in Alaska. The Coast Guard has its base at Unalaska and the Alaska 

 ComiTiercial Company has a store and a coaling station there. The Kav:;;'- 

 has a radio statioa at Dutch Harbor. . There is also located one of the 

 most active industries in the Islands, herring packing. A few stunted 

 spruce trcGs comprise the only growing timber on the island but tho grass 

 grows waist high and on tho fields are millions of violets and other fra- 

 grant flo¥/ers. In former years thous.nnds of Cciribou subsisted on the 

 island but with the importation of rifles the herds were soon exterminated. 

 The deer placed there in 1914 by the Coast Guard have also disappeared. 



After leaving Unalaska on patrol, the first point of contact of 

 the cutter was the summer hcsrae of the famed Alaskan fur seals, the PriLilof 

 Islands-. Those are located about 200 miles north northeast of Unalaska. 

 They consist of four islands, St. Paul Island, St . ' Cra-orge Island, Walrus 

 Island and Otter Island. They were discovered by Gerassium Pribilof a 

 Russian navigator in the summer of 1786. He was in the employ of the 

 Lebedoff Company, one of the many trading companies which at that time 

 were levying tribute upon the Aleutian natives and fighting among them- 

 selves for the control of the fur industry. Sailing a clumsily-constructed 

 craft through a Bering Sea -fsg, he heard a strange, bollovving sound, simi- , 

 1-ar to the b;:.rking of a band of dogs.^ Ho anchored, and when tho fog cloarod, ' 

 ho saw the islands v/hich boar his name. It did not tako him long to discover 

 that the barking emanated f rem' fur seals, the- skins of which, at that time, 

 wore very highly prized by tho Orientals. Pribilof niimed the southern- 

 most island St. George, after the ship in which ho sailed. 



During the first season Pribilof 's hunters killed m-ore than 2,000 

 sea otters, more than 4-0,000 seals and accumlated much walrus ivory. The 

 invading horde of hunters recklessly -and' wastefully killed hundreds of 

 pup seals arid ycang otters during the years that followed. 



In 1867 the United States purchased Alaska. In 1658 American 

 financiers purchased the buildings of the Russian Companies. In 1869 the 

 Congress passed a law declaring tho islands to be a reservation and pro- 

 hibiting anyone from killing fur- seals except under certain restrictions. 

 The following year on July 1, 1870, the islands of St. Paul and St. George 

 were leased to the Alaska Commercial Company for a period of twenty years. ( 

 In 1895 this was renewed but aT/arded to the North American Commercial 

 Company. In 1910 the GovernmGnt undertook to manage the seal rookeries 

 itself. The seal herd had been depleted. Many rocks on the islands once 

 worn smooth and round by thO; continual movement wore now covered with moss 

 and buried in vogotation. Tliis gradual reduction 7/as duo to tho pernicious 

 activity of pelagic or open sea sealing which was a disgraceful butchery, 

 the United States ' • 



In 1911 / ' as a lesult of this hold a con.eronco with 

 roprosentativos of Russia, Groat Britian and Japan, and it was agreed they 

 jointly/ should patrol the Bering Sea and that no sealing of any kind should 

 be permitted within sixty miles of the shore of any territory controlled 

 by any of these countries. Under this treaty each nation was permitted to 

 kill seal in its own territory. A law providing that a certain number of 

 the bachelor seals on the Pribilof Islands be killed each yoar under 

 government supervision and the skins sold and' the proeoeds ■ divided between 

 the signatory pov/ers, and that every ship of whatever flag, carrying 



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