316 OUR ARCTIC PROVINCE. 



there knocking down a drove of two or three thousand " hoHu- 

 schiekie " for their day's work, and as they labor, the whacking of 

 their chibs and the sounds 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 oflf 

 every seal within its influence, are the decaying bodies of the last 

 year's catch — seventy-five thousand or eighty-five thousand un- 

 buried 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 three million seals have bleached out on 

 that slaughtering-spot, and are buried below its surface. 



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 subsequently 

 deepened to its present condition in 1868. It is twelve 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 ac- 

 count, 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 a spot upon which the Russians, during the heyday 

 of their early occuj)atiou, drove the unhappy visitors of Nah Speel 

 to slaughter. There is no Golgotha known to man elsewhere in 

 the world as extensive as this one of St. 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 

 here and located a part of the present village, in 1821 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 ex- 

 pansion, in spite of all these exhibitions of butchery of their kind, 

 executed right under their eyes, and in full knowledge of their nos- 

 trils, while the groans and low moanings of their stricken sj^ecies, 

 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 thev belonc,' to a class which intelligent men never did 



