bad quality, an immense number of 

 traps for foxes, a few hams, a little rancid butter." With such imports 

 against such exports the profits nmst have been considerable. 



From Langsdorf we have a general inventory of the furs at the begin- 

 ning of the century in the piincipal magazine of the Enssian Company 

 on the Island of Kodiak, collected on the islands, the Peninsula of 

 Alaska, Cook's Inlet, Prince William Sound, and the continent gen- 

 erally. Here were "a great variety of the rarest kinds of fox-skins," 

 black, blackish, reddish, silver grey, and stone fox, the latter probably 

 a species of the Arctic; brown and red bears, "the skins of which are of 

 great value," and also "the valuable black bear;" the zizel marmot 

 and the common marmot, the glutton; the lynx, chieliy of whitish 

 grey; the reindeer; the beaver; the luiiry hedgehog; the wool of a 

 wild American sheep, whitish, fine, and very long, but he could never 

 obtain sight of the animal that produced this wool; also "sea otters, 

 once the ])rincipal source of wealth to the Company, now nearly extir- 

 pated, a few hundreds only being annually collected." The same furs 

 Avere reported by Cook as found on this coast in his day, including even 

 the wild shee]). They all continue to be found, except that I hear noth- 

 ing of any wild sheep save at a Sitkan dinner. 



