THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN. 179 



Attoo, Atkha, and Oomnak are the only villages, the last closely ad- 

 joins Oonalashka, on a large island of the same name. 



Attoo is the extreme western town which is or can be located on 

 the North American continent. It is the first land made and dis- 

 covered by the Russians, as they became acquainted with the Aleu- 

 tian chain. Michael Novodiskov, a sailor who had survived Bering 

 and the wreck of the St. Peter in 1741, took command of a small 

 shallop in 1745, and sailed from Lower Kamchatka. He reached 

 Attoo, and also landed on its sister island of Aggatoo, in the same 

 season. The Aleutes were then numerous, bold, and richly sup- 

 plied with sea-otter skins. Now, nothing but the ruined sites of 

 once populous villages remain behind to attest the truth of that 

 early Russian narrative ; and the descendants, who number but a 

 little more than one hundred souls, are living in a small hamlet 

 that nestles in the shelter of that beautiful harbor on the north side 

 of Attoo Island, at the rear of which abrupt hills and high moun- 

 tains suddenly rise. A sand-beach before the village is fringed 

 by a most luxurious growth of rank grass, that wild wheat of the 

 north, the tasselled seed-plumes of which are waving as high as 

 the waists, and even the heads of the natives themselves. 



Sea-otters have been virtually exterminated or driven from 

 the coast here, so that the residents of Attoo are, in worldly goods, 

 poor indeed ; and a small trader's store is stationed here, more for 

 the sake of charity than of commercial gain. But they have an 

 abundance of sea-lion meat, of eggs and water-fowl ; a profusion of 

 fish cod, halibut, algae mackerel, and a few salmon. They have a 

 liberal supply of drift-wood landed by currents upon the shores of 

 this and the contiguous rugged islets. Several times during the 

 last ten years have traders endeavored to coax these inhabitants 

 to abandon Attoo and go with them to better situations for sea- 

 otter hunting. But, although pinched by poverty, yet so strongly 

 attached are they to this lonely island of their birth, that they have 

 obstinately declined. Though they are poor, yet the contrast be- 

 tween their cheerful, healthy faces and those debauched coun- 

 tenances which we observed at the wealthy villages of Protassov 

 and Belcovsky is a delightful one, and preaches an eloquent ser- 

 mon in its own reflection. Naturally the people of Attoo do not 

 enjoy much sugar, tea, cloth, and other little articles which they 

 have learned to covet from the trader's store ; so we find them liv- 

 ing nearer the primitive style of Aleutian ancestry than elsewhere 



