340 NORTH AMERICAN MUSTELIDiE. 



very great, aud compared with what are now captured seem 

 perfectly, fabulous; for instance, when the Prybilov Islands were 

 first discovered, two sailors, Lukaunon aud Kaiekov, killed at 

 St. Paul's Island, in the first year of occupation, yire thousand, 

 the next year they got less than a thousand, and in six years 

 after not a single sea-otter appeared, and none have appeared 

 since. When Shellikov's party first visited Cook's Inlet, they 

 secured three thousand; during the second year, two thousand ; 

 in the third, only eight hundred; the season following they 

 obtained six hundred; and finally, in 1812, less than a hundred, 

 and since then not a tenth of that number. The first visit made 

 by the Eussians to the Gulf of Yahkutat, in 1794, two thousand 

 sea-otters were taken, but they diminished so rapidly that in 

 1799 less than three hundred were taken. In 1798 a large party 

 of Russians and Aleuts captured in Sitka Sound and neighbor- 

 hood twelve hundred skins, besides those for which they traded 

 with the natives there, fully as many more; and in the spring 

 of 1800 a few American and English vessels came into Sitka 

 Sound, anchored off the small Eussian settlement there, and 

 traded with the natives for over two thousand skins, getting 

 the trade of the Indians by giving tire-arms and powder, ball, 

 &c., which the Eussians did not dare to do, living then, as they 

 were, in the country. In one of the early years of the Eussian 

 American Company, 1801, Baranov went to the Okotsk from 

 Alaska with fifteen thousand sea-otter skins, that were worth 

 as much then as they are now, viz, fully $1,000,000. 



" The result of this warfare upon the sea-otters, with ten 

 hunters then where there is one today, was not long delayed. 

 Everywhere throughout the whole coast-line frequented by 

 them the diminution set in, and it became difficult to get to 

 places where a thousand have been as easily obtained as twenty- 

 five or thirty. A Eussian chronicler says : ' The numbers of 

 several kinds of animals are growing very much less in the 

 present as compared with past times ; for instance the Company 

 here (Ounalashka) regularly killed more than a thousand sea- 

 otters annually ; now (1835) from seventy to a hundred and 

 fifty are taken; and there was a time, in 1826, when the return* 

 from the whole Ounalashka district (the Aleutian Islands) were 

 only fifteen s'kins.'^ 



*' It is also a fact coincident with this diminution of sea- 

 otters, that the population of the Aleutian Islands fell off almost 

 in the same proportion. The Eussians regarded the lives of 



