8 THE FISHERIES OF THE UNITED STATES. 



rock* 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 of the Alaska rookeries. — To recapitulate, 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 Autarctic have been, by the united efforts of all nationalities — misguided, short-sighted, 

 and greedy of gain — entirely depopulated ; only a few thousand unhappy stragglers are now to be seen throughout 

 all that southern area, where millions once were found, and a small rookery protected and fostered by the 

 government of a South American state, north and south of the month of the Eio de la Plata. When, therefore, we 

 note the eagerness with which our civilization calls for sealskin fur, the fact that, in spite of fashion aud its caprices, 

 this 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 aud 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 forever. 



0. THE PRIBYLOV ISLANDS. 



3. DISCOVERY OF THE PRIBYLOV ISLANDS. 



Search of Russian explorers for sea-otters and seals. — All writers on the subject of Alaskan 

 exploration and discovery, agree as to the cause of the discovery of the Pribylov islands in the last century. It 

 was due to the feverish anxiety of a handful of Russian fur-gatherers, who desired to find new fields of gain when 

 they had exhausted those last uncovered. Altasov, and his band of Russians, Tartars, and Kossacks, arrived at 

 Kamtchatka, 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 aud those who came after them had entirely extirpated it from that country. Then the survivors of 

 Bering's second voyage of observation, in 1741-'i2, and Tscherikov brought back an enormous number of skins from 

 Bering island; then Michael Novodiskov discovered Attoo, and the contiguous islands, in 1745; Paikov came after 

 him and opened out the Fox islands, iu the same chain, during 1759 ; then succeeded Stepan Glotov, of infamous 

 memory, who determined Kakiak in 1763, and the peninsula of Alaska followed in order by Kreutsin, 1708. During 

 these long years, from the discovery of Attoo until the last date mentioned above, a great many Russian associations 

 fitted out at the mouth of the Amoor river, in the Okotsk sea, and prospected therefrom this whole Aleutian 

 archipelago in search of the sea-otter. There were perhaps twenty-live or thirty 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 which they are engaged in is 

 failing them, a change of search and inquiry was iu order, and then the fur-seal, which had been noted but not 

 valued much, every year as it went north in the spring 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 throughout all 

 Alaska or the northwest coast. The natives, when questioned, expressed themselves as entirely ignorant, 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 

 uuknown laud 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 iu turn to speud the winter. Naturally the Russians preferred to look for the 

 supposed winter resting-places of the fur-seal, and forthwith a hundred schooners and shallops sailed into storm 

 and fog to the northward occasionally, but generally to the southward, in search of this rumored breeding ground. 

 Indeed, if the record can be credited, the whole bent of this Russian attention and search for the fur-seal islands 

 was devoted to that region south of the Aleutian islands, between Japan and Oregon. 



Pribylov's discovery of the islands which bear his name. — Hence it was not until 1780, after more 

 than eighteen years of unremitting search by hardy navigators, that the Pribylov islands were discovered. It seems 

 that a rugged Muscovitic "stoorman", or ship's "mate", Gehrman Pribylov by name, serving under the direction 

 and iu the pay of one of the many companies engaged in the fur business at that time, was much moved and 

 exercised in his mind by the revelations of an old Aleutian shaman at Oonalashka, who pretended to recite a legend 

 of the natives, wherein he declared that certain islands iu the Bering sea had long been known to Aleuts.t 



Pribylov commanded a small sloop, the "St. George", which he employed for three successive years in 

 constant, though fruitless, explorations to the northward of Oonalashka and Oonimak, ranging over the whole of 



* Robbius reef. t This legend is translated by the author, aud published iu the Appendix. 



