42 AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC QUESTIONS 



their mare clamum convictions regarding Bering Sea, and 

 who perhaps regarded all boards of international arbitration 

 as but sorry exponents of justice. 



(An Act of Congress was passed April 5, 1894, enforcing the 

 award as to American citizens, ;and some slight friction be- 

 tween the two powers was caused by the delay of the British 

 government in effecting concurrent legislation in relation 

 to British subjects. Orders in Council were shortly after 

 enacted (April 18, 1894), and the sealing season of 1894, the 

 first under the new regime, opened. 



Notwithstanding the general feeling of satisfaction with 

 the award that soon succeeded a period of doubts concerning 

 its justice, it became apparent, at the close of the sealing season 

 the following autumn (1894), that the regulations were inade- 

 quate, and that they had evidently been made without that 

 accurate and scientific knowledge of seal life and conditions 

 which the authors of the articles should have possessed. The 

 pelagic catch was unusually and alarmingly large. Including 

 the captures made on the Asiatic side during the closed season 

 of May, June, and July, the number of skins taken at sea 

 amounted altogether to about 142,000 a figure greatly in 

 excess of any previous year's catch. 



Actual operations in Bering Sea soon developed the fact 

 that the sixty-mile inhibitive zone about the Pribyloff Islands 

 was entirely insufficient in extent to protect the seals. The 

 females, and occasionally the young males or bachelors, as 

 already shown, are in the habit, during the breeding season, 

 from May until December, of wandering away in search of 

 food, even to a distance of 200 miles at sea; they do not, 

 as the commissioners evidently presumed, remain on or near 

 the shores of the islands. They are driven to make these long 

 excursions on account of the scarcity of food near the shore, 

 a result naturally arising from the presence of so great a 

 number of animals subsisting entirely upon fish and other 

 forms of marine life. On the first of August, and the end of 

 the closed season, the sealing schooners appeared in force in 

 the Bering Sea and reaped a rich harvest just without the 

 protective zone of sixty miles that had been established by 



