ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 7 



should not have been equal to that of the Russian Promyshleniks, who 

 were renowned as the most unscrupulous and the greediest of gain- 

 getters. 



Possibilities for protection. — The Falkland Islands offer natural 

 conditions of protection by land far superior to those found on the 

 Pribilof or CJommander groups. They have beautiful harbors and 

 they lie in the track of commerce, advantages whicli are not shared 

 b}^ our islands. At Desolation Island, perhaps, the difficulties are 

 insuj)erable on account of the great extent of coast, whicli is practi- 

 cally inaccessible to men and nearly so to the seals; buttlie Falkland 

 Islands might have been farmed out by the British Government at a 

 trifling outlay and with exceeding good result, for millions upon mil- 

 lions of the fur seals could rest there to-day, as they did a hundred 

 years ago, and be there to-morrow, as our seals do and are in Bering 

 Sea. But the work is done. There is nothing down there now val- 

 uable enough to rouse the interest of any government; still, a begin- 

 ning might be made which, j)ossibly forty or fifty years hence, would 

 rehabilitate the scourged and desolated breeding grounds of the South 

 seas. We are selfish jjeople, however, and look only to the present, 

 and it is, without question, more than likely that should any such 

 proposition be brought before the British Parliament it would be so 

 ridiculed and exaggerated by demagogues and ignorant jesters as to 

 cause its speedy su]3pression ; hence, in our opinion, it is not at all 

 likely that the English Government, or any of the other governments 

 controlling these many islands of the Southern ocean which we have 

 named will ever take a single step in the right direction as far as the 

 encouragement of the fur seal to live and prosper in those regions 

 is concerned. When we look at our northern waters, we speedily 

 recognize the fact that between North America and Europe, across 

 the Atlantic and into the Arctic, there is not a single island or islet 

 or stretch of coast that the fur seal could successfully struggle for 

 existence on. These facts will become entirely clear when the chap- 

 ter on the habit of this animal is reached. 



Isolation of the North Pacific rookeries. — In the North 

 Pacific, in prehistoric times, a legend from Spanish authority states 

 that fur seals were tolerably abundant on the Santa Barbara and 

 Guadaloupe islands, off the coast of California, and the peninsula to 

 the southward. A few were annually taken from these islands up 

 to 1835, and some were wont to sport on those celebrated rocks off the 

 harbor of San Francisco, known as the Farralones; but no tradition 

 locates a seal rookery anywhere else on the northwest coast, or any- 

 where else in all Alaska and its islands, save the Pribilof group, while 

 across and down the Asiatic coast only the Commander Islands and 

 a little roek^ in the Kurile chain have been and are resorted to by 

 them. The crafty savages of that entire region, the hairy Ainos of 

 Japan, and the Japanese themselves, have for a hundred years searched 

 and searched in vain for such ground. 



Commercial importance op the Alaska rookeries. — To reca- 

 pitulate, with the exception of these seal islands of Bering Sea, there 

 are none elsewhere in the world of the slightest importance to-day; 

 the vast breeding grounds bordering on the Antarctic have been, by 

 the united efforts of all nationalities — misguided, short-sighted, and 

 greedy of gain — entirelj^ depopulated ; only a few thousand unhappy 

 stragglers are now to be seen throughout all that southern area, where 



^ Robbins Reef. 



