FUK-SEAL FISHERIES OF ALASKA. 141 



him in dense fogs, and the furious funneling storms of wind and sleet 

 will never permit him to safely hover about these openings. 



But above them, 50 and 100 miles to the southward of the seal islands, 

 in that watery avenue of the returning fur seals every June and July 

 and August, he has a fine opportunity to shoot, to spear, and to net 

 them until he shall have attained the full extent of their utter exter- 

 mination. 



His power to destroy them is also augmented by the fact that those 

 seals which are most liable to meet his eye and aim are the female fur 

 seals, which, heavy with young, are here slowly nearing the land, 

 soundly sleeping at sea by intervals, and reluctant to haul out from the 

 cool embrace of the water upon their breeding grounds until that day, 

 and hour even, arrives, which limits the period of their gestation. 



The pelagic sealer employs three agencies with which to secure his 

 quarry, viz: He sends out Indians with canoes from his vessel, armed 

 with spears; he uses shotguns and buckshot, rifles and balls, and last, 

 but most deadly and destructive of all, he can spread the " gill-net" in 

 favorable weather. 



With gill-nets " underrun" by a fleet of sealers in Bering Sea, across 

 these converging paths of the fur seal, anywhere from 10 to 100 miles 

 southerly from the Pribylov Group, I am moderate in saying that such a 

 fleet could utterly ruin and destroy those fur-seal rookeries now present 

 upon the seal islands in less time than three or four short years. 

 Every foot of that watery roadway of fur-seal travel above indicated, 

 if these men were not checked, could and would be traversed by those 

 deadly nets ; and a seal coming from or going to the islands would have, 

 under the water and above it, scarcely one chance in ten of safely pass- 

 ing such a cordon. 



Open those waters of Bering Sea to unchecked pelagic sealing, then 

 a fleet of hundreds of vessels, steamers, ships, schooners, and what not, 

 would immediately venture into them, bent upon the most vigorous and 

 indiscriminate slaughter of these fur seals ; a few seasons of greediest 

 rapine, then — nothing would be left of those wonderful and valuable 

 interests of our Government which are now so handsomely embodied on 

 the seal islands ; but which, if guarded and conserved as they are to- 

 day, will last for an indefinite time to come as objects of the' highest 

 commercial good and value to the world, and as subjects for the most 

 fascinating biological study. 



Shooting fur seals in the open waters of the sea or ocean with the pe- 

 culiar shot and bullet cartridges used involves an immense waste of seal 

 life. Every sea! that is merely wounded, and even if mortally wounded 

 at the moment of shooting, dives and swims away instantly, to perish 

 at some point far distant and to be never again seen by its human ene- 

 mies ; it is ultimately destroyed, but it is lost, in so far as the hunters 

 are concerned. If the seal is shot dead instantly, killed instantly, then 

 it can be picked up in most every case, but not one seal in ten fired at 

 by the most skillful marine hunters is so shot, and nearly every seal in 

 this ten will have been wounded, many of them fatally. The irregular 

 tumbling of the water around the seal and the irregular heaving of the 

 hunter's boat, both acting at the same moment entirely independent of 

 each other, make the difficulty of taking an accurate aim exceedingly 

 great and the result of clean killing very slender. 



By Mr. Eelton: 

 Q. It has occurred to me, as you have spoken, of the reason why these 

 breeding grounds and what you call hauling grounds are separate, but 



