the number of seals thereupon. "I could at first not believe it; 

 and, for four or five years, I searched carefully among the ar- 

 chives of the old Russian company. . .but was disappointed" 

 (Elliott 1887:332). Was he unaware of Bryant's 1869 census? 

 Elliott mapped the rookeries between 1872 and 1874 (Elliott 

 1875:76-79). He estimated that on the average, each seal in a 

 harem including breeding adults and pups, occupied "two feet 

 square" (Elliott 1875:77). He meant "two square feet" as in- 

 dicated by his calculations and by a diagram showing 47 seals 

 crammed into a plot 10 x 10 ft (3 x 3 m) square (Elliott 1898: 

 335). He calculated that there were 3,193,670 breeding seals 

 and young, and he estimated that there were 1,500,000 non- 

 breeding seals. "The sum of the seal-life on the Prybilov Is- 

 lands [is] over four million seven hundred thousand (Elliott 

 1875:79). 



Fur seals do not in fact form breeding groups so compact; 

 Elliott's estimate was probably 300'% of the actual herd size. 

 His estimate of total rookery area was 6,387,340 ft' (593,403 

 m^). An estimate made by Kenyon in 1948 on the basis of 

 aerial photographs was 3,566,519 ft" (331,340 m') (Kenyon et 

 al. 1954:28). Elliott's total area was 1.8 times that of 

 Kenyon's. 



Through a compensation of errors, Elliott's figure for total 

 breeding males, breeding females, and young (3,193,670) was 

 almost the same as Bryant's (3,283,200). Bryant had assigned 

 3.6 times more rookery space to a seal but, conversely, had es- 

 timated 3.6 times more total rookery area. 



Elliott was present in at least six summers on the Pribilofs, 

 in 1872, 1873, 1874, 1876, 1890, and 1913. Up to 1890 he was 

 widely regarded as an authority on fur seal biology. But, 

 "when, in 1890, Mr. Elliott reached the seal islands after an 

 absence of fourteen years, and found only a scant one fifth of 

 the seals that he saw there in 1876, he impulsively and errone- 

 ously concluded that the driving of the young males from the 

 hauling grounds. . .produced impotency and destroyed their 

 usefulness as breeders" (Murray 1898b:55). Elliott's angry re- 

 port for 1890 was declared by the Secretary of the Treasury to 

 be unfit for publication (U.S. Treasury 1898-99, part 2, p. 

 302). Elliott was dismissed from Government service on 25 

 April 1891 (U.S. Congress, House 1911:451). His report was 

 published 8 yr later, though we do not know whether in its 

 original form (Elliott 1898). Jordan and Clark (U.S. Congress, 

 House 1898, vol. 3, p. 714) stated that "it is not for us to say 

 what were the motives which prompted such work. We believe, 

 however, that we are justified in saying that its methods and 

 results can not be too strongly condemned." Elliott recanted, 

 in part, and on 13 April 1892 he stated his new opinion that ex- 

 cessive driving was unimportant as compared with the damage 

 caused by pelagic sealing. He recommended a closed season 

 for a few years on land killing and a permanent prohibition of 

 pelagic sealing (Murray 1898b: 127). 



An early attempt to salvage fur seal carcasses was made in 

 1871-72. About 8,000 gal (30,000 1) of seal oil were rendered, 

 but the costs of making it and shipping it to San Francisco 

 were greater than the price it brought (Maynard 1898:297). 



In 1874, Lieut. Washburn Maynard, U.S. Navy, was sent to 

 the Pribilofs to inspect the operations of the Alaska Commer- 

 cial Company and to obtain general information on the fur 

 seal herd (Maynard 1898). He worked with Elliott, though he 

 made an independent report (Maynard 1876, 1898). He ob- 

 served that the area of a rookery varied as the number of seals, 

 i.e., he recognized the outward expression of the territorial in- 



stinct of the fur seal on its breeding grounds. It was more im- 

 portant, he concluded, to measure from time to time the areas 

 occupied by rookery seals than to worry about the actual num- 

 ber of seals. He estimated that the total herd size in 1874 was 

 "not far from 6,000,000" (Maynard 1876:5). 



In July, he and Elliott mapped the rookeries and hauling 

 grounds of both islands, using in part the rookery maps made 

 by Elliott in 1872-73. The Maynard-Elliott maps were evi- 

 dently not reproduced until 1882, in Elliott's monograph of 

 the seal islands. In the preface to this 1882 work are two maps, 

 one of St. Paul Island and one of St. George, with fur seal 

 hauling grounds shown in yellow and fur seal breeding 

 grounds in red. 



"The experiment was tried of examining one hundred pups 

 taken at random from the rookeries, and in that number the 

 sexes were about equally divided" (Maynard 1876:4). 



We have never understood, for history does not tell, how 

 the managers of the seal herd from 1870 to about 1915 knew 

 that they were killing 2-, 3-, and 4-yr-old bachelors. Elliott 

 (1875:117) wrote of "the annual kilhng of 100,000 young 

 males over one year and under five." Quite certainly the man- 

 agers were killing from these age classes, but the question is, 

 how they knew it. We can only conclude that they guessed 

 right. "In assigning the age of three years," wrote Bryant 

 (1880:402), "1 have accepted the judgement of the natives, 

 who are familiar with every phase of Seal life, and are gov- 

 erned mainly in their opinion by the appearance of the teeth." 



Elliott and agent Samuel Falconer measured and weighed 86 

 seals of estimated ages 1 to 6 yr on the killing fields of St. 

 George Island in 1873 (Elliott 1875:150). All but about three 

 were males. Their data for size of the yearling male correspond 

 almost exactly to the data given by Scheffer and Wilke (1953) 

 for known-age animals. For older ages, however, the Elliott 

 and Falconer sizes increased much too rapidly. Thus a male of 

 "six years" by their guess measured 72 in (183 cm) and 

 weighed 280 lb (127 kg); by modern standards only 57 in (145 

 cm) and 134 lb (61 kg). 



The first Government chart of the Pribilofs was issued by 

 the "United States Coast Survey" in July 1875 as chart no. 

 886, scale 1:666,000, with sketches of the islands of St. Paul 

 and St. George at 1:128,300. It was based on surveys by Elliott 

 in 1873-74, on astronomical observations by Dall and party in 

 1874, and on "surveys of Capt. Archimandritov." Our infor- 

 mation comes from this chart and from a later edition, 1890. 

 According to Martin (1946a:138, 143) Ilarion Archimandritov 

 was an Aleut-Russian navigator who had visited the Pribilofs 

 in 1864 as the colonial inspector of the Russian-American 

 Company. He was chief aide to Hutchinson during the first 

 U.S. sealing, 1868. 



In 1878, Lucien McShan Turner visited St. Paul Island. He 

 later wrote "Contributions to the Natural History of Alaska" 

 (1886) in which he mentioned fur seals briefly, referring his 

 readers to the detailed account of Elliott (1882). 



On 20 August 1879, a Dr. White, on St. Paul Island, autop- 

 sied a 2-mo-old pup. "Microscopic examination revealed a 

 probable parasite (hookworm?) to the flat parasitic worm 

 (tapeworm?) that infests the intestines of the seal. The long, 

 flat worm is found in the upper part of the bowels. The cylin- 

 drical worm (ascarid?), with pointed conical ends, is only in 

 the stomach" (U.S. Treasury 1898-99, part 2, p. 272). Jordan 

 and Clark believed that "these observations seem to have ap- 



