and the management of the herd on the islands, and 2) the ref- 

 erence of all matters in dispute to a tribunal of arbitration" 

 (Evermann 1919:269). 



The Paris Tribunal and Regulations of 1893 



The tribunal met in Paris on 23 February 1893 and reached a 

 decision on 15 August 1893. It had been asked, essentially, to 

 judge whether pelagic sealing or land sealing was the cause of 

 the decline of the herd. In a conservative Old World milieu, it 

 decided against most of the claims of the United States and it 

 established certain regulations which would allow pelagic seal- 

 ing to continue. The regulations were applicable only to citi- 

 zens of the United States and Great Britain. They provided 

 for: 1) A sanctuary within a zone of 60 mi (97 km) around the 

 Pribilofs, 2) a closed time of 2 mo (May and June) injected in 

 the middle of the season and thus breaking it up, and 3) a ban 

 on firearms in the Bering Sea, but not in the North Pacific. 

 The texts of the decision and the regulations were published 

 (U.S. Congress, House, 1898, part 2). The regulations went in- 

 to effect in the summer of 1894 and continued in effect until 

 the treaty of 1911. Interesting "reminiscenses of the Bering 

 Sea arbitration" were written by William Williams (1943), last 

 surviving member of the American delegation. 



One certain, though perhaps minor, cause of the defeat of 

 the United States before the Paris tribunal was the free-lance 

 diplomacy of Elliott. "His persistent urging of a modus Viven- 

 di with Great Britain, the object of which was to stop killing 

 on the islands, while publicly held by him to be a measure nec- 

 essary for the preservation of seal life, was actually suggested 

 by his secret connection with the Alaska Commercial Com- 

 pany (the recently ousted lessee)" (Lembkey 191 la:453). As a 

 matter of fact, Elliott had admitted before a Congressional 

 committee in 1884 that he was an "expert. . .counsel and ad- 

 viser in the work on the islands" under salary of the Company 

 (U.S. Congress, House 1884:36). We have seen no evidence 

 that he continued to receive a salary from the Company after it 

 lost the lease in 1889. 



Another cause for the defeat of the United States was the 

 Government's embarrassed disclosure that it had not realized 

 until 1890, that the seal herd was declining. The routine re- 

 ports of the island agents, in the absence of scientific observa- 

 tions, had instilled in the Government during the 1880's a false 

 sense of well-being (Goff 1891; Elliott 1898). 



Meanwhile, Japanese nationals, not being bound by the 

 Paris regulations, began to hunt seals more intensively, even 

 within 3 mi (5 km) of the islands. In 1906, 5 Japanese poachers 

 were killed and 12 were wounded on St. Paul Island itself 

 (Cobb and Kutchin 1907:58). 



When, in 1894, the Paris regulations went into effect and 

 supplanted the terms of the modus vivendi, the newer ones 

 were seen to be useless. The pelagic take in Alaskan waters 

 doubled in 1894 over that of the previous year. American feel- 

 ing against pelagic sealing ran high. On 25 February 1896, the 

 House passed a bill (H.R. 3206) which provided that, if Great 

 Britain should fail to cooperate in measures to conserve the 

 seals, "then considerations of mercy as well as of economy 

 and justice demand that we should stop the further cruel star- 

 vation of thousands of seal pups by taking what seals are left 

 and disposing of their skins and covering into the Treasury the 

 proceeds, which would probably reach $5,000,000" (U.S. 

 Congress, Senate 1896b:2). The Senate Committee on Foreign 



Relations agreed but, fortunately for the species, the Senate 

 voted down this spiteful proposal for a final settlement of the 

 fur seal problem. 



The United States and Great Britain did agree in mid- 1896 

 to study independently the fur seal problem and to plan for a 

 new look at the treaty in 1898. The study groups of the two na- 

 tions will be discussed later. 



Research During the Second Lease, 1890-1909 



In 1890, William Palmer, of the U.S. National Museum, 

 collected plants and animals on the Pribilofs. Among his pub- 

 lications are a detailed account of the Pribilof avifauna (1899) 

 and an appeal for the preservation of the seal herd (1891). He 

 was perhaps the first to present a "screen tour" of the Prib- 

 ilofs, when he showed lantern slides to the Biological Society 

 of Washington on 17 October 1891. 



Edition 2, slightly changed from the original Pribilof Islands 

 chart No. 886, was issued by the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Sur- 

 vey in November 1890. 



Elliott took the fifth "census" of the herd in July 1890. 

 Upon his original rookery maps he outlined the areas occupied 

 by seals in 1872-74 as compared with those occupied in 1890 

 (Elliott 1898:326-382). Again using 2 ft 2 of rookery space per 

 animal, he estimated that in 1890 there were only 959,393 

 breeding seals and pups, representing 3 1 % of those which had 

 been present in 1872-74 (Elliott 1898:367). We do not find an 

 estimate by Elliott of total nonbreeding seals in 1890. Jordan 

 and Clark (1898a:84) concluded that Elliott's new estimate was 

 "as bad, if not worse," than his older one. 



The Aleuts on the Pribilofs did not kill silver pups for food 

 after 1890. Wrote Kirik Artamonov, "The pup seals are our 

 chicken meat, and we used to be allowed to kill 3,000 or 4,000 

 male pups every year in November; but the Government agent 

 forbade us to kill. . .any more" (U.S. Congress, Senate 1896a, 

 part 1, p. 146). 



In 1891, 2 wk after the signing of the first international treaty 

 for protection of fur seals (the modus vivendi treaty of 15 

 July), the first joint commission representing Great Britain 

 and the United States visited the Pribilofs. The members for 

 the United States were Clinton Hart Merriam (U.S. Bureau of 

 Animal Industry and, later, first chief of the U.S. Biological 

 Survey) and Thomas C. Mendenhall. The members for Great 

 Britain were Sir George Smyth Baden-Powell (brother of the 

 founder of the Boy Scouts) and George M. Dawson (Canadian 

 Geological Survey). Also present, though not as members of 

 the commission, were James Melville Macoun (Canadian 

 Geological Survey), Joseph Stanley-Brown (Treasury agent 

 and son-in-law of President Garfield), and Joseph Murray 

 (Treasury agent) (Murray 1896:58, 1898b:20, 25, 39; Macoun 

 1899:559; Hulten 1940:307-308). Macoun returned in 1892, 

 1896, 1897, and 1914 to botanize. We will discuss later the re- 

 sults of the Bering Sea commission. 



Stanley-Brown's independent assignment during the sum- 

 mer of 1891 was to obtain evidence that pelagic sealing, rather 

 than overkilling, overdriving, and disturbing seals on land, 

 was responsible for the visible decline of the herd. He later 

 (Stanley-Brown 1894) published an article on the "Past and 

 future of the fur seal," a perceptive analysis of the Paris regu- 

 lations and their predicted effect on the herd. 



He was engaged in 1891 and also in 1892 in "continuous 

 general examination of all the rookeries and the plottings of 



11 



