34 FUR-SEAL FISHERIES OF ALASKA. 



It was excavated in 1857, tliey say, and subsequently deepened to its 

 present condition in 1808. It is 12 feet deep, and the diggers said that 

 they found bones of tlie sea lion and fur seal thickly distributed every 

 foot down, from top to bottom. How much lower these osteological 

 renniins of prehistoric pinnipeds can be found no one knows as yet. 

 The water here on that account has never been lit 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 liussians, dur- 

 ing the heydays of their early occupation, drove the unhappy visitors 

 of Nail Speel to slaughter. There is no Golgotha known to man else- 

 where in the world as extensive as this one of St. Paul. 



Yet, tlie natives say that this Lagoon rookery is a new feature in the 

 distribution of the seals ; that when their people first came here and 

 located a part of the present village, in 18L*4 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 beginning, not very long ago, until 

 they have attained their present numerical expansion, in spite of all 

 these exhibitious of butchery of their kind, executed riglit under their 

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

 moaniugs of their stricken species stretched out beneath the clubs of 

 the sealers must have been 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 did 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 seals: for, it is a bar 

 simply i)ushed 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 St. Paul, walled out from salt water and 

 freshened by rain and melting snow, as are the other pools, lakes, and 

 lakelets on the island. 



LAGOON ROOKERY (1890). 



[7/s condition and appearance July, ISdO."] 



There has been little or no change in the character of the topograph- 

 ical features of the Lagoon rookery since my survey of 1872, except that 

 the sea wall of bowlders which separates the lagoon from Bering Sea, 

 this breakwater, has been shoved up still higlier by ice floes, some 6 or 

 10 feet perhaps. That shoving up of these bowlders, which compose the 

 lagoon seawall on which the rookery is establislied, Ijas also resulted in 

 shoaling the cove. Tliis village lagoon has been filling up very x)ercep>;- 

 bly since 1808, when Hutchinson and Morgan were able to sail in a small 

 sloop, drawing feet of water, np to its liead. To-day, such a vessel 

 could not come nearer than a mile to tlieir anchorage of 1808. The 

 principal shoaling takes place in a direct line here between Tolstoi Point 

 and the village hill, where a rocky reef seems to be slowly rising, pushed 

 up by ice fields. The sloop yacht Jahez Hoice, which was wrecked in 

 1873, on Akootan,.is probably the last seagoing vessel that has or ever 

 will gain an entrance to the village lagoon, St. Paul Island, or swing at 

 anchor in the cove. 



The singular location of this Lagoon roo"kery, in close contact with 

 the killing grounds where most of the seals are slaughtered on St. Paul 

 Island (save those killed at Northeast Point), and its immediate juxta- 



