52 



THE FISHERIES OF THE UNITED STATES. 



appears 



Looking from the village across the cove and down upon the Lagoon, still another strange contradiction 

 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 forty 

 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, forty men 

 are standing there knocking down a drove of two or 

 three thousand "holluschickie" for the day's work, 

 and as they labor, the whacking of their clubs and the 

 sound of their voices must be as plain to those, breeding- 

 seals, which are not one hundred feet from them, as it is 

 to us, a quarter of a mile distant ! In addition to this 

 enumeration of disturbances, 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 unburicd 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 fiat between its feet and the 

 Cove, the natives have sunk a well. It was excavated in 1857, they say, and subsequently deepened to its present 

 condition, in 1808. It is twelve feet deep, and the diggers 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 pre-historic 

 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 their 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 1821 up to 1817, there never had been a 

 breeding seal on that Lagoon rookery 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 moauiugs 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 well that they belong 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 bar simply pushed up above the surf- wash of bowlders, water- worn and rounded, which has 

 almost inclosed and cut out the Lagoon from its parent sea. In my opinion, the time is not far distant when that 

 estuary will be another inland lake of St. Paul, walled out from salt water and freshened by rain and melting snow, 

 as are the other pools, lakes, and lakelets on the island. 



Lukannon and Keetavie rookeries. — The next rookeries in order can be found at Lukannon and Keetavie. 

 Here is a joint blending of two large breeding-grounds, their continuity broken by a short reach of sea-wall right 

 under and at the eastern foot of Lukannon hill. The appearance of these rookeries is like all the others, peculiar 

 to themselves. There is a rounded, swelling hill, at the foot of Lukannon bay, which rises perhaps 100 or 170 feet 

 from the sea, abruptly at the point, but swelling out, gently up from the sand-dunes in Lukannon bay, to its summit 

 at the northwest and south. The great rookery rests upon the northern slope. Here is a beautiful adaptation of 

 the finest drainage, with a profusion of those rocky nodules scattered everywhere over it, upon which the females 

 so delight in resting. 



Standing on the bald summit of Lukannon hill, we turn to the soitth, and look over Keetavie point, where 

 another large aggregate of breeding seals rests under our eye. The hill falls away into a series of faintly terraced 



