190 Sport and Life. 



when the seals, are travelling northwards back towards their 

 rookeries, and the nearer the vessels engaged 'in it get to the 

 Aleutian Chain, which forms the southern boundary of the Behring 

 Sea, the latter being now closed to them during certain months of 

 the year, the better is the chance of securing pelts. They are 

 obtained by shooting or spearing the seals, mostly when they lie 

 asleep on the water. The former method is the one chosen by the 

 white hunters, the other by the Indians, of whom all of the sealing 

 vessels carry a complement. Both methods make it impossible, 

 except in the case of the undesirable large bulls, to distinguish the 

 sex of the sleeping victim, so that many females and cows in pup 

 are killed or wounded. Moreover, and particularly in the case of 

 the shot seal, a certain number escape, to die of their wounds later 

 on, the percentage of these cases being a point concerning which 

 testimony varies to a surprising degree. That pelagic sealing 

 causes a more or less considerable waste of seal life only unreason- 

 able partisanship can deny, and, comparing either of these methods 

 with the businesslike and painless manner of killing on the rookeries, 

 where only animals of suitable age and sex are taken, no possible 

 doubt can remain in one's mind which method is the least wasteful. 

 Pelagic sealing in its modern sense, in distinction to the 

 u coastwise" sealing by Indians, is a thing of very recent origin 

 as an occupation of whites, who until about thirty years ago never 

 troubled themselves about an industry concerning which nobody on 

 the coast knew anything, for trade with the Aleutian Islands was, 

 until 1867, entirely in the hands of Russian traders hailing from 

 Russian ports on the coast of Asia. The first vessel, it is said, 

 that engaged in open sea sealing was a small twenty or thirty ton 

 schooner, the Kate, of Victoria, whose captain, " Dutch Harry," 

 left that port in 1866 on a sealing and -trading venture to Behring 

 Sea. Whether he ever entered that ocean is not known, nor what 

 results were attained, for both captain and crew are either dead 

 or have disappeared. At any rate they were not of a kind to 

 tempt others or cause a boom, and the old routine of the Hudson 

 Bay Company, of buying sealskins from the coast Indians, who did 



