THE GREAT ALEUTIAN CHAIN. 181 



west ; but on our side they are separated by more than four hun- 

 dred and thirty miles of stormy water from the first inhabited 

 island, which is Atkha, where a much larger and a much more fort- 

 unately situated settlement exists on its east coast, at Nazan Bay. 

 Here is a community of over two hundred and thirty souls, being 

 all the people gathered together who previously lived in small scat- 

 tered hamlets on the many large and small islands between Atkha 

 and Attoo. They secure a comparatively good number of sea- 

 otters, and are relatively well-to-do, being able to excite and sus- 

 tain much activity in the trader's store. 



General agreement among those who have visited the Atkhans, 

 as traders and agents of the Government, is that these natives are 

 the finest body of sea-otter hunters in all respects known to the 

 business. They make long journeys from their homes, carried to 

 the outlying islands of Semeisopochnoi, Amchitka, Tanaga, Kanaga, 

 Adahk and Nitalikh, Siguam and Amookhta, some of them far dis- 

 tant, on which they establish camps and search the reefs and rocks 

 awash, as they learn by experience where the chosen haunts of the 

 shy sea-otter are. Here they remain engaged in the chase over 

 extended periods of months at a time, when, in accord with a pre- 

 concerted date arranged with the traders, those schooners which 

 carried them out from Atkha, return, pick them up, and take them 

 back. Then the trader's store is made a grand rendezvous for the 

 village ; the hunters tally their skins, settle their debts, make their 

 donations to the church, and then promptly invest their surplus in 

 every imaginable purchase which the goods displayed will warrant. 



The women of Atkha employ long intervals, in which their 

 husbands and sons are absent, by making the most beautifully 

 woven grass baskets and mats. The finest samples of this weaving 

 ever produced by a savage or semi-civilized people are those which 

 come from Atkha. The girls and women gather grasses at the 

 proper season, and prepare them with exceeding care for their 

 primitive methods of weaving ; and they spare no amount of labor 

 and pains in the execution of their designs, which are now almost 

 entirely those suggested by the traders, such as fancy sewing- 

 baskets, cigar-holders, table-mats, and special forms that are eagerly 

 accepted in trade, for they find a ready sale in San Francisco. 



A peculiar and valuable food-fish is found in the Atkhan waters 

 which has been attracting a great deal of attention as a substitute 

 for the mackerel of our east coast, inasmuch as there is no such 



