APPENDIX TO CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 745 
on these two islands of St. Pan] and St. George engaged to their utmost ability 
throughout full seventeen years in unbroken succession in taking fur seal-skins. 
Had these early Russian fur hunters then possessed the knowledge and means of 
curing skins in salt that we now have, together with those appliances i in use to-day 
on the seal islands of Alaska, I am well satistied in my own mind that they would 
have killed every fur-seal th: it remained to show itself in less than three years after 
they began operations—that they would have swept every animal from these grounds, 
long, long before the old Russian America Company assumed autocratic control of 
these interests in 17 799, and all Alaska as well. 
But fortunately for us, and the world as well, they did not know anything about 
curing skins in salt—they had but one method, and that was to stretch ont the green 
skins and air-dr y them upon frames in long low-drying honses, or in bright weather 
during August, September, and October to peg them out upon the eround. 
Thus, this tedious process in a climate as damp, foggy, and stormy as is that 
peculiar to the seal islands of Alaska made these Slavonian sealers spend ten times 
as much time in the act of curing their fur-seal pelts as it took them to drive and 
kill; then, too, in those early days they were remote from a market, had no prompt, 
economical means of transportation to London, and depended wholly upon the 
idiosyncrasies of the Chinese trade via Kiachta; but even with this extraordinary 
hindrance, it seems that they took in that laborious and risky manner at least 100,000 
fur seal-skins every year.* 
They took so many that by 1803 several hundred thousand of these air-dried pelts 
had accumulated over the ability of the old Russian Company to dispose of them in 
time to prevent their decay—moulding and damp, then abruptly decaying—rotting 
in huge pilesas they were stacked up in the warehouses at Kodiak, so ‘“‘it became 
59 necessary to cut or throw into the sea 700,000 pelts” during that year. Natur- 
ally this loss of labour, time, and money cooled the ardour of the sealing 
gangs which were working the Pribyloff Islands—they worked slower when they 
did work, and most likely never worked at all in wet weather; obliged to bow to 
the eaprices of the climate or lose their labour, they were thus obliged to spare the 
seals, and this enforced delay in 1788-1806 has saved the Pribylotf rookeries from 
that swift destruction which the keen, quick-witted American and English sealers 
visited in 1806-26 upon the great breeding grounds of the fur-seal in the Antarctic; 
they, our countrymen, then used the kench and salt; they never were 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 1806-26—the same methods of to-day—up 
to tlfese seal islands of Alaska for the first time in 1868.t 
No one can state, with more than mere estimation on his part, the full number of 
fur-seals slaughtered by the Russians on the Pribyloff Islands from 1786 to 1817; no 
lists, no checks whatever on it appear to have been made, and the record certainly 
never was made, since Bishop Veniaminoyv, who, from 1825 up to 1838 was at the he: ad 
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 1834-35 among the archives of 
the Company at Sitka, where 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.t 
The Bishop (who is the only Russian who has given us the faintest idea of how 
matters were conducted in his time upon these islands) seems to have witnessed them 
in a steady 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 1854; the killing 
seems to have been permitted with all sorts of half measures since 1817, adopted one 
*< Ty the first years on St. Paul’s Island from 50,000 to 60,000 were taken annually, 
and on St. George from 40,000 to 50,000 every year. Such horrible killing was neither 
necessary nor demanded. The skins were frequently taken without any list or count. 
In 1803, 800,000 seal-skins had accumulated, and it was impossible to make advanta- 
geous sale of so many skins, for in this great number so many were spoiled that it 
became necessary to cut or throw into the sea 700,000 pelts! ”—( Bishop Veniaminovy, 
““Zapieskie,” &c., 1848, vol., chap. xii.) 
+tThey began at once that system of disciplined exhaustive slaughter which has 
proved so effective in their hands throughout the Antarctic—took nearly 300,000 seal- 
skins on these islands in the short space of four months, ceased then only for want of 
salt; but, happily, the Government intervened before they could resume their work 
of swift destruction. 
t “ Zapieski ob Oonalashkenskaho Otdayla:” St. Petersburgh, 1842; 2 vols,80. A 
ae translation of that chapter which treats of this question will follow this intro- 
uction. 
