338 HISTORY AXD METHODS OF THE FISHERIES. 



the Lagoon rookery, a reach of ground upon which some twenty-five or thirty thousand breeding 

 seals come out regularly every year during the appointed time, and go through their whole elabo- 

 rate system of reproduction, without showing the slightest concern for or attention to the scene 

 directly east of them and across that shallow slough not forty feet in width. There are the great 

 slaughtering fields of Saint Paul Island ; there are the sand flats where every seal has been slaugh- 

 tered for years upon years back, for its skin ; and even as we take this note, forty men are standing 

 there knocking down a drove of two or three thousand "holluschickie" for the day's work, and as 

 they labor, the whacking of their clubs and the sound of their voices must be as plain to those 

 breeding seals which are not one hundred feet from them, as it is to us, a quarter of a mile distant. 

 In addition to this enumeration of disturbances, well calculated to amaze, and dismay, and drive 

 ofi' every seal within their influence, are the decaying bodies of the last year's catch, 75,000 or 

 85,000 unburied carcasses, that are sloughing away into the sand, which two or three seasons 

 from now nature will, in its infinite charity, cover with the greenest of all green grasses. The 

 whitened bones and grinning skulls of over 3,000,000 seals have bleached out on that slaughtering 

 spot, and arc buried below its surface now. 



Directly under the north face of the Village Hill, where it falls to the narrow flat between its 

 feet and the cove, the natives have sunk a well. It was excavated in 1857, they say, and sub- 

 sequently deepened to its present condition in 1868. It is 12 feet deep, and the diggers said that 

 they found bones of the sea-lion and fur-seal thickly distributed every foot down, from top to bottom ; 

 how much lower these osteological remains of prehistoric pinnipeds can be found, no one knows 

 as yet; the water here, on that account, has never been fit to drink, or even to cook with; but 

 being soft, was and is used by the natives for washing clothes, etc. Most likely it records the spot 

 where the Russians, during the heydays of their e arly occupation, drove the unhappy visitors of 

 Nan Speel to slaughter. There is no Golgotha known to man elsewhere in the world as extensive 

 as this one of Saint Paul. 



Yet the natives say that this Lagoon rookery is a new feature in the distribution of the seals ; 

 that when the people first came there and located a part of the present village, in 1824 up to 1847, 

 there never had been a breeding seal on that Lagoon rookery of to-day ; so they have hauled up 

 here from a small beginuipg, not very long ago, until they have attained their present numerical 

 expansion, in spite of all these exhibitions of butchery of their kind, executed right under their 

 eyes, and in full knowledge of their nostrils, while the groans and low meanings of their stricken 

 species stretched out beneath the clubs of the sealers, must have been and are far plainer in their 

 ears than they are in our own. 



Still they come they multiply, and they increase knowing so well that they belong to a class 

 which intelligent men never molest; to-day at least they must know it, or they would not submit- 

 to these manifestations which we have just cited, so close to their knowledge. 



The Lagoon rookery, however, never can be a large one.on account of the very nature of the 

 ground selected by the seal ; for it is a bar simply pushed up above the surf wash of bowlders, 

 water-worn and rounded, which has almost inclosed and cut out the Lagoon from its parent sea. 

 In my opinion the time is not far distant when that estuary will be another inland lake of Saint 

 Paul, walled out from salt water and freshened by rain and melting snow, as are the other pools, 

 lakes, and lakelets on the island. 



LUKANNON AND KEETAViE ROOKERIES. The next rookeries in order can be found at 

 Lukannon and Keetavie. Here is a joint blending of two large breeding grounds, their continuity 

 broken by a short reach of sea wall right under and at the eastern foot of Lukannon Hill. The 

 appearance of these rookeries is like all the o'hers, peculiar to themselves. There is a rounded, 



