WONDERFUL SEAL ISLANDS. 239 



for this wretched spectacle, so often presented to my eyes in 1872- 

 73, I should hardly have taken the active steps which I did to put 

 the nuisance down ; for it involved me, at first, in a bitter personal 

 controversy, which, although I knew at the outset was inevitable, 

 still it weighed nothing in the scales against the evil itself. A few 

 febrile disorders are occurring, yet they yield readily to good 

 treatment. 



The inherent propensity of man to gamble is developed here to 

 a very appreciable degree, but it in no way whatever suggests the 

 strange gaming love and infatuation with which all Indians and 

 Eskimo elsewhere of Alaska are possessed. The chief delight of 

 men and boys in the two villages is to stand on the street cor- 

 ners " pitching " half-dollars. So devoted, indeed, have I found 

 the native mind to this hap-hazard sport, that frequently I would 

 detect groups of them standing out in pelting gales of wind and of 

 rain, " shying " silver coins at the little dirt-driven pegs. A few 

 of them, men and women, play cards with much skill and intelli- 

 gence. 



One of the peculiarities * of these people is that they seldom 

 undress when they go to bed neither the men, women, nor chil- 

 dren ; and also that at any and all hours of the night during the 

 summer season, when I have passed in and out of the village to and 

 from the rookeries, I always found several of the natives squatting 

 before their house-doors or leaning against the walls, stupidly star- 

 ing out into the misty darkness of the fog, or chatting one with the 

 other over their pipes. A number of the inhabitants, by this dis- 

 position, are always up and around throughout the settlement 

 during the entire night and day. In olden times, and even recently, 



* I was told by a very bright Russian, who spent a season here, 1871-72, 

 as special agent of the Treasury Department, that the Aleutian ancestors of 

 these people when they were converted and baptized into the Greek Catholic 

 Church received their names, brand new, from the fertile brains of priests, 

 who, after exhausting the common run of Muscovitic titles, such as our Smiths 

 and Joneses, were compelled to fall back upon some personal characteristics of 

 the new claimant for civilized nomenclature. Thus we have to-day on the 

 Seal Islands a " Stepan Bayloglazov," or, "Son of a White Eye," " Oseep 

 Baizyahzeekov," or " Son of Man without a Tongue." A number of the old 

 Russian governors and admirals of the imperial navy are represented here by 

 their family names, though I do not think, from my full acquaintance with 

 the namesakes, that the distinguished owners in the first place had anything 

 to do with their physical embodiment on the Pribylov Islands. 



