198 FUR-SEAL FISHERIES OF ALASKA. 



pied by 98 souls. There were 120 when I was here iu 1873. The little 

 streets or roadways are clean and well drained. The grass iu and about 

 the village is much better than at St. Paul, and a small sheep paddock 

 directly under the window of the Treasury agent's house is one that 

 suggests a Kentucky blue grass meadow most forcibly. 



GENERAL MEMORANDA. 



THE FOOD OF THE FUR SEAL AND ITS RELATION TO THE FISHERIES 

 OF ALASKA AND THE NORTHWEST COAST. 



In my monograph of the seal islands of Alaska (p. 64) I called atten- 

 tion to the amount offish that a fur seal probably consumed every day 

 on an average throughout the year, showing that these animals 

 undoubtedly required and secured some 6,000,000 tons of fish as food 

 annually. I said: 



Think of the enormous food consumption of these rookeries and hauling grounds; 

 what an immense quantity of linny prey must pass do^vu their voracious throats as 

 every year rolls by. A creature so full of life, strung Avith nerves, muscles like bauds 

 of steel, can not live on air, or absorb it from the sea. Their food is fish, to the 

 practical exclusion of all other diet. I have never seen them touch, or disturb with 

 the intention of touching, one solitary example in the flocks of waterfowl which 

 rest upon the surface of the water all about the islands. I was especially careful iu 

 noting this, because it seemed to mo that the cauine armature of their mouths must 

 suggest flesh for food at times as well as fish ; but fish we know they eat. Whole 

 windrows of the heads of cod and wolf fishes, bitten off by these animals at the 

 nape, were washed up on the south shore of St. George during a gale in the summer 

 of 1873. This pelagic decapitation evidently marked the progress and the appetite 

 of a band of fur seals to the windward of the island, as they passed into and through 

 a stray school of these fishes. 



How many pounds jier diem is required by an adult seal, and taken by it when 

 feeding, is not certain in my mind. .ludging from the appetite, however, of kindred 

 animals, such as sea lions fed in confinement at Woodward's Gardens, San Francisco, 

 lean safely say that 40 pounds for a full-grown fur seal is a fair allowance, with at 

 least 10 or'l2 pounds per diem to every adult female, and not much less if any, to the 

 rapidly growing pups and young hoUuschickie. Therefore, this great body of 

 4,000,d0o"and 5,000,000 of hearty, active animals wliich we know on the seal islands 

 must consume an enormous amount of such food every year. They can not average 

 less than 10 pounds offish each per diem, which gives the consumption as exhibited 

 by their appetite of over 6,000,000 tons of fish every year. What wonder then that 

 nature should do something to hold these active fishermen in check.' 



An old sea captain, Dampier, cruising around the world just about two hundred 

 years ago, wrote diligently thereof (or, rather, one Funnel is said to have written for 

 him), and wrote well. He had frequent reference to meeting hair seals and sea liims, 

 fur seals, etc., and fell into repeating this maxim, evidently of his own making: 

 "For wherever there be plenty of fysh, there be seals." I am sure that, unless a vast 

 abundance of good fishing ground was near by, no such congregation of seal life as 

 is that under discussion on the seal islands could exist. The whole eastern half of 



'I feel confident that I have placed this average of fish eaten per diem by each seal 

 at a starvation allowance, or, in other words, it is a certain minimum of the whole 

 consumption. If the seals can get double the quantity which I credit them with 

 above, startling as it seems, still I firmly believe that they eat it every year. An 

 adequate realization by ichthyologists and fishermen as to what havoc the fur-seal 

 hosts are annually making among cod, herring, and salmon of the northwest coast 

 and Alaska would disconcert and astonish them. Happily for the peace of political 

 economists who may turn their attention to the settlement and growth of the Pacific 

 Coast of America, it bide fair to never be known with anything like precision. The 

 fishing of man, both aboriginal and civilized, in the past, present, and jirospective, 

 has never been, nor will it be, more than a drop in the bucket contrasted with the 

 I>iscatorial labors of these ichthyophagi iu those Avaters adjacent to their birth. 

 What Catholickno wledge of fish and iishing banks anyone of those old " seecatchie" 

 must possess, which we observe hauled out on the Pribilov rookeries each summer. 

 It has, undoubtedly, during the eighteen or twenty years of its life exi^lored. every 

 fish eddy, bank, or shoal throiighout the whole of that vast immensity of the North 

 Pacific and Bering Sea. It has had more piscine sport in a single twelvemonth 

 than Izaak Walton had in his whole life. 



