FUR-SEAL FISHERIES OF ALASKA. 13 



wet weather. Obliged to bow to the caprices of the climate or lose their 

 labor, they were compelled to spare the seals, aud this enforced delay- 

 in 1788-1800 lias saved the Pribilov rookeries from that swift destruction 

 which the keen, quick-witted American and P^nglish sealers inflicted 

 during 1806-1826, upon the great breeding grounds of the fur seal in the 

 Antarctic. They, our countrymen, then used the kench and salt; they 

 were never bothered with the question of how to dispose of their skins 

 after killing' and skinning so as to save them; and they brought their 

 methods of lSOO-1826, the same methods of to-day, up to these seal 

 islands of Alaska for the first time in 1868.' 



No one can vstate with more than mere estimation on his part the full 

 number of seals slaughtered by the Russians on the Pribilov Islands 

 from 1786 to 1817; no lists, no cheek whatever on it appears to have 

 been made, and the record certainly never was made, since Bishop 

 Veniaminov, who from 1825 up to 1838 was at the head of all matters 

 connected with the church in this Oonalashka district, where the seal 

 islands belonged: and who had the respect and confidence of the old 

 Russian American Company, made a zealous search for such a record 

 in 1831-35 among the archives of the company at Sitka, to which he had 

 full access: but the result of his painstaking search he sums up in the 

 following terse statement: "Of the number of skins taken up to 1817 

 I have no knowledge to rely upon, but from that time up to the present 

 writing I have true and reliable accounts," which he puts into the 

 appendix of his published work.^ 



The bishop (who is the only Russian who has given us the faintest 

 idea of how matters were conducted in his time ujwn these islands) 

 seems to liave witnessed them in a uniform condition of decline as to 

 yield; for, in the time of his writing and up to its closing in 1837, the 

 record was one of steady diminution. Until 1834 the killing seems to 

 have been permitted, with all sorts of half measures since 1817, adopted 

 one after the other, to no good result whatever. Finally, however, the 

 supply abruptly fell from an exi)ected 20,000 to only 12,000 from both 

 islands in 1831, "all that could be got with all possible exertion." 



Then the Russians awoke to the fact that if they wished to preserve 

 these fur-bearing interests on the Pribilov Islands from ruin they must 

 stop killing: wholly stop for a number of years: stop until the renewal 

 of the exhausted rookeries was manifest and easily recognized. This 

 zapooska of 1835, which they then ordered, is the date of the renewed 

 lease of life which these rookeries took : and, which by 1857, had restored 

 them to the splendid condition in which they were when they passed 

 into the hands of the United States: and which, now, after twenty-two 

 years of killing since 1868, and under the recent regulations of 1870, 

 together with the pelagic sealing since 1886, we find again threatened 

 with speedy extinction unless full measures are at once adopted for 

 their preservation and restoration on laud and in the sea. Half meas- 



'They began at once that system of disciplined, exhaustive slaughter which had 

 proved so effective in their hands throughout the Antarctic — took nearly 250,000 seal 

 skins on these islands in the short space of fonr months; ceased then only for the 

 want of salt. But, happily, the Government intervened early in 1869, before they 

 could resume their work of swift destruction. In 1854 the first salting of fur-seal 

 skins was attempted on the Pribilov Islands, but the rudeness of the method caused 

 trouble when the shipment reached London. In 1862 it was tried again by the Rus- 

 sians, but it was still crudely done until our people went to work in 1868 with their 

 thorough methods. The Russians seldom bundled their skins when salted; they 

 allowed them to dry while kenching in salt; and then shipped them just as they did 

 their air-dried skins or '•'parchment" pelts. 



- "Zapieskie ob Onalashkenskaho Otdayla," St. Petersburg, 1842, 2 vols. 8°. A full 

 translation of that chapter which treats of that question will follow this introduction. 



