252 THE ASIATIC FUR-SEAL ISLANDS. 



supposed emigration would have taken place and that the killing of the greatest 

 number of seals on Copper and Bering islands occurred long after the Kuril Island 

 rookeries had been thoroughly destroyed. 



But it is not necessary to have recourse to such revolutionary theories in order to 

 explain the late discovery of the Kuril rookeries. 



In the first place, the islands upon which the seals were finally discovered to 

 breed are very small, hard to find, dangerous to approach, and difficult to land upon, 

 and in the second place, the seals themselves may be easily mistaken for sea lions by 

 people not familiar with both animals. As very instructive examples of how easy it 

 was to miss these rookeries I may quote two instances. In 1881 Captain Sandman, 

 agent of Hutchinson, Kohl, Philippeus & Co., the lessees of the Commander Islands 

 rookeries, and captain of their steamer Alelcsander II, a man of many years' intimate 

 knowledge of the seals and the seal business, with his vessel visited the Middle 

 Kurils, especially Srednoi Eocks, for the particular purpose of finding these rookeries, 

 the existence of which he had learned from the Aleut colonists who had returned 

 from the Kuril Islands upon their cession to Japan. He had even one of the very 

 men on board who, himself, in 1877, had seen the rookery on Srednoi.' Yet he failed 

 to find the seals which during that same year were discovered on Srednoi Plat Bock 

 by Captain Snow.^ But even the latter, intrepid and fortunate discoverer of seal 

 rookeries as he is, missed a similar opportunity once himself, as he related to me in 

 1896. In 1883 he landed on Kaikoke and was scarcely more than a hundred yards 

 from the seal rookery without recognizing it as such. He mistook the seals for young 

 sea lions, went on board the Otome again, and sailed for the Commander Islands. 



But even these incidents fail to alone explain the fact that about 25,000 breeding 

 seals could remain unknown so long, and the only reasonable supposition is that the 

 rookeries had possibly been overlooked because of the insignificant number of seals 

 composing them, these being then probably confounded with the sea lions, while it 

 was due to a very decided and considerable increase in their ranks that the discovery 

 was finally made. 



In explanation of this let us bear in mind four facts, viz: (1) That while the 

 Kuril Islands north of Iturup are entirely uninhabited by natives at present, yet there 

 was a time when not only all the larger islands had villages of human habitations, but 

 even the smaller ones, such as the Ushishirs, Rashua, and Matua, the latter all located 

 in the immediate neighborhood of the seal rocks ; (2) that the fur-seal rocks themselves 

 have never been inhabited by manj (3) the gradual decrease of the Kuril population 

 during the Eussian regime and its almost total extinction upon the cession of the 

 islands to Japan in 1875; and, finally, (4) the wonderfully recuperative powers of the 

 rookeries when left undisturbed both at sea and ashore, as exemplified by the remarkable 



' These natives, viz, Gregori Kiehin, a Eussian " Creole," born 1843 in Sitka, and Simon Stepanof, 

 born on the island of Akha, both now living on Copper Island, told Captain Moser and myself in 1896 

 that in 1877 they bad themselves seen the rookery on Srednoi. They had, however, only counted 50 

 to 100 seals with young, but as they could not specify the time it is quite possible that they visited 

 the rock before the bulk of the seals had hauled out. Kiehin vras with Sandman in 1881. 



^ Sandman, in conversation with me in 1882, attributed his failure to see the seals to the fact that 

 they were on the side of the rock opposite to where he was with his vessel (see my Russian Fur-Seal 

 Islands, p. 59), but Captain Snovv is rather inclined to believe that he was there before the seals had 

 arrived, since when ho himself landed m\ Srednoi in 1881 not all the seals had hauled out yet. The 

 Kuril seals, according to Snow, are later in hauling out than those on the other rookeries. 



