FUR-SEAL FISHERIES OF ALASKA. 115 



and bunted down in .1 calm sea in the quietest mouths of the year, a piaclicaliy unlim- 

 ited quantity of females might, be taken, and, as you say, it v. ould be only a few 

 years till the Alaska seal-was a thing of the past. 

 Yours, very truly. 



C. A. Williams, Esq., 



Xeiv London. 



C. M. La.mpson & Co. 



FUR SEALS. 

 [From an article in Land and Water, July 14, 1877, by Henry Lee, F. L. S., etc.] 



We come to the date when Captain Cook, soon after his return from his voyage 

 in the Eesolutioii in 1771, i)reseuted an olBcial report on New Georgia, in which he 

 gave an account of the great number of proboscis seals and fur seals ho had met 

 with on that island. The lirst named, Morunga clephantiua, is a true seal, without 

 fur, earless, and of an extraordinary iSize. It attains to a length of from 20 to 25 i'eet, 

 and its girth is even disproportionately great. It is furnished with a nasal appendage, 

 which has a certain fancied resemblance to an elephant's trunk, and from this and its 

 great bulk it has received the appropriate name of 6ea-elephaut. Its blubber yields oil 

 of a very superior quality, and its commercial value in this respect \Vasas well known 

 as that of the fur seal for its skin. Cook'a information soon tempted enterprising 

 merchants to fit out vessels for the capture of these auimals. 



It has been stated that during a period of fifty years not less than 20,009 tons of 

 sea-elephant's oil, worth more than £1,000,000, was annually obtained from New Geor- 

 gia, besides an incalculable number of fur-sealskins, of which wo have no statistics. 

 Some idea may he had of their numbers in former years when we learn that on the 

 island of Mas Ai'uera, on the coast of Chili (an island not 2.3 miles in circumference), 

 Captain Fanning, of the American ship Betsy, obtained in 1798 a full crop of choice 

 skins and estimated that there wero left on the island at least 500,000 seals. Subse- 

 quently there were taken from this island little short of a million skins. Theseal catch- 

 ing was extensively prosecuted there for many years, the sealing fieet on the coast of 

 Chili alone then numbering thirty vessels. From Desolation Island, also discovered 

 by Cook, and the South Shetlands, discovered by Weddell,* the number of skins taken 

 was at least as great ; from the latter alone 320,000 were shipped during the two years 

 1821 and 1822. China was the great market to which they were sent, and there the 

 price for each skin Avas from $4 to ^6. As several thousand tons of shipping, chiefly 

 English and American, were at that time employed in fur-seal catching, the x>rofits of 

 the early traders were enormous. 



Does the reader ask what has become of this extensive and highly remunerative 

 southern fur trade i It has been all but annihilated by man's grasping greed, reckless 

 improvidence, and wanton cruelty. The " woful want " has come that " woful waste " 

 has made. Without thought of the future the misguided hunters persisteutly killed 

 every seal that came Avithin their reach. Old and young, male and female, were in- 

 discriminately slaughtered, in season and out of season, and thousands of little jiups 

 not thought worth the trouble of knocking them on the head were left to die of hun- 

 ger alongside of the flayed and gory carcasses of their mothers. Every coast and 

 island known to be the haunt of the seals was visited by ship after ship, and the 

 massacre left unfinished by one gang was continued by the next comers and com- 

 pleted by others until, in consequence of none of the animals being left to breed, 

 their number gradually diminished so that they were almost exterminated, ouly a 

 few stragglers remaining where millions were once fouyd. > In some places where 

 formerly they gathered together in such densely packed crowds upon the shore that 

 a. boat's crew could not find room to land till they had dispersed them for a space 

 with oars and boat-hooks, not one fur seal was to be found even so long ago as lei35. 



From other localities where the seals have not been destroyed or driven away we 

 still annually receive a few skins, stripped chieliy by small ]>arties of men detached 

 from ship's crews and left to " watch out " for the arrival of the animals during their 

 breeding season and to shoot them singly as they come on shore. 



If the southern species is to be saved from extinction and the trade revived it must 

 be by strong protective measures; but to bo effectual they must be sternly enforced. 

 That this might be done has been proved by the success which has been attained 

 wherever regulations have been adopted. For nearly half a century the seal killing 



* Weddell was an intrepid sailor as well as a highly intelligent observer. In 1823, 

 with two small vessels under his command, the Jane, of Leith, 160 tons, and the JJcuu- 

 foy, of 65 tons, he penetrated 214 miles nearer the South Pole than Cook or any other 

 navigator liad previously gone. Ho met with the fur seal in South Georgia and on 

 the South Orkneys and South Shetlands, and unhesitatingly identified it with that of 

 the Falklands. 



