USA > Alaska > Our Arctic province, Alaska and the Seal islands > Part 20
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When they the approaching time perceive, They flee the deep, and watery pastures leave ; On the dry ground, far from the swelling tide, Bring forth their young, and on the shores abide Till twice six times they see the eastern gleams Brighten the hills and tremble on the streams. The thirteenth morn, soon as the early dawn Hangs out its crimson folds or spreads its lawn, No more the fields and lofty coverts please, Each hugs her own and hastes to rolling seas. -OVID.
THE story of the gloomy grandeur of Alaskan scenery and the wild existence of its inhabitants is not half told until that picture of what we observe on the Pribylov Islands of Bering Sea is graphic- ally drawn. Here is annually presented one of the most mar-
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vellous exhibitions of massed animal-life that is known to man, civilized or savage ; here is exhibited the perfect working of an anomalous industry, conducted without a parallel in the history of human enterprise, and of immense pecuniary and biological value.
In treating this subject the writer has trusted to nothing save what he himself has seen, for, until these life-studies were made by him, no succinct and consecutive history of the lives and move- ments of these animals had been published by any man. Fanciful yarns, woven by the ingenuity of whaling captains, in which the truth was easily blended with that which was not true, and short paragraphs penned hastily by naturalists of more or less repute, formed the knowledge that we had. Best of all was the old diary of Steller, who, while suffering bodily tortures, the legacy of gan- grene and scurvy, when wrecked with Bering on the Commander Islands, showed the nerve, the interest, and the energy of a true naturalist. He daily crept, with aching bones and watery eyes, over the boulders and mossy flats of Bering Island to catch glimpses of those strange animals which abode there then as they abide to- day. Considering the physical difficulties that environed Steller, the notes made by him on the sea-bears of the North Pacific are remarkably good ; but, as I have said, they fall so far from giving a fair and adequate idea of what these immense herds are and do as to be absolutely valueless for the present hour. Shortly after Steller's time great activity sprang up in the South Atlantic and Pacific over the capture and sale of fur-seal skins taken in those localities. It is extraordinary that, though whole fleets of Ameri- can, English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese vessels engaged dur- ing a period of protracted enterprise of over eighty years in length in the business of repairing to the numerous rookeries of the Ant- arctic, returning annually laden with enormous cargoes of fur-seal skins, yet, as above mentioned, hardly a definite line of record has been made in regard to the whole transaction, involving, as it did, so much labor and so much capital.
The fact is, that the acquisition of these pelagic peltries had en- gaged thousands of men, and that millions of dollars had been em- ployed in capturing, dressing, and selling fur-seal skins during the hundred years just passed by ; nevertheless, from the time of Stel- ler, away back as far as 1751, up to the beginning of the last dec- ade, the scientific world actually knew nothing definite in regard to the life history of this valuable animal. The truth connected
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with the life of the fur-seal, as it herds in countless myriads on the Pribylov Islands of Alaska, is far stranger than fiction. Perhaps the existing ignorance has been caused by confounding the hair- seal, Phoca vitulina, and its kind, with the creature now under dis- cussion. Two animals, more dissimilar in their individuality and method of living, can, however, hardly be imagined, although they belong to the same group, and live apparently upon the same food.
The following notes, surveys, and hypotheses herewith presented are founded upon the writer's personal observations in the seal- rookeries of St. Paul and St. George, during the seasons of 1872 to 1874 inclusive, supplemented by his confirmatory inspection made in 1876. They were obtained during long days and nights of con- secutive observation, from the beginning to the close of each seal- season, and cover, by actual surveys, the entire ground occupied by these animals.
During the progress of heated controversies that took place pending the negotiation which ended in the acquisition of Alaska by our Government, frequent references were made to the fur-seal. Strange to say, this animal was so vaguely known at that time, even to scientific men, that it was almost without representation in any of the best zoological collections of the world ; even the Smith- sonian Institution did not possess a perfect skin and skeleton. The writer, then as now, an associate and collaborator of that establish- ment, had his curiosity very much excited by these stories; and in March, 1872, he was, by the joint action of Professor Baird and the Secretary of the Treasury, enabled to visit the Pribylov Islands for the purpose of studying the life and habits of these animals .*
All writers on the subject of Alaskan exploration and enterprise agree as to the cause of the discovery of the Pribylov Islands in the last century. It was due to the feverish anxiety of a handful of
* It was with peculiar pleasure that the writer undertook, at the sugges- tion of Professor Baird, who is the honored and beloved secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, the task of examining into and reporting upon this subject ; and it is also gratifying to add, that the statements of fact and the hypotheses evolved therefrom by him in 1874 have, np to the present time, been verified by an inflexible sequence of events on the ground itself. The concurrent testimony of the numerous agents of the Treasury Department and the Government generally, who have trodden in his footsteps, amply testifies to their stability.
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Russian fur-gatherers, who desired to find new fields of gain when they had exhausted those last uncovered. Altasov and his band of Russians, Tartars, and Cossacks arrived at Kamtchatka toward the end of the seventeenth century, and they were the first discoverers of the beautiful, costly fur of the sea-otter. The animal bearing this pelage abounded then on that coast, but by the middle of the eighteenth century they and those who came after them had en- tirely extirpated it from that country. Then the survivors of Be- ring's second voyage of observation, in 1741-42, and Tschericov brought back an enormous number of skins from Bering Island ; then Michael Novodiskov discovered Attoo and the contiguous islands in 1745 ; Paicov came after him, and opened out the Fox Islands, in the same chain, during 1759; then succeeded Stepan Glottov, of infamous memory, who determined Kadiak in 1763 ; the peninsula of Alaska was discovered by Krenitsin in 1768. During these long years, from the discovery of Attoo until the last date men- tioned above, a great many Russian companies fitted out at the mouth of the Amoor River and in the Okotsk Sea ; they prospected therefrom this whole Aleutian archipelago in search of the sea-otter. There were, perhaps, twenty-five or thirty different companies, with quite a fleet of small vessels ; and so energetic and thorough were they in their search and capture of the sea-otter that as early as 1772 and 1774 the catch in that group had dwindled from thousands and tens of thousands at first to hundreds and tens of hundreds at last. As all men do when they find that that which they are en- gaged in is failing them, a change of search and inquiry was in order ; and, then the fur-seal, which had been noted, but not valued much, every year as it went north in the spring through the passes and channels of the Aleutian chain, then going back south again in the fall, became the source of much speculation as to where it spent its time on land and how it bred. No one had ever known of its stopping one solitary hour on a single rock or beach throughout all Alaska or the northwest coast. The natives, when questioned, ex- pressed themselves as entirely ignorant, though they believed, as they believe in many things of which they have no knowledge, that these seals repaired to some unknown land in the north every sum- mer and left it every winter. They also reasoned then, that when they left the unknown land to the north in the fall, and went south into the North Pacific, they travelled to some other strange island or continent there, upon which in turn to spend the winter. Naturally
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the Russians preferred to look for the supposed winter resting- places of the fur-seal, and forthwith a hundred schooners and shal- lops sailed into storm and fog, to the northward occasionally, and always to the southward, in search of this rumored breeding-ground. Indeed, if the record can be credited, the whole bent of this Russian attention and search for the fur-seal islands was devoted to that region south of the Aleutian Islands, between Japan and Oregon.
Hence it was not until 1786, after more than eighteen years of unremitting search by hardy navigators, that the Pribylov Islands were discovered. It seems that a rugged Muscovitic "stoorman," or ship's " mate," Gerassim Pribylov by name, serving under the direction and in the pay of one of the many companies engaged in the fur-business at that time, was much moved and exercised in his mind by the revelations of an old Aleutian shaman at Oonalashka, who pretended to recite a legend of the natives, wherein he de- clared that certain islands in Bering Sea had long been known to the Aleutes.
Pribylov* commanded a small sloop, the St. George, which he employed for three successive years in constant, though fruit- less, explorations to the northward of Oonalashka and Oonimak, ranging over the whole of Bering Sea from the straits above. His ill-success does not now seem strange as we understand the cur- rents, the winds, and fogs of those waters. Why, only recently the writer himself has been on one of the best-manned vessels that ever
* Pribylov, the discoverer of the Seal Islands, was a native of "old Rus- sia. " His father was one of the surviving sailors of the St. Peter, which was wrecked, with Bering in command, November 4, 1741, on Bering Island. The only reference which I can find to him is the vague incidental expressions, used here and there throughout an extended series of lengthy Russian letters published by Techmainov, as illustrative of the condition of affairs in regard to the Russian American Company. Pribylov was, when cruising in 1783-86 for the rumored seal-grounds, merely the first mate of the sloop St. George. The captain and part owner was one M. Subov, who was a member of a trad- ing association then well organized in Alaska, and widely known as the " Lay- baider Lastochin" Company. It does not appear that Pribylov took any part in the business of sealing other than that of remaining in charge of the com- pany's vessels. He died while in discharge of these duties at Sitka, March, 1796, on his ship The Three Saints.
Pribylov himself called these islands of his discovery after Subov ; but the Russians then, and soon after unanimously, indicated the group by its present well-deserved title, " Ostrorie Pribylora."
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sailed from any port, provided with good charts and equipped with all the marine machinery known to navigation, and that vessel has hovered for nine successive days off the north point and around St. Paul Island, sometimes almost on the reef, and never more than ten miles away, without actually knowing where the island was! So Pribylov did well, considering, when at the beginning of the third summer's tedious search, in July, 1786, his old sloop ran up against the walls of Tolstoi Mees, at St. George, and, though the fog was so thick that he could see scarce the length of his ves- sel, his ears were regaled by the sweet music of seal-rookeries wafted out to him on the heavy air. He knew then that he had found the object of his search, and he at once took possession of the island in the Russian name and that of his craft.
His secret could not long be kept. He had left some of his men behind him to hold the island, and when he returned to Oona- lashka they were gone; and ere the next season fairly opened, a dozen vessels were watching him and trimming in his wake. Of course, they all found the island, and in that year, July, 1787, the sailors of Pribylov, on St. George, while climbing the bluffs and straining their eyes for a relief-ship, descried the low coast and scattered cones of St. Paul, thirty-six miles to the northwest of them. When they landed at St. George, not a sign or a vestige of human habitation was found thereon ; but during the succeeding year, when they crossed over to St. Paul and took possession of it, in turn, they were surprised at finding on the south coast of that island, at a point now known as English Bay, the remains of a recent fire. There were charred embers of driftwood and places where grass had been scorched ; there was a pipe and a brass knife- handle, which, I regret to say, have long passed beyond the cog- nizance of any ethnologist. This much appears in the Russian records.
But, if we can believe the Aleutes in what they relate, the islands were known to them long before they were visited by the Russians. They knew and called them "Ateek," after having heard about them. The legend of these people was as follows :
Eegad-dah-geek, a son of an Oonimak chief of the name of Ah- kak-nee-kak, was taken out to sea in a bidarka by a storm, the wind blowing strong from the south. He could not get back to the beach, nor could he make any other landing, and was obliged to run before the wind three or four days, when he brought up
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on St. Paul Island, north from the land which he had been com- pelled to leave. Here he remained until autumn, and became ac- quainted with the hunting of different animals. Elegant weather one day setting in, he saw the peaks of Oonimak. He then re- solved to put to sea, and return to receive the thanks of his people there, and after three or four days of travelling he arrived at Ooni- mak with "many otter tails and snouts." *
The Pribylov Islands lie in the heart of Bering Sea, and are among the most insignificant landmarks known to that ocean. They are situated one hundred and ninety-two miles north of Oon- alashka, two hundred miles south of St. Matthews, and about the same distance westward of Cape Newenham on the mainland.
The islands of St. George and St. Paul are from twenty-seven to thirty miles apart, St. George lying southeastward of St. Paul. They are far enough south to be beyond the reach of permanent ice-floes, upon which polar bears would have made their way to the islands, though a few of these animals were doubtless always pres- ent. They were also distant enough from the inhabited Aleutian districts and the coast of the mainland to have remained unknown to savage men. Hence they afforded the fur-seal the happiest shelter and isolation, for their position seems to be such as to surround and envelop them with fog-banks that fairly shut out the sun nine days in every ten during the summer and breeding-season.
In this location ocean-currents from the great Pacific, warmer than the normal temperature of this latitude, trending up from southward, ebb and flow around the islands as they pass, giving rise during the summer and early autumn to constant, dense, humid fog and drizzling mists, which hang in heavy banks over the ground and the sea-line, seldom dissolving away to indicate a pleasant day. By the middle or end of October strong, cold winds, refrigerated on the Siberian steppes, sweep down over the islands, carrying off
* Veniaminov says that he does feel inclined to believe this story, as the peaks of Oonimak can be seen occasionally from St. Paul. I have no hesi- tation in saying that they were never observed by any mortal eye from the Pribylov group. The wide expanse of water between these points, and the thick, foggy air of Bering Sea, especially so at the season mentioned in this story above, will always make the mountains of Oonimak invisible to the eye from Saint Paul Island. A mirage is almost an impossibility. It may have been much more probable if the date was a winter one .- Veniaminov : Zapies- kie ob Oonalashkenskaho Otdayla, etc., 1842.
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the moisture and clearing up the air. By the end of January, or early in February, they usually bring, by their steady pressure, from the north and northwest, great fields of broken ice, sludgy floes, with nothing in them approximating or approaching glacial ice. They are not very heavy or thick, but as the wind blows they compactly cover the whole surface of the sea, completely shutting in the land, and for months at a time hush the wonted roar of the surf. In the exceptionally cold seasons that succeed each other up there every four or five years, for periods of three and even four months-from December to May, and sometimes into June-the islands will be completely environed and ice-bound. On the other hand, in about the same rotation, occur exceptionally mild winters. Not even the sight of an ice-blink is recorded then during the whole winter, and there is very little skating on the shallow lakes and lagoons peculiar to St. Paul and St. George. This, however, is not often the case.
The breaking up of winter-weather and the precipitation of summer (for there is no real spring or autumn in these latitudes), usually commences about the first week in April. The ice begins to leave or dissolve at that time, or a little later, so that by the 1st or 5th of May, the beaches and rocky sea-margin beneath the mural precipices are generally clear and free from ice and snow, although the latter occasionally lies, until the end of July or the middle of August, in gullies and on leeward hill-slopes, where it has drifted during the winter. Fog, thick and heavy, rolls up from the sea, and closes over the land about the end of May. This, the habitual sign of summer, holds on steadily to the middle or end of October again.
The periods of change in climate are exceedingly irregular during the autumn and spring, so-called, but in summer a cool, moist, shady gray fog is constantly present. To this certainty of favored climate, coupled with the perfect isolation and an exceed- ing fitness of the ground, is due, without doubt, that preference manifested by the warm-blooded animals which come here every year, in thousands and hundreds of thousands to breed, to the practical exclusion of all other ground .*
I simply remark here, that the winter which I passed upon St.
* A large amount of information in regard to the climate of these islands has been collected and recorded by the signal service, United States Army, and similar observations are still continued by the agents of the Alaska Com- mercial Company.
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Paul Island (1872-73) was one of great severity, and, according to the natives, such as is very seldom experienced. Cold as it was, however, the lowest marking of the thermometer was only 12º Fahr. below zero, and that lasted but a few hours during a single day in February, while the mean of that month was 18° above. I found that March was the coldest month. Then the mean was 12º above, and I have since learned that March continues to be the meanest month of the year. The lowest average of a usual winter ranges from 22° to 26° above zero ; but these quiet figures are simply in- adequate to impress the reader with this exceeding discomfort of a winter in that locality. It is the wind that tortures and cripples out-door exercise there, as it does on all the sea-coasts and islands of Alaska. It is blowing, blowing, from every point of the compass at all times ; it is an everlasting succession of furious gales, laden with snow and sleety spiculæ, whirling in great drifts to-day, while to-morrow the wind will blow from a quarter directly opposite, and reverse its drift-building action of the day preceding.
Without being cold enough to suffer, one is literally confined and chained to his room from December until April by this Æolian tension. I remember very well that, during the winter of 1872-73, I was watching, with all the impatience which a man in full health and tired of confinement can possess, every opportunity to seize upon quiet intervals between the storms, in which I could make short trips along those tracks over which I was habituated to walk during the summer ; but in all that hyemal season I got out but three times, and then only by the exertion of great physical energy. On a day in March, for example, the velocity of the wind at St. Paul, recorded by one of the signal-service anemometers, was at the rate of eighty-eight miles per hour, with as low a temperature as -4° ! This particular wind-storm, with snow, blew at such a velocity for six days without an hour's cessation, while the natives passed from house to house crawling on all fours. No man could stand up against it, and no man wanted to. At a much higher temperature -say at 15° or 16° above zero-with the wind blowing only twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, it is necessary, when journeying, to be most thoroughly wrapped up so as to guard against freezing.
As I have said, there are here virtually but two seasons-winter and summer. To the former belongs November and the following months up to the end of April, with a mean temperature of 20° to 28° ; while the transition of summer is but a very slight elevation
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of that temperature, not more than 15° or 20°. Of the summer monthis, July, perhaps, is the warmest, with an average temperature between 46° and 50° in ordinary seasons. When the sun breaks out through the fog, and bathes the dripping, water-soaked hills and flats of the island in its hot flood of light, I have known the ther- mometer to rise to 60° and 64° in the shade, while the natives crawled out of that fervent and unwonted heat, anathematizing its brilliancy and potency. Sunshine does them no good ; for, like the seals, they seem under its influence to swell up at the neck. A little of it suffices handsomely for both Aleutes and pinnipedia, to whom the ordinary atmosphere is much more agreeable.
It is astonishing how rapidly snow melts here. This is due, probably, to the saline character of the air, for when the tempera- ture is only a single degree above freezing, and after several suc- cessive days in April or May, at 34° and 36°, grass begins to grow, even if it be under melting drifts, and the frost has penetrated the ground many feet below. I have said that this humidity and fog, so strongly and peculiarly characteristic of the Pribylov group, was due to the warmer ocean-currents setting up from the coast of Japan, trending to the Arctic through Bering's Straits, and de- flected to the southward into the North Pacific, laving, as it flows, the numerous passes and channels of the great Aleutian chain ; but I do not think, nor do I wish to be understood as saying, that my observation in this respect warrants any conclusion as to so large a Gulf Stream flowing to the north, such as mariners and hydrog- raphers recognize upon the Atlantic coast. I do not believe that there is anything of the kind equal to it in Bering Sea. I believe, however, that there is a steady set up to the northward from south- ward around the Seal Islands, which is continued through Bering's Straits, and drifts steadily off up to the northeast, until it is lost beyond Point Barrow. That this pelagic circulation exists, is clearly proven by the logs of the whalers, who, from 1845 to 1856, literally filled the air over those waters with the smoke of their "try-fires," and ploughed every square rod of that superficial marine area with their adventurous keels. While no two, perhaps, of those old whaling captains living to-day will agree as to the exact course of tides,* for Alaskan tides do not seem to obey any law, they all
" The rise and fall of tide at the Seal Islands I carefully watched one whole season at St. Paul. The irregularity, however, of ebb and flow is the
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affirm the existence of a steady current, passing up from the south to the northeast, through Bering's Straits. The flow is not rapid, and is doubtless checked at times, for short intervals, by other causes, which need not be discussed here. It is certain, however, that there is warm water enough, abnormal to the latitude, for the evolution of those characteristic fog-banks, which almost discomfited Pribylov, at the time of his discovery of the islands, nearly one hun- dred years ago, and which have remained ever since.
Without this fog the fur-seal would never have rested there as he has done ; but when he came on his voyage of discovery, ages ago, up from the rocky coasts of Patagonia mayhap, had he not found this cool, moist temperature of St. Paul and St. George, he would have kept on, completed the circuit, and returned to those congenial antipodes of his birth.
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