304 
BULLETIN OF THE BUBEAU OF FISHEEIES 
Sealing industry on land. — On the Commander Islands the sealing industry was 
in the hands of a trading and sealing company, practically the same arrangement 
that existed on the Pribilof Islands except that the killing of the seals was done 
through the agency of the Government while the company's responsibility began 
with the receipt of the fresh skins at the salt-house door. 
In 1897 the leasing company (the Russian Seal Skin Co.) was operating under 
a 10-year contract from February 19, 1891, to February 19, 1901 (old style). This 
company, however, continued the sealing business during the season of 1901, ship- 
ping from the islands in that year 11,489 skins (Bering Island 5,438, Copper 
Island 5,527, and Robben Island 524), for which, at the rate of 12 rubles per skin, 
they paid the Government 137,868 rubles, as shown by the documents in the Bering 
Island archives. 
On August 4, 1901 (old style), a contract for the lease of the sealing on the 
islands for the next 10 years from September 1, 1901, was concluded between the 
Russian department of agriculture and public domain and the Kamchatka Com- 
mercial-Industrial Co. much on the same conditions as previously, the company to 
pay 10 rubles for each sealskin, 200 rubles for sea otters of the first quality, 100 
rubles for sea otters of the second quality, 18 rubles for first-class blue foxes, 9 rubles 
for second-class blue foxes, and 5 rubles for white foxes." Headquarters of the 
company were in St. Petersburg, with an agent in Petropaulski. 
This company, the lease to which expired on September 1, 1912, was succeeded 
on that date by a new company, Ivan Yakovlevitch Tchurin & Co., also known as the 
I. I. Choorin Co., which held the contract for the skins to September 1, 1916 (old 
style), when the system of leasing was abandoned and the administration of the 
fur industry of the islands was taken over by the fisheries bureau in Vladivostok. 
As the five-year closed season for seals fell within their term, they handled principally 
sea-otter and blue-fox skins. 
Then followed the revolution, and the subsequent events, in so far as they 
,have any bearing on the sealing industry, will be related separately. 
• In the three years, 1895 to 1897, when the writer investigated the Commander 
Islands rookeries the hauling grounds were "raked and scraped" for the last 
obtainable bachelor. At the same time pelagic sealers took tremendous toll of the 
herd at sea, which had not even the slight protection of the 60-mile zone and the 
closed season before August 1. There can be no doubt that the killing on land 
was much too close, with pelagic sealing still going on unchecked. If the estimate 
of the females present on the Commander Islands in 1896 were only moderately 
accurate, the number of male seals killed that year (14,472) would not have been 
justifiable even if the herd had been in prime condition and no pelagic sealing going 
on. As the killings are now regulated on the Pribilofs, though possibly over- 
conservative, there would not have been taken 7,000 skins; but the worst of it was, 
of course, that in the same year probably 20,000 female seals belonging to the 
Commander Islands herd were killed at sea. The next year this toll of females was 
scarcely less than 12,000, yet by the same process of scraping the rookeries on the 
islands the company secured 13,620 bachelors. 
'Theteitof the contract, with the title Kontraki na sdatchu f arendu Kamtchatskomu Torgovo-PromishUnnomu Obnhtcheitvu 
pushnik promishlof na Ostrovakh Komandorskikh i Tiuleniem, is to be found as Appendix I in Suvorof's Komandorskie Ostrova, 
1 612, pp. 281-2S5 
