WONDERFUL SEAL ISLANDS. 247 



follow it to these islands, and clearly and correctly appreciate the 

 circumstance which gave it footing and finally the control of the 

 business, I will pass back and review a chain of evidence adduced 

 in this direction from the time of our first occupation, in 1867, of 

 the territory of Alaska. 



It will be remembered by many people, that when we were rati- 

 fying the negotiation between our Government and that of Russia, 

 it became painfully apparent that nobody in this country knew 

 anything about the subject of Russian America. Every school-boy 

 knew where it was located, but no professor or merchant, however 

 wise or shrewd, knew what was in it. Accordingly, immediately 

 after the purchase was made and the formal transfer effected, a large 

 number of energetic and speculative men, some coming from New 

 England even, but most of them residents of the Pacific coast, 

 turned their attention to Alaska. They went up to Sitka in a little 

 fleet of sail and steam vessels, but among their number it appears 

 there were only two of our citizens who knew of or had the faintest 

 appreciation as to the value of the Seal Islands. One of these, Mr. 

 H. M. Hutchinson, a native of New Hampshire, and the other, a Cap- 

 tain Ebenezer Morgan, a native of Connecticut, turned their faces 

 in 1868 toward them ; also an ex-captain of the Russian-American 

 Company, Gustav Niebaum, who became a citizen immediately after 

 the transfer, knowing of their value, chartered a small vessel, and 

 hastened so as to land there a few days even before Captain Morgan 

 arrived in the Peru, a whaling ship. 



Mr. Hutchinson gathered his information at Sitka Captain Mor- 

 gan had gained his years before by experience on the South Sea seal- 

 ing grounds. Mr. Hutchinson represented a company of San Fran- 

 cisco or California capitalists when he landed on St. Paul ; Captain 

 Morgan represented another company of New London capitalists 

 and whaling merchants. 'They arrived almost simultaneously, 

 Morgan a few days or weeks anterior to Hutchinson. He had 

 quietly enough commenced to survey and pre-empt the rookeries on 

 the islands, or, in other words, the work of putting stakes down 

 and recording the fact of claiming the ground, as miners do in the 

 mountains ; but later agreed to co-operate with Mr. Hutchinsou. 

 These two parties passed that season of 1868 in exclusive control 

 of those islands, and they took an immense number of seals. They 

 took so many that it occurred to Mr. Hutchinson unless something 

 was done to check and protect these wonderful rookeries, which he 



