130 OUit ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



style of Baranov's bateaux. As matters are now conducted, the 

 hunting-parties do not let the sea-otter have a day's rest during the 

 whole year : parties relieve each other in orderly, steady succession, 

 and a continual warfare is maintained. Stimulated by our people, 

 this persistence is rendered still more deadly to the kahlan by the 

 use of rifles of our best make, which, in the hands of the young 

 and ambitious natives, in spite of the warnings of their old sires, 

 must result in the virtual extermination of that marine beast.* 



This is the more important because all the world's supply comes 

 from the North Pacific and Bering Sea, and upon its continuance 

 between four thousand and five thousand semi-civilized natives of 

 Alaska depend absolutely and wholly for the means by w^hich they 

 are enabled to live beyond simple barbarism ; its chase and the 

 jjroceeds of its capture furnish the only employment offered by 

 their country, and the revenue by which the}^ can feed and clothe 

 themselves as they do, and, by so doing, aj^pear to all intents and 

 purposes much superior to their Indian neighbors of Southeast- 

 ern Alaska, or their Eskimo cousins of Beiing Sea. 



The sea-otter, like the fur-seal, is another striking illustration 

 of an animal long known and highly prized in the commercial 

 world, yet respecting the life and habits of which nothing definite 

 has been ascertained or jDublished. The reason for this is obvious, 

 for, save the natives who liunt them, no one properly qualified to 

 write has ever had an opportunity of observing the Enhydra so as 

 to study it in a state of nature, inasmuch as of all the shy, sensitive 

 beasts upon the capture of which man sets any value whatever, 

 this creature is the most keenly on the alert and difficult to obtain ; 

 and, also, like the fur-seal, it possesses, to us, the enhancing value 



* It is a fact, coincident with the diminution of the sea-otter life under 

 the pressure of Russian greed, that the population of the Aleutian Islands fell 

 off at the same time and in the same ratio. The Slavonians regarded the lives 

 of these people as they did those of dogs, and treated them accordingly. They 

 impressed and took, under Baranov's orders, in 1790-180G, and his subordinates, 

 hunting-parties of five hundred to one thousand picked Aleutes, eleven or 

 twelve hundred miles to the eastward from their homes at Oonalashka, Oom- 

 nak. Akoon, and Akootan. This terrible sea-journey was made by these 

 natives in skin "baidars" and bidarkies, traversing one of the wildest and 

 roughest of coasts. They were used not only for the drudgery of otter-hunting 

 in Cook's Inlet and the Sitkan archipelago, but forced to fight the Koloshians 

 and other savages all the way up and down those inhospitable coasts. That 

 soon destroyed them — very few ever got back to tlie Aleutian Islands alive- 



