ing of pups was interrupted when pelagic sealers appeared off- 

 shore. In order not to frighten the rookery animals into firing 

 range of the sealers, the Government forbade ail visits to the 

 rookeries. Five poachers were killed on St. Paul beaches on 17 

 July (Sims 1906:15-19) (Fig. 3 bottom). Marsh recommended 

 that virtually all matters pertaining to fur seal management be 

 turned over in the future to naturalists (Marsh 1911:366). In 

 critical review. Marsh's efforts in 1906 were spread thinly and 

 generally unsatisfactory. 



In the summer of 1906, Edwin W. Sims, Solicitor of the De- 

 partment of Commerce and Labor, spent a week on St. Paul 

 Island. He subsequently made a report which is especially val- 

 uable because it contains statistics of the seal herd from 1786 

 to 1906 (Sims 1906, tables 1-5). 



On 1 July 1908, Capt. A. W. Baber, of Seattle, took motion 

 pictures at Gorbatch Rookery which he showed in a "biograph 

 exhibition" at the "Eskimo village" concession of the Alaska- 

 Yukon-Pacific Exposition in 1909. These were undoubtedly 



the first motion pictures of fur seals (U.S. Congress, House 

 1911, Appendix A, p. 583-584, 628). The famed explorer, Roy 

 Chapman Andrews, filmed the seals of St. Paul in the belief 

 that, before his visit in the summer of 1913, "no one with a 

 movie camera had been allowed on the islands" (Andrews 

 1929:183). 



Japanese and Caucasians on Japanese schooners, continued 

 recklessly to hunt seals in the coastal waters of the Pribilofs. It 

 is difficult now to imagine the tension under which the admin- 

 istrators and scientists on the islands must have lived in the last 

 years of pelagic sealing. In 1908 "the watchmen on guard at 

 Northeast Point reported on half a dozen occasions that they 

 had observed the small boats from the schooners to form a line 

 a mile or so in length and, in that formation, advance abreast 

 on the rookery. When close to shore, the occupants of the 

 boats would begin a fusillade with their shotguns, the noise of 

 which would drive off a number of seals from the rookeries 

 and hauling grounds. The boats would then withdraw a safe 





Figure 4.— Top: "Seal Killing aboul 1900. SI. Paul Island" is (he caption on an 8xlO-in glass 

 plale; pholographer unknown. The scene is near Village Pond, where seals used lo be driven 

 Irom Ihe Reef (pholo hy V. B. Scheffer). Botlom: G. Dallas Hanna in his laboralory al St. Paul, 

 1*15; self-portrait (photo by V. B. Scheffer). 



