REVIEW OF FUR-SEAL HISTORY 127 



1870. The United States leased to the Alaska Commercial 

 Company, for twenty years, the exclusive right to kill each 

 year, on the Pribilof Islands, 100,000 young male Fur-Seals, 

 receiving therefor, annually, the sum of $317,500. 



1872. The Alaska Commerical Company began to expend 

 $100,000 in cash, chiefly in London, in making the wearing of 

 sealskin fashionable. This effort was entirely successful. 



1873. After a careful survey of the Pribilof Islands, and 

 an elaborate computation of the number of Fur-Seals then 

 inhabiting them, Mr. Henry W. Elliott, a special agent of 

 the Treasury Department, announced the total number of 

 Seals to be 3,193,420. He says: "No language can express 

 adequately your sensations when you first stroll over the out- 

 skirts of any one of those great breeding grounds of the Fur- 

 Seal on St. Paul's Island. . . . Indeed, while I pause to think 

 of this subject, I am fairly rendered dumb by the vivid spec- 

 tacle which rises promptly to my view. It is a vast camp of 

 parading squadrons which file and deploy over slopes from 

 the summit of a lofty hill a mile down to where it ends on the 

 south shore. Upon that area before my eyes, this day and 

 date of which I have spoken, were the forms of not less than 

 three-fourths of a million seals, moving in one solid mass from 

 sleep to frolicsome gambols, backward, forward, over, around 

 . . . until the whole mind is so confused and charmed by 

 the vastness of mighty hosts that it refuses to analyze any 

 further." ("Our Arctic Province," p. 313.) 



Some observers estimated the number of Seals at a figure 

 higher than Mr. Elliott's. Others have recently contended 

 that it must have been less. 



