WONDERFUL SEAL ISLANDS. 191 



Kussian fur-gatherers, who desired to find new fields of gain when 

 they had exhausted those last uncovered. Altasov and his band of 

 Russians, Tartars, and Cossacks arrived at Kamtchatka toward the 

 end of the seventeenth century, and they were the first discoverers 

 of the beautiful, costly fur of the sea-otter. The animal bearing 

 this pelage abounded then on that coast, but by the middle of the 

 eighteenth century they and those who came after them had en- 

 tirely extirpated it from that country. Then the survivors of Be- 

 ring's second voyage of observation, in 1741-42, and Tschericov 

 brought back an enormous number of skins from Bering Island ; 

 then Michael Novodiskov discovered Attoo and the contiguous 

 islands in 1745 ; Paicov came after him, and opened out the Fox 

 Islands, in the same chain, during 1759 ; then succeeded Stepan 

 Giotto v, of infamous memory, who determined Kadiak in 1763 ; the 

 peninsula of Alaska was discovered by Krenitsin in 1768. During 

 these long years, from the discovery of Attoo until the last date men- 

 tioned above, a great many Russian companies fitted out at the 

 mouth of the Amoor River and in the Okotsk Sea ; they prospected 

 therefrom this whole Aleutian archipelago in search of the sea-otter. 

 There were, perhaps, twenty-five or thirty different companies, with 

 quite a fleet of small vessels ; and so energetic and thorough were 

 they in their search and capture of the sea-otter that as early as 

 1772 and 1774 the catch in that group had dwindled from thousands 

 and tens of thousands at first to hundreds and tens of hundreds at 

 last. As all men do when they find that that which they are en- 

 gaged in is failing them, a change of search and inquiry was in 

 order ; and, then the fur-seal, which had been noted, but not valued 

 much, every year as it went north in the spring through the passes 

 and channels of the Aleutian chain, then going back south again in 

 the fall, became the source of much speculation as to where it spent 

 its time on land and how it bred. No one had ever known of its 

 stopping one solitary hour on a single rock or beach throughout all 

 Alaska or the northwest coast. The natives, when questioned, ex- 

 pressed themselves as entirely ignorant, though they believed, 'as 

 they believe in many things of which they have no knowledge, that 

 these seals repaired to some unknown land in the north every sum- 

 mer and left it every winter. They also reasoned then, that when 

 they left the unknown land to the north in the fall, and went south 

 into the North Pacific, they travelled to some other strange island or 

 continent there, upon which in turn to spend the winter. Naturally 



