Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

LAGOON ROOKERY

Survey Showing the Close Contact of Village, Slaughter-Field and Breeding Grounds.

Looking from the village across the cove and down upon the lagoon, still another strange contradiction appears—at least it seems a natural contradiction to one’s usual ideas. Here we see the Lagoon rookery, a reach of ground upon which some twenty-five or thirty thousand breeding-seals come out regularly every year during the appointed time, and go through their whole elaborate system of reproduction, without showing the slightest concern for or attention to the scene directly east of them and across that shallow slough not eighty feet in width. There are the great slaughtering fields of St. Paul Island; there are the sand-flats where every seal has been slaughtered for years upon years back, for its skin; and even as we take this note, forty men are standing there knocking down a drove of two or three thousand “holluschickie” for their day’s work, and as they labor, the whacking of their clubs and the sounds of their voices must be as plain to those breeding-seals, which are not one hundred feet from them, as it is to us, a quarter of a mile distant! In addition to this enumeration of disturbances, well calculated to amaze, and dismay, and drive off every seal within its influence, are the decaying bodies of the last year’s catch—seventy-five thousand or eighty-five thousand unburied carcasses—that are sloughing away into the sand which, two or three seasons from now, nature will, in its infinite charity, cover with the greenest of all green grasses. The whitened bones and grinning skulls of over three million seals have bleached out on that slaughtering-spot, and are buried below its surface.

Directly under the north face of the village hill, where it falls to the narrow flat between its feet and the cove, the natives have sunk a well. It was excavated in 1857, they say, and subsequently deepened to its present condition in 1868. It is twelve feet deep, and the diggers said that they found bones of the sea-lion and fur-seal thickly distributed every foot down, from top to bottom. How much lower these osteological remains of prehistoric pinnipeds can be found no one knows as yet. The water here, on that account, has never been fit to drink, or even to cook with, but, being soft, was and is used by the natives for washing clothes, etc. Most likely, it records a spot upon which the Russians, during the heyday of their early occupation, drove the unhappy visitors of Nah Speel to slaughter. There is no Golgotha known to man elsewhere in the world as extensive as this one of St. Paul.

Yet, the natives say that this Lagoon rookery is a new feature in the distribution of the seals; that when the people first came here and located a part of the present village, in 1824 up to 1847, there never had been a breeding-seal on that Lagoon rookery of to-day; so they have hauled up here from a small beginning, not very long ago, until they have attained their present numerical expansion, in spite of all these exhibitions of butchery of their kind, executed right under their eyes, and in full knowledge of their nostrils, while the groans and low moanings of their stricken species, stretched out beneath the clubs of the sealers, must have been and are far plainer in their ears than they are in our own!

Still they come—they multiply, and they increase—knowing so well that they belong to a class which intelligent men never did molest. To-day at least they know it, or they would not submit to these manifestations which we have just cited, so close to their knowledge.

The Lagoon rookery, however, never can be a large one, on account of the very nature of this ground selected by the seals; it is a bar simply pushed up beyond the surf-wash of boulders, water-worn and rounded, which has almost enclosed and cut away the Lagoon from its parent sea. In my opinion, the time is not far distant when that estuary will be another inland lake of St. Paul, walled out from salt water and freshened by rain and melting snow, as are the other pools, lakes, and lakelets on the island.

Zapadnie, in itself, is something like the Reef plateau on its eastern face, for it slopes up gradually and gently to the parade-plateau above—a parade-ground not so smooth, however, being very rough and rocky, but which the seals enjoy. Just around the point, a low strip of rocky bar and beach connects it with the ridge-walls of Southwest Point, a very small breeding rookery, so small that it is not worthy of a survey, is located here. I think, probably, on account of the nature of the ground, that it will never hold its own, and is more than likely abandoned by this time.

One of the prehistoric villages, the village of Pribylov’s time, was established here between that point and the cemetery ridge, on which the northern wing of Zapadnie rests. An old burying-ground, with its characteristic Russian crosses and faded pictures of the saints, is plainly marked on the ridge. It was at this little bight of sandy landing that Pribylov’s men first came ashore and took possession of the island, while others in the same season proceeded to Northeast Point and to the north shore to establish settlements of their own order. When the indiscriminate sealing of 1868 was in progress, one of the parties lived here, and a salt-house which was then erected by them still stands. It is in a very fair state of preservation, although it has never been occupied since, except by the natives who come over here from the village in the summer to pick those berries of the Empetrum and Rubus, which abound in the greatest profusion around the rough and rocky flats that environ a little lake adjacent. The young people of St. Paul are very fond of this berry-festival, so-called among themselves, and they stay there every August, camping out, a week or ten days at a time, before returning to their homes in the village.