80URCES OF SUPPLY. 531 



in two years over 320,000 seals were killed and their skins shipped 

 from these islands. 



South Georgia. — Later still seal were found on the island of South 

 Georgia, South Atlantic Ocean, and from this locality was obtained 

 over 1,000,000 of fur seal, leaving the beaches bare of seal life. 



Cape Horn. — From the coast of South America and about Cape Horn 

 many thousands of fur seal have been taken, and of the life once so 

 prolific there nothing is now left save such remnants of former herds 

 as shelter on rocks and inlets almost inaccessible to the most daring 

 hunter. 



This record shows the nearly complete destruction of these valuable 

 animals in southern seas. Properly protected, Kerguelen Land, Masa- 

 fuero, the Shetlands, and South Georgia might have been hives of 

 industry, producing vast wealth, training schools for hardy seamen, 

 and furnishing employment for tens of thousands in the world's mar- 

 kets where skins are dressed, prepared, and distributed. But the 

 localities were no man's land, and no man cared for them or their 

 products save as through destruction they could be transmitted into 

 a passing profit. 



In 1872, fifty years after the slaughter at the Shetland Islands, the 

 localities before mentioned were all revisited by 



another generation of hunters, and in the sixteen C. A. Williams, p. 542. 

 years that have elapsed they have searched every 

 beach and gleaned from every rock known to their predecessors, and 

 found a few secluded and inhospitable places before unknown, and the 

 net result of all their toil and daring for the years scarcely amounts to 

 45,000 skins, and now not even a remnant remains save on the rocks 

 off the pitch of Cape Horn. The last vessel at South Shetlands this 

 year of 1888, after hunting all the group, found only 35 skins, and the 

 last at Kerguelen Land only 61, including pups. So in wretched waste 

 and wanton destruction have gone out forever from the southern seas a 

 race of animals useful to man and a possible industry connected with 

 them, and it is plain that without the aid of law to guide and control 

 no other result could have been expected or attained. 



MARKETS. 

 Page 266 of The Case. 



Deponent says that what may be described as the fur-skin business 

 has been built up — that is, the product, the fur- 

 sealskins, have been made an article of fashion 56 f r G ' c - Lam P°° n > P- 

 and commerce — and the sales of such skins largely 

 increased, and the methods of dressing and dyeing the same have been 

 perfected almost entirely through the influence and joint endeavors of 

 the Alaska Commercial Company, the North American Commercial 

 Company, the Russian Seal Skin Company, deponent's own firm, and 

 the firm of C. W. Martin & Sons, and their predecessors in the city of 

 London. 



That the first seal-skins of which deponent has any knowledge arriv- 

 ing in London market were consigned by a Rus- 

 sian company to the firm of J. M. Oppenheim & 56 ^ alier E ' Mariin > P- 

 Co., the business of which firm, in far so as it re- 

 lated to the dressing an d dyeing of fur-seal skins, was subsequently 

 taken over by the firm of Martin & Teichmann. That the fur-seal skin 



