ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 



95 



A great many confusing statements have been made to me about 

 this rookery — more than in regard to any other on the islands. It has 

 been said with much i^ositiveness that in the times of the Russian 

 rule this was an immense rookery for St. George, or, in other words, 

 it covered the entire ground between that low plateau to the north and 

 the high plateau to the south, as indicated on the map; and it is also 

 cited in proof of this that the main village of the island for many 

 years, thirty or forty, was placed on or near the limited drifting sand- 

 dune tracts just above the plateau to the westward. Be the case as it 

 may, it is certain that for a great, great many years back no such 

 rookery has ever existed here. When seals have rested on a chosen 

 piece of ground to breed, they wear off the sharp edges of fractured 

 basaltic bowlders and polish the breccia and cement between them so 



thoroughly and so finely that years and years of chiseling by frost and 

 covering by lichens and creeping of mosses will be required to efface 

 that record. Hence I was able, acting on the suggestion of the natives 

 at St. Paul, to trace out those deserted fur-seal rookeries on the shores 

 of that island. At Maroonitch, which had, according to their account, 

 been abandoned for over sixty years by the seals, still, at their prompt- 

 ing, when I searched the shore, I found the old boundaries tolerably 

 well defined. I could find nothing like them at Zapadnie. 



Zapadnie rookery in July, 1873, had 600 feet of sea margin, with 60 

 feet of average depth, making ground for 18,000 breeding seals and 

 their young. In 1874 I resurveyed the field and it seemed very clear 

 to me that there had been a slight increase, ijerhaps to the number of 

 5,000, according to the expansion of the superficial area over that of 

 1873. 



