INVESTIGATION OP THE FUR-SEAL INDUSTRY OF ALASKA. 813 



Mr. McGuire (reading) : 



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 shot- 

 guns and buckshot, rifles and balls; and last, but most deadly and destructive of all, 

 he can spread the "gill net" in favorable weather. 



Mr. Elliott. Yes, sir; that is all right. 

 Mr. McGuire (reading) : 



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 Pribilof 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 on© 

 chance in ten of safely passing such a cordon. 



Mr. Elliott. I believe that. 

 Mr. McGuire (reading) : 



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

 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 peculiar shot and 

 bullet cartridges used involves an immense waste of seal life. Every seal 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 enemies; 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 10 fired at by the most skillful 

 marine hunters is so shot, and nearly every seal in this 10 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. 



You are the author of that, are you? 



Mr. Elliott. Yes, sir; that was a state paper which I first ad- 

 dressed to Secretary Bayard, dated "Smithsonian Institution, Decem- 

 ber 3, 1887," and I reread it into this record of the Committee on the 

 Merchant Marine and Fisheries in 1888. In that I wanted to express 

 the danger to these rookeries (two years before I went up there in 

 1890), the full appreciation of the danger which pelagic sealing had 

 to the commercial value of these rookeries, that they could destroy 

 that value in a few years, and I still repeat that. That is very differ- 

 ent from the extermination of the species which I was facing in 1890 

 on the islands by land killing by the lessees — very far from it. 



The Chairman. Just in this connection, may I ask a question? 



Mr. McGuire. Yes. 



The Chairman. When did pelagic sealing really commence? 



Mr. Elliott. In 1886 as an industry of note, and in 1887 I pre- 

 pared that letter forecasting, foreseeing, the whole ultimate end of it, 

 unless it was checked; that is, the ruin of the commercial value of 

 the herd. 



The Chairman. I thought there was some testimony to the effect 

 that the pelagic sealing commenced in 1886 ? 



Mr. Elliott. No; they began in 1874, in a small way. 



