ORAL ARGUMENT OF SIR RICHARD WEBSTER, Q. C. M. P. 221 



the Government, and it is so forwarded. The duty of each of them is 

 to report throngli their chief to the Government. I quite admit that 

 it shoiihl be des(u ibed as a report by Mr. Nettletou to Mr. Goft"; but it 

 came to the United States Treasury Department. 



Now, Sir, as I have touched upon this, will the Tribunal kindly favor 

 me by letting me call their attention to the character of this report of 

 Mr. Elliott's s I am making a very great draft uj^on their patience, but 

 it really is important that it should be understood. I will not refer to 

 it except in connection with one subject afterwards; but if you, Mr. 

 President, will be kind enough to take it before you, you will hnd that 

 in his letter to Mr. '\\'iudom of the 17th of jSTovember, he describes his 

 appointment, and he says he went there supi)Osing he should find every- 

 thing* to be occasioned by pelagic sealing; and it is the strongest evi- 

 dence in favor of the impartiality of this report that nobody condemns 

 pelagic sealing more than Mr. Elliott does. He is perfectly entitled to 

 do it from the point of view of regarding what he was reporting, that is 

 to say, the interest of the United States. At the first page in Eoman 

 numerals, just underneath the date, the second paragraph begins: 



I may as well frankly confess, at the outset, that I was wholly unaware of the 

 extraordinary state of affairs which stared nie in the face at the moment of my first 

 landing, last Mav, on the Seal Islands of Alaska. I eniharked npon this mission with 

 a faint apjirehension of viewing anything more than a decided diminution of the 

 Pribilof rookeries, caused by ]ie)agic poaching during the last five or six years. 



But from tbe moment of my lauding at St. Paul Island on the 2Ist of last May, 

 until the close of the breeding season those famous "rookeries" and "hauling 

 grounds" of the furseal thereon, and of St. George Island, too, began to declare and 

 have declared to my astonished senses the fact that their utter ruin and extermina- 

 tion is only a question of a lew short years from date, unless prompt and thorough 

 measures of relief and protection are at once ordered on sea and on land by the 

 Treasury Department, and enforced by it. 



Quickly realizing after my arrival upon these islands that a remarkable change for 

 the worse had taken place since my finished work of 1874 was given to the public iu 

 that same year, and the year also of my last survey of those rookeries, I took the 

 field at once, carrying hourly and daily with me a series of note books opened under 

 the following heads: 



And those you are aware. Sir, are all verbatim annexed to the Eeport. 

 AVould you let me call your attention to iiage 4. He had cited from his 

 report of 1872-74. I read from the middle of page 4: 



In 1872-74 I observed that all the young male seals needed for the annual quota, of 

 75,000 or 90,000 as it was ordered in the latter year, were easily obtained every season, 

 between the 1st of June and the 20th of .luly following, from the "hauling grounds" 

 of "Tolstoi", "Lukanuon" and " Z(dtoi Sands" — from these hauling grounds adja- 

 cent to the "rookeries" or breeding grounds of " Tolstoi", "Lukanuon ", "Reef" and 

 " Garbotch". All of these points of supply being not more than one and a half miles 

 distant from the St. Paul killings grounds — the " Tolstoi" drive being less than 600 

 feet away. 



Then he refers to his own work, at page 5: 



Therefore, when summing up in my published work of 1872-1874, 1 was positive in 

 declaring that although I was firmly convincetl that no increase to the then existing 

 number of seals on these Islands would follow any efibrt that we juight make (giving 

 my reasons in detail for so believing), yet I was as firmly satisfied that as matters 

 were then conducted, nothing was being done which would injure the regular annual 

 supply of male life necessary for the full demand of the rookeries. I then declared 

 "that provided matters are conducted on the seal-islands in the future, as thci/ are 

 io-day 100,000 male seals, under the age of five years, and over one, may be safely 

 taken every year from the Pribilof Islands without the slightest injury to the regu- 

 lar birth rates, or natural increase thereon: provided also that the fnr-seals are not 

 visited by any plauue, or pests, or any abnormal cause for their destruction, which 

 might be beyond the control of men. 



Therefore I am justified in saying that he starts with convictions, 

 j)roperly expressed, in favor of the fact that his previous report had 

 been well founded. 



