USA > Alaska > Alaska and the Klondike > Part 9
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Some interesting facts bearing upon what it costs to produce the world's gold supply, even from so rich a district as the Seward Peninsula, are afforded by the statis-
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tics of travel and traffic with that section. Seattle shipped during the season of 1903, 110,750 tons of freight to Nome and St. Michael. The value, on the basis of $100 a ton, was $11,750,000. The freight on this merchan- dise ranged from $7 to $22.50 per ton, while the 5,553 people, who shipped at Seattle for Nome, paid from $30 to $125 apiece for their passage. Now all this outlay, to say nothing of the time of ten or twelve thousand people engaged, taken into account and compared with the gold output of gold mining in Alaska, does not look like a very profitable business. But when did gold or silver mining ever distribute its favours impartially ? It is a great game, in which few men win and many lose. It will be always so. Some men win enormous fortunes, and their good luck will always attract many more, a few of whom will be successful. Every man thus attracted hopes that he will be the next favourite of chance, and so he struggles on in Alaska, in Colorado, in Africa. The world's supply of gold is constantly added to, but it costs more, all things considered, than it represents in value or purchasing power.
Coal costs $17 to $20 a ton in Nome, and $45 to $50 a ton 25 miles in the interior. Coal has been found on the Yukon, and on the west coast of Alaska, the most im- portant discovery being that at Cape Lisburne, where it is mined for commercial purposes. Alaska's coal, how- ever, so far as discovered, is comparatively of inferior grade and does not figure as an important resource of the country. A more promising fuel supply is found in the
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manufacture of peat from the thick matted mass of roots and vines which cover the tundra, and which, when prepared as peat is prepared, will make an excellent fuel, and for fuel purposes in the interior is likely to come into use. The Seward Peninsula, it should be understood, is barren of timber, and the only fuel supply of the natives, prior to the arrival of white men, was the driftwood brought down by the Yukon and cast upon the shore.
NOTE .- Among the exhibits in the Alaska building at the Louisiana Purchase Exposi- tion was a quantity of tin ore from Cape York, in the extreme western part of the Seward Peninsula. How extensive or how important these deposits are has not been fully deter- mined, but the indications are favourable. Fourteen claims are said to have been sold in one group for $40,000, and owners of some of these deposits are seeking to have smelters erected at Seattle in order to create there a market for their ore.
VIII THE SEAL ISLANDS
B ERING SEA is a lonesome corner of the Earth. It is considerably less than 200 years since it began to be navigated at all by white men. Alaska was discovered in 1741. Some unsuccessful voyages in that direction had been made shortly before that time, but long after navigators had circled the globe and had be- come familiar with the waters of the southern oceans and after the habitable world had been pretty thoroughly ex- plored in all other directions, the fur traders of Russia began to venture out across the unknown seas to the east- ward of Siberia in their crude and clumsy and unsea- worthy vessels.
The story of Russian discovery in northwest America is full of disaster. Scores of ships and hundreds of lives were lost both before and after the voyage of discovery, which was not accomplished without the death of Vitus Bering himself, shipwrecked on a bleak and desolate island in the sea which bears his name. Russian occupation of the Alaskan coast-the Russians can hardly be said to have occupied the interior-finally came to require the service of many ships to maintain communication between the Russian-American fur-trading posts and the ports of the Siberian coast. But for forty years and more the ves-
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sels of the Russian traders continued to plough the waters of this northern sea, bringing merchandise of many kinds and carrying back the furs and pelts, before they discov- ered that bonanza of the fur traders, the fur-seal islands. They had taken the seal at sea and had learned the value of the pelts, but it was not until 1786 that Gerassim Pribylov, after repeated efforts to follow the seals on their northward migration in the spring, discovered their des- tination. Groping cautiously among the fog banks, he heard one morning the barking of myriads of these curi- ous animals and knew that the object of his search must be near. The island coasts are usually rocky and dan- gerous, and he approached cautiously till the fog lifted and revealed the low-lying islands with their rocky shores swarming with millions of seals. The mystery of the summer migration of the fur seals was solved; here on these islands, which bear their discoverer's name, was their breeding place, and here on these rocks they were killed by the million for their valuable skins, till the in- discriminate slaughter had well-nigh exterminated them and it became necessary to set a limit to the yearly catch in order to save the species from extinction.
Our approach to the seal islands was attended with difficulties similar to those encountered by their discoverer.
The revenue-cutter McCulloch, having on board the senatorial party, sailed from Nome, Saturday afternoon, August 1. For two days the surf had rolled so high against the beach that no boat of any description could live in it for five minutes. Outside, a mile from shore, lay
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our ship and several others, but no one dared venture across the foaming flood. Saturday about noon the wind fell, and in that shallow sea the falling of the wind is soon followed by the subsidence of the waves. At three o'clock we were on board, and an hour later, Nome, lying along the low shore, had disappeared from sight and we were steaming southward over Bering Sea bound for the seal islands, 500 miles southward.
Our course lay a little to the westward from the track of the steamers bound from Seattle to Nome. All night and nearly all day Sunday we ploughed our lonesome way through fog and mist and rain. The fog whistle sounded every five minutes, but not a sail nor an answering sound broke the solitude of that unfrequented sea. Toward evening the navigator knew we must be approaching the seal islands and we went ahead at slow speed till sud- denly St. George, the smaller and the more southerly of the two, came into view. We desired, however, to stop at St. Paul, the larger island, and thither we returned and found a safe anchorage near the village. Lieutenant Barker was sent ashore to arrange for a visit by the senatorial committee the next morning.
When Alaska was purchased in 1867 by Secretary Seward, these islands, as well as the Aleutian chain and all the islands in Bering Sea east of a direct line drawn from the middle of Bering Strait to a point midway be- tween the most westerly of the Aleutian chain and the Commander Islands, off the coast of Kamschatka, came into the possession of the United States. In order to con-
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serve the sealing industry, the exclusive privilege of tak- ing the seals on the islands was granted to the Alaska Commercial company. The concession was for a period of twenty years and ran from 1870 to 1890. The privilege passed then for a like period to the North American Com- mercial company. The Government maintains an agent and an assistant on St. Paul Island and an assistant on St. George, to see that the terms of the concession are complied with. The company have agents on both islands to carry on their business.
When the islands were discovered by the Russians, there were no human inhabitants, and that fact, together with the rocky shores, low and easily climbed by them, no doubt determined the selection of these islands by the seals as their breeding grounds. In order to carry on the fur-sealing business successfully, the Russians brought from the Aleutian Islands several hundred natives and established them on the seal islands as their permanent home. They built for them barrabkies, or dug-outs, clothed and fed them and instructed them in the religion of the Russian church. But their condition was deplorable enough when the American company was given posses- sion of the islands. They were practically in a state of slavery. Transported without their consent, they were paid mere nominal wages, housed in wretched hovels and treated more like animals than human beings, except that they were required to attend the services of the Russian church and to contribute of their meagre wages to its support.
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With the change from Russian to American occupation of the islands the condition of the natives was greatly improved. Good frame houses were built for them by the Alaska Commercial company, the price paid for re- moving the skins was raised from 10 to 40 cents a pelt- it is now 50 cents-a school was established which the children were required to attend, the sale of intoxicating liquors in the islands was stopped, a hospital and medical attendance were provided, and the condition of the natives on the seal islands is the envy of the natives of the other islands. The influence of the Russian church has been against the education of the children, especially in English, so that not much has been accomplished in that direction. There are only 180 natives on the islands now, the greater number being residents of St. Paul Island, where the seal catch for 1903 approximated 19,000 skins, while at St. George Island the company took only about 3,000, mak- ing 22,000 as the total season's crop on both islands.
The killing is always done early in the morning when the temperature is lowest. It was 5 o'clock in the morn- ing when we left the ship. The village stands back nearly a mile from the shore where we landed, and with its rows of white cottages for the natives, the white resi- dence and office buildings of the company and its store- houses, and the white walls and yellow and blue domes of the Greek church, presents, on the green hillside, quite an attractive appearance. The killing season was prac- tically over, but the agents had arranged for a drive for our benefit. The seals lie along the rocky shores, the bulls
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or beachmasters, as they are called, and the cows and their pups occupying the rocks nearest the water, while the bachelors, the young, unmated males, are forced to go farther back on the hillside. As the bachelors only are killed for their skins, this natural division facilitates the work of the drivers in making their selections. Very early in the morning two or three drivers slip in quietly be- tween the bachelors and the shore and " cut out," as the cowboys would say, a bunch for the day's killing. They then proceed to make a great noise by shouting, slapping pieces of board together and by beating on tin cans. The seals are frightened and the squirming, hobbling, hud- dling mass is gradually forced away from the rookery or rocky shore to the grassy upland.
And here they come, bleating like a flock of sheep, ambling along in their awkward fashion through the tall grass. The younger males, and a few females which the drivers will not try to separate from the herd till the killing ground is reached, offer no resistance, but two or three old bulls gathered up with the younger males, but not intended for the slaughter, show fight and rush at the drivers with surprising speed and agility for a rod or two when pressed too hard. Nature never intended these ani- mals to go more than a few rods from the shore, and though their movements in the water are all that the word grace can describe, their movements on land are clumsy and laborious. As they are driven to the killing ground their gait is a sort of canter, as they raise them- selves on their flippers and then pull their heavy bodies
Killing Seal on St. Paul Island
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up. They repeat this movement rapidly for a hundred yards and then fall, panting and exhausted. They become so heated in a drive of 200 rods that a cloud of steam rises from the clustered, squirming mass and they must be allowed to cool off before the killing begins or their pelts will spoil.
The killing ground is strewn with the rotting carcasses of thousands of seals which have been slaughtered there during the season and the stench is almost unbearable to those not accustomed to it. The natives and the agents themselves seem not to be disturbed by it and, after the seals have been allowed to rest and cool off for twenty minutes, the killing commences.
Since milady must have the furs which these pretty creatures wear, and since her wants cannot be satisfied without killing the seals, the method of killing adopted on the islands probably inflicts less suffering on the part of the victims than any other that could be devised. But one who has witnessed the operation once will not wish to see it again.
Here come the killers, three gangs of them, natives who are expert at the business. The first are half a dozen men, each armed with a mamlika or stout club, about five feet long and about three inches thick at the heavy end. They cut out a bunch of twenty or thirty of the fright- ened, huddling, struggling creatures and, striking each one on the head, crush the soft, thin skull. Death is instan- taneous. As the club falls with a thud upon each grace- ful head those that have escaped the first crushing blows
Taking Seal Pelts on the Killing Grounds
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seem to become conscious of their impending fate, and their appealing eyes, soft as those of a deer, their plaintive cries and their frantic but ineffectual struggles to escape would certainly stay the arm of any one not schooled by years and generations to do this cruel work. The stranger to this scene is forced to turn away, though he must admit that the slayers are skilful and that not a throb of con- scious pain follows the descent of the heavy club. After the killers come three or four men with big knives, who open the pelts down the under side of the body and probe the hearts with their long blades. The third squad are six or eight experts who remove the pelts, and who wield their knives so dextrously that within thirty seconds in some cases the soft pelt is stripped clean and thrown fur side up on the wet grass. In the earlier part of the killing season which now lasts only about six weeks, in July and August, the carcasses are left to rot on the killing grounds, but in the latter part of the season considerable quantities of seal meat are saved for consumption by the natives. Seal oil is also made for the use of the natives and to some extent for commercial purposes, but it is not now an important part of the business.
The pelt of the seal, as it lies on the killing ground, bears no resemblance to the glossy, dark-brown coat which is such a popular winter garment here at home. It is about 3 feet long by 2 or 2 1-2 feet wide, on the average, has a grey, neutral tint from the long hairs that pro- ject beyond the fur, and has little of the beauty of the finished product as it comes plucked and dyed from the
A Section of a Seal Rookery on St. Paul Island
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hands of the London furrier. It is provided in the con- tract that only the males two years old and upwards may be killed on the islands, and out of this drive twenty or thirty young females and three or four old bulls, whose fur is too coarse for the market, were allowed to escape and find their way back to the rookery. The agents of the Government are on hand at every killing to see that no females are killed, although that sometimes happens, as our party could testify.
From the killing ground the skins are taken to the salt- house, where they are laid together in pairs, the flesh side in, with a sprinkling of coarse salt between. After remain- ing there for two or three weeks, the skins are tied up in pairs in compact bundles and are ready for market. The sealskin market is still in London, where the best process of tanning and drying has been a well-guarded monopoly for many years, though the method of treatment is now understood in this country and would doubtless become an important industry if the seals were not being gradually exterminated, not by the company having the lease of the islands, but by the poachers at sea.
The first year after the islands were discovered, two million seal pelts were taken. The market was glutted and the price fell to the equivalent of $1 for a skin. Indis- criminate slaughter nearly exterminated the seals and the Russian Government had to regulate the sealing business. A Russian company was given the exclusive privilege of taking sealskins on the islands. When the United States came into possession of the islands, in 1867, and granted
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an exclusive sealing privilege on the islands, commencing 1870, it was provided that not more than 100,000 skins should be taken in one year. That number has rarely been reached as an annual catch. The chief cause of the decline in the number of seals on the rookeries-hundreds now where there used to be thousands-was pelagic sealing. Pelagic sealing is taking the seals at sea, and it is par- ticularly destructive because the poacher cannot tell whether he is killing males or females, and, as a matter of fact, does not care. The habits of these animals are very interesting. Where they come from in the spring or early summer, and where they go to in the autumn, is some- thing of a mystery-the South Pacific probably, but they seem never to land anywhere-those which frequent the rookeries of the extreme South Pacific Ocean probably never finding their way north of the middle Pacific. As the sea is their natural habitat, and furnishes both food and lodging, they probably do not touch land from the time they leave it in the fall till they return again in the early summer.
The first to arrive on the seal islands as soon as the ice is gone are the older males, who come to select the sites of their summer residence. They locate, but not with- out a good deal of fighting over the choice spots, and await the arrival of the females, whom they gather in harems of half a dozen to fifteen or twenty as fast as they arrive. The young are born soon after the females arrive, one to each female.
Somebody, the Russians or the natives, is responsible
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for a very peculiar seal nomenclature. The mated male is called a bull, or in the island vernacular, a " sicatch "; the unmated male, who is younger, is called a bachelor, or " holluschikie "; the female is called a cow, and her off- spring a pup, though the latter is the only seal that bears any resemblance to bulls or cows or pups. The baby seal looks very much like a little black pup as he lies curled up asleep among the rocks ; but when he cries he makes a noise a good deal like the bleat of a lamb. They look as much alike as a handful of peas, and a cluster of them is called a pod. The breeding grounds are called rookeries, though they are only the black, rocky shores of the islands, with nothing about them to suggest the usual significance of the term.
A few days after the pup is born his mother goes to sea for food. Her first excursion is not long, and when she returns she has no difficulty in picking out her own among the thousands of little, wriggling, crying and hungry creatures that crawl and tumble over the rocks made smooth and slippery by ages of travel over them by gen- erations of seals. The later trips of the mother seal are longer as the food supply is becoming scarce near the islands, where there are so many thousands to be fed on fish, and her necessities may take her a hundred or more miles from the islands. It is when the females are on these excursions for food that the seal poachers reap their harvest. While the seal fishers of other nations cannot come upon the islands and take the seals there, they can hover around outside the three-mile limit and catch the
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females in large numbers. The death of the female means also the death of her pup on the island, as there are no nurses in fur-sealdom and no seal mother will minister to the hunger of any seal baby but her own. The seals caught at sea during the summer are almost all females because the mated males never leave the rookeries from the time they arrive in the early part of June till they depart in September. These old Mormons of the sea are exceedingly jealous lords and will not leave their rocky reserves till the time comes for the whole seal pack to depart for warmer climes. Talk about the fast cure- these old fellows, who arrive fat and sleek in the begin- ning of the season, do not get a mouthful to eat during their summer-long residence on the islands and depart in the fall, lean and hungry.
They stand guard day and night growling and snarl- ing, at every disturbance of their domestic circles, and exposing savage teeth that could tear and lacerate fear- fully on opportunity. The visitor is abundantly warned to keep at a respectful distance, not less than forty or fifty feet. Closer intrusion is likely to provoke a charge by the old beachmaster, and the speed which he can develop when enraged is surprising. The battles which are some- times fought between rivals on the rookeries are described as terribly fierce and lasting usually till one old warrior or the other is completely disabled. The rules of the rookery provide for a fair fight-there is no outside interference when two " sicatch " become involved in a personal altercation over the affections of some little fawn-
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eyed beauty of the beach; and such badges of conflict as some of these veterans of many duels wear, would be a source of swelling pride to a German student.
Pelagic sealing, or sea poaching, threatened the destruc- tion of the seal fisheries at an early date. Some of the poachers were Americans and more of them Canadians. Our Government undertook to patrol the waters of Bering Sea as an inland water, and claim exclusive prop- erty in the seals. Vessels belonging to other nations were seized and an attempt was made to put a stop to the pelagic sealing in Bering Sea. Other nations denied our claims, and after considerable friction had been engen- dered between our Government and Canada, Great Britain and the United States submitted the matter to what was known as the Paris Tribunal. That board of arbitration denied our claim to exclusive seal-fishing rights in Bering Sea, but established a sixty-mile limit within which the fisheries of neither nation might take seals. This regula- tion is enforced against the ships of both nations by patrol boats of both nations, one or the other being on duty all the time, and is sufficient to prevent poaching by ships of either nation party to this arbitration; but no other nations concede that they are bound by this regulation of no sealing within a radius of sixty miles. Japanese ves- sels, for example, do not hesitate to invade this zone. There is evidence to show, too, that British and, possibly, American seal fishers have resorted to the protection of the Japanese flag in order to get within less than sixty miles of the islands.
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The mate of the Healy, the boat which carried our senatorial party down the lower Yukon to St. Michael, was at one time engaged in pelagic sealing, and his description of this really exciting sport interested me. Albert Edwards was on Bering Sea as a hunter for a Canadian sealing ship in 1893, the year the arbitration tribunal met in Paris. It was the custom, he said, for a sealing ship to carry eight or ten small boats, in each of which they sent out a hunter and two oarsmen to search for and capture seals wherever they could be found on the sea. The hunter is armed with a gun loaded with buckshot. He stands in the prow of the boat and care- fully scans the sea for sleeping seal. The seal is a sleepy- head. His appetite satisfied after a good morning's fish- ing, he curls up on his back, folds his flippers across his breast and snores so loudly sometimes that he can be heard for several rods. When what is supposed to be good seal-fishing ground is reached, the vessel stops and anchors if possible. The boats work out to windward. Every precaution is necessary, as the seal seems to be able to smell the hunters half a mile off when the wind is right. The small boats move on quietly, more careful to avoid exposing themselves through the animal's sense of smell than through his sense of hearing. It takes a practised and keen eye to discover the seal among the waves, and a lot of careful manœuvring to get within range. A successful shot, and the floating prey of the marksman is pulled into the boat, skinned and the carcass thrown over- board and the search begins again. The hunters were paid
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