HUNTING THE SEA OTTER. 



CHAPTER I. 



TOWARDS the end of the seventeenth century, Feodore 

 Altosov, with a band of pioneering Cossacks, arrived 

 at the end of the Kamschatka Peninsula and became 

 acquainted, for the first time, with the rare and beautiful fur 

 of the sea-otter. Ignorant of their value, and prizing them 

 but little above Ihe skins of hair seals and sea-lions, the 

 natives were only too glad to barter the pelts for such 

 trifles as the Russians possessed. Greed on the one side 

 and fear of the intruders on the other led before long to 

 the practical extermination of the animal along the whole 

 of the Kamschatkan seaboard. A new impulse was given, 

 however, to this profitable trade in 1 743. when the survivors 

 of Veit Behring's second and disastrous voyage landed at 

 Petropaulovski, bringing with them large quantities of otter 

 skins from the hitherto unknown Aleutian and Commander 

 Islands. Two years later Michael Novidoskov pushed 

 boldly into the seas farther north, and, after exploring them 

 for a distance of seven hundred miles in an open boat, 

 beached his primitive bark on the shores of Attoo, the 

 extreme western islet of the Aleutian Chain. Quickly 

 followed by others as hardy and intrepid as himself, the 

 trade carried on in the rude vessels of the time soon 

 assumed such proportions that by 1769 a great part of 

 Alaska had been explored and roughly charted, while in 

 1799, when the Russian- American Company was incor- 

 porated under the authority of the Government of St. 

 Petersburg, there were more than sixty distinct trading 



B 



