XVIII. 

 THE SEAL AND SEA-OTTER INDUSTRIES. 



1. THE FUR-SEAL INDUSTRY ON THE PRIBYLOV GROUP, 



ALASKA. 



BY HENRY W. ELLIOTT. 

 1. DISCOVERY OF THE PRIBYLOV ISLANDS. 



SEARCH OF RUSSIAN EXPLORERS FOR SEA-OTTERS AND SEALS. All writers on the subject of 

 Alaskan exploration and enterprise agree as to the cause of the discovery of the Pribylov Islands 

 in the last century. It was due to the feverish anxiety of a handful of Russian 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 Kossacks, arrived at Kaintchatka toward the close of the 

 seventeenth century, and they first found, of all men, the beautiful, costly, rare 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 entirely extirpated it from that country. Then 

 the survivors of Bering's second voyage of observation, in 1741-'42, and Tscherikov brought back 

 an enormous number of skins from Bering Island; then Michael Novodiskov discovered Attooand 

 the contiguous islands, in 1745 ; Paikov came after him and opened out the Fox Islands, in the 

 same chain, during 1759; then succeeded Stepau Glotov, who determined Kadiak in 1763, and 

 the peninsula of Alaska followed by Krenitsin, 1768. During these long years a great many Rus- 

 sian companies fitted out at the mouth of the Amoor River, in the Okhotsk Sea, and 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 by 1772 and 1774 the catch in that 

 group bad dwindled from thousands and tens of thousands at first, to hundreds and tens of hun- 

 dreds at last. A change of search and inquiry was now in order, and then 'he 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 heard 

 of its landing on a rock or beach throughout all Alaska or the northwest coast. The natives, 

 when questioned, expressed themselves as entirely ignorant, though they believed that these seals 

 repaired to some unknown land in the north every summer and left every winter. They also rea- 

 soned then, that when they left tlie unknown land to the north in the fall, and went south into the 

 North Pacific, they traveled to some other strange island or continent there, upon which in turn 



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