ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 83 



Looking from the village across tlie cove and down upon the Lagoon, 

 still another strange contradiction appears — at least it seems a natural 

 contradiction to one's usual ideas. Here we see the Lagoon rookery, 

 a reach of ground upon which some twenty-five or thirty thousand 

 breeding seals come out regularly every year during the appointed 

 time and go through their whole elaborate system of reproduction, 

 without showing the slightest concern for or attention to the scene 

 directly east of them and across that shallow slough not 40 feet in 

 width. There are the great slaughtering fields of St. Paul Island; 

 there are the sand flats where every seal has been slaughtered for 

 years upon years back for its skin ; and even as we take this note 40 

 men are standing there knocking down a drove of two or three thou- 

 sand " hoUuschickie " for the day's work, and as they labor the whack- 

 ing of their clubs and the sound of their voices must be as plain to 

 those breeding seals, which are not 100 feet from them, as it is to us, 

 a quarter of a mile distant ! In addition to this enumeration of dis- 

 turbances, well calculated to amaze and dismay and drive off every seal 

 within its influence, are the decaying bodies of the last year's catch — 

 75,000 or 85,000 unburied carcasses — that are sloughing away into the 

 sand, which two or three seasons from now nature will, in its infinite 

 charity, cover with the greenest of all green grasses. The whitened 

 bones and grinning skulls of over 3,000,000 seals have bleached out on 

 that slaughtering spot and are buried below its surface now. 



Directly under the north face of the Village Hill, where it falls to 

 the narrow flat between its feet and the Cove, the natives have sunk 

 a well. It was excavated in 1857, they say, and subsequently deep- 

 ened to its present condition in 1868. It is 12 feet deep, and the dig- 

 gers said that they found bones of the sea lion and fur seal thickly 

 distributed every foot down, from top to bottom. How much lower 

 these osteological remains of prehistoric pinnipeds can be found no 

 one knows as yet. The water here, on that account, has never been 

 fit to drink, or even to cook with, but being soft, was and is used by the 

 natives for washing clothes, etc. Most likely it records the spot where 

 the Russians, during the heydays of tliejr early occupation, drove the 

 unhappy visitors of Nah Speel to slaughter. There is no Golgotha 

 known to man elsewhere in the world as extensive as this one of St. 

 Paul. 



Yet the natives say that this Lagoon rookery is a new feature in the 

 distribution of the seals; that when the people first came there and 

 located a part of the present village, in 1824 up to 1847, there never 

 had been a breeding seal on that Lagoon rookerj^ of to-day. So they 

 have hauled up here from a small beginning not very long ago, until 

 they have attained their present numerical expansion, in spite of all 

 these exhibitions of butchery of their kind, executed right under their 

 eyes and in full knowledge of their nostrils, while the groans and low 

 moanings of their stricken species stretched out beneath the clubs of 

 the sealers must have been far plainer in their ears than they are in 

 our own. 



Still they come — they multiply and they increase — knowing so Avell 

 that they iDelong to a class which intelligent men never did molest; 

 to-day at least they must know it, or they would not submit to these 

 manifestations which we have just cited, so close to their knowledge. 



The Lagoon rookery, however, never can be a large one, on account 

 of the very nature of the ground selected by the seals, for it is a ba^' 

 simply pushed up above the surf wash of bowlders, waterworn and 

 rounded, which has almost inclosed and cut out the Lagoon from its 



