THE FUR-SEALS AND THE BERING SEA AWARD 13 



use of fire-arms, or by any means which tended to drive them 

 away from those islands. The Secretary of the Treasury was 

 further empowered to lease to proper and responsible parties, 

 for a period of twenty years, " the right to engage in the bus- 

 iness of taking fur-seals on the islands of St. George and 

 St. Paul " ; Secretary Boutwell thereupon granted to the 

 Alaska Commercial Company the sole privilege of capturing 

 seals upon those islands. The company according to the 

 terms of this lease was obliged to pay annually into the Treas- 

 ury of the United States the sum of 55,000, besides the 

 sum of 62J cents for each skin taken. Under proper restric- 

 tions such care was taken by the company in killing only the 

 " bachelors," - the two to four year old males, that the 

 number of seals sojourning upon the islands each year showed 

 no signs of diminution, despite the fact that the company 

 was authorized to take annually one hundred thousand pelts. 

 During the twenty years' operations of the Alaska Commer- 

 cial Company in the Pribyloff Islands, the prices of sealskins 

 advanced from $2,.5Q in 1868 to $30 in 1890. At the expira- 

 tion of its lease, the company had paid into the Treasury of 

 the United States the large sum of 85,956,065.67. 



The contract proved to be an exceedingly profitable one for 

 the company as well, and the reports of its success soon 

 spread far and wide. Expeditions were fitted out by ship- 

 owners in British Columbia, in Hawaii, and even in Australia, 

 to engage in the hunt for seals. As the Alaska Company 

 was protected in its monopoly of seal catching on the islands 

 of St. Paul and St. George of the Pribyloff group, and as the 

 few Russian islands, to which the other seal herds repaired, 

 were similarly protected by Russian laws, the method fol- 

 lowed by these free rovers was to drift about in the open 

 waters of the sea, often in the neighborhood of the passes 

 between the Aleutian Islands, and thus intercepting the seals 

 in their annual migration north or south, capture them 

 in the water. This method of attack was exceedingly de- 

 structive to the herd. It was impossible that a discrimination 

 could be made between the males and females, and in killing 

 the females a double slaughter was effected. Besides this, 



