8 ' ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 



iiiillions once were found, and a small rookeiy, protected and fostered 

 bj^ tlie government of a South American State, north and south of the 

 mouth of the Rio de la Plata. When, therefore, we note the eager- 

 ness with which our civilization calls for seal-skin fur, the fact that, in 

 spite of fashion and its caprices, tliis fur is and always will be an 

 article of intrinsic value and in demand, the thought at once occurs 

 that the Government is exceedingly fortunate in having this great 

 amphibious stock yard far up and away in the quiet seclusion of 

 Bering Sea, from which it shall draw an everlasting revenue and on 

 which its wise regulations and its firm hand can continue the seals 

 forevei". 



DISCOVERY OF THE PRIBILOF ISLANDS. 



Search op Russian explorers for sea otters and seals. — All 

 writers on tlie subject of Alaskan exploration and discovery agree as to 

 the cause of the discovery of the Pribilof Islands in the last century. 

 It was due to the feverish anxiety of a handful of Russian fur gath- 

 erers who desired to find new fields of gain when tlie.y had exhausted 

 tliose last uncovered. Altasov, and his band of Russians, Tartars, and 

 Kossaoks, arrived at Kamchatka toward the close of the seventeenth 

 century, and they first found, of all men, the beautiful, costly, rare fur 

 of the sea otter. The animal bearing this pelage abounded then on 

 that coast, but by the middle of the eighteenth century they and those 

 wlio came after them had entirely extirpated it from that country. 

 Then the survivors of Bering's second voyage of observation, in 

 1741-42, and Tscherikov brought back an enormous number of skins 

 from Bering Island; tlien Michael Novodiskov discovered Attoo, and 

 the contiguous islands, in 1745; Paikov came after him and opened 

 out the Fox Islands, in the same chain, during 1759; then succeeded 

 Stepan Glotov, of infamous memory, who determined Kakiak in 17G3, 

 and the peninsula of Alaska followed in order by Krenitsin, 1768. 

 During these long years, from the discovery of Attoo until the last 

 date mentioned above a great jnany Russian associations fitted out at 

 the mouth of the Amoor River, and the Okotsk Sea, and pi-ospected 

 therefrom this whole Aleutian Archipelago in search of the sea otter. 

 There were perhaps 25 or 30 different companies, with quite a fleet of 

 small vessels, and so energetic and thorough were they in their search 

 and capture of the sea otter that along by 1772 and 1774 the catch in 

 this group had dwindled down from thousands and tens of thousands 

 at first, to hundreds and tens of hundreds at last. As all men do 

 when they find that that whicli they are engaged in is failing them, 

 a change of search and inquiry was in order, and then the fur seal, 

 which iiad been noted but not valued much, every yeav as it went 

 north in the sjjring through the passes and channels of the Aleutian 

 chain, then going back south again in the fall, became the source of 

 much speculation as to where it spent its time on land and how it 

 bred. Nobody had ever heard of its stopping one solitary hour on a 

 single rock or beach tliroughout all Alaska or the northwest coast. 

 The natives, when questioned, expressed themselves as entirely' igno- 

 rant, though they believed, as they believe in many things of which 

 they have no knowledge, that these seals repaired to some unknown 

 land in the north every summer and left every winter. They also 

 reasoned, then, that when they left the unknown land to the north in 

 the fall and went south into the North Pacific, they traveled to some 

 other strange island or continent there upon which in turn to spend 

 the winter. Naturally the Russians preferred to look for the sup- 



