Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

The precipitous shore-line of St. George is enough in itself to explain the small number of seals found there, when contrasted with the swarming myriads of her more favorably adapted sister island. Nevertheless that Muscovitic sailor, Pribylov, not knowing then of the existence of St. Paul, was as well satisfied as if he had possessed the boundless universe when he first found it. As in the case of St. Paul Island, I have been unable to learn much here in regard to the early status of the rookeries, none of the natives having any real information. The drift of their sentiment goes to show that there never was a great assemblage of fur-seals on St. George—in fact, never as many as there are to-day, insignificant as the exhibit is, compared with that of St. Paul. They say that at first the sea-lions owned this island, and that the Russians, becoming cognizant of the fact, made a regular business of driving off the “seevitchie,” in order that fur-seals might be encouraged to land. Touching this statement, with my experience on St. Paul, where there is no conflict at all between the fifteen or twenty thousand sea-lions which breed around on the outer edge of the seal rookeries there and at Southwest Point, I cannot agree to the St. George legend. I am inclined to believe, however—indeed, it is more than probable—that there were a great many more sea-lions on and about St. George before it was occupied by men—a hundredfold greater, perhaps, than now, because a sea-lion is an exceedingly timid, cowardly creature when it is in the proximity of man, and will always desert any resting-place where it is constantly brought into contact with him.[128]

The rookeries on this island, being so much less in volume, are not especially noted—still, one of them, “Starry Arteel,” is unique indeed, lying as it does in a bold sweep from the sea up a very steep slope to a point where the bluffs bordering it seaward are over four hundred feet in vertical declination. The seals crowd just as closely to the edge of this precipice along its entire face as they do at the tide-level. It is a very strange sight for that visitor who may sail under these bluffs with a boat in fair weather for landing, and, as you walk the beach, above which the cliff-wall frowns a sheer five hundred feet, there, directly over your head, the craning necks and twisting forms of restless seals, appear as if ready to launch out and fall below, ever and anon, as you glance upward, so closely and boldly do they press to the very edge of the precipice. I have been repeatedly astonished at an amazing power possessed by the fur-seal of resistance to shocks which would certainly kill any other animal. To explain clearly, the reader will observe by reference to the maps that there are a great many cliffy places between the rookeries on the shore-lines of the islands. Some of these bluffs are more than one hundred feet in abrupt elevation above the surf and rocks awash below. Frequently “holluschickie,” in ones, or twos, or threes, will stray far away back from the great masses of their kind and fall asleep in the thick grass and herbage which covers these mural reaches. Sometimes they will repose and rest very close to the edge, and then as you come tramping along you discover and startle them and yourself alike. They, blinded by their first transports of alarm, leap promptly over the brink, snorting, coughing, and spitting as they go. Curiously peering after them and looking down upon the rocks, fifty to one hundred feet below, instead of seeing their stunned and motionless bodies, you will invariably catch sight of them rapidly scrambling into the water, and, when in it, swimming off like arrows from the bow. Three “holluschickie” were thus inadvertently surprised by me on the edge of the west face to Otter Island. They plunged over from an elevation there not less than two hundred feet in sheer descent, and I distinctly saw them fall; in scrambling, whirling evolutions, down, thumping upon the rocky shingle beneath, from which they bounded as they struck, like so many rubber balls. Two of them never moved after the rebound ceased; but the third one reached the water and swam away swift as a bird on the wing.

While they seem to escape without bodily injury incident to such hard falls as ensue from dropping fifty or sixty feet upon pebbly beaches and rough boulders below, and even greater elevations, yet I am inclined to think that some internal injuries are necessarily sustained in almost every case, which soon develop and cause death. The excitement and the vitality of the seal at the moment of the terrific shock are able to sustain and conceal a real injury for the time being.

Driving the “holluschickie” on St. George, owing to the relative scantiness of hauling area for those animals there, and consequent small numbers found upon these grounds at any one time, is a very arduous series of daily exercises on the part of the natives who attend to it. Glancing at the map, the marked considerable distance over an exceedingly rough road will be noticed between Zapadnie and the village, yet in 1872 eleven different drives across the island of four hundred to five hundred seals each were made in the short four weeks of that season.

The peculiarly rough character to this trail is given by large, loose, sharp-edged basaltic boulders which are strewn thickly over all those lower levels that bridge the island between the high bluffs at Starry Arteel and the slopes of Ahluckeyak Hill. The summits of the two broader, higher plateaux, east and west respectively, are comparatively smooth and easy to travel over, and so is the sea-level flat at Zapadnie itself. On the map of St. George a number of very small ponds will be noticed. They are the fresh-water reservoirs of the island. The two largest of these are near the summit of this rough divide. The seal-trail from Zapadnie to the village runs just west of them and comes out on the north shore, a little to the eastward of the hauling-grounds of Starry Arteel, where it forks and unites with that path. A direct line between the village and Zapadnie, though nearly a mile shorter on the chart, is equal to five miles more of distance by reason of its superlative rocky inequalities.

One question is always sure to be asked in this connection. The query is: “At the present rate of killing seals it will not be long ere they are exterminated—how much longer will they last?” My answer is now as it was then: “Provided matters are conducted on the Seal Islands in the future as they are to-day, 100,000 male seals under the age of five years and over one may be safely taken every year from the Pribylov Islands without the slightest injury to the regular birth-rate or natural increase thereon; provided also that the fur-seals are not visited by plagues or by pests, or any such abnormal cause for their destruction, which might be beyond the control of men, and to which, like any other great body of animal life, they must ever be subjected to the danger of.”[129] From my calculations given above it will be seen that 1,000,000 pups or young seals, in round numbers, are born upon these islands of the Pribylov group every year. Of this million, one-half are males. These 500,000 young males, before they leave the islands for sea during October and November, and when they are between five or six months old, fat, and hardy, have suffered but a trifling loss in numbers—say one per cent.—while on and about the islands of their birth, surrounding which and upon which they have no enemies whatever to speak of; but after they get well down to the Pacific, spread out over an immense area of watery highways in quest of piscatorial food, they form the most helpless of their kind to resist or elude the murderous teeth and carnivorous attacks of basking sharks[130] and killer-whales.[131] By these agencies, during their absence from the islands until their reappearance in the following year, and in July, they are so perceptibly diminished in number that I do not think, fairly considered, more than one-half of the legion which left the ground of their birth last October come up the next July to these favorite landing-places—that is, only 250,000 of them return out of the 500,000 born last year. The same statement in every respect applies to the going and the coming of the 500,000 female pups, which are identical in size, shape, and behavior.

As yearlings, however, these 250,000 survivors of last year’s birth have become strong, lithe, and active swimmers, and when they again leave the hauling grounds, as before, in the fall, they are fully as able as are the older class to take care of themselves, and when they reappear next year, at least 225,000 of them safely return in the second season after birth. From this on I believe that they live out their natural lives of fifteen to twenty years each, the death-rate now caused by the visitation of marine enemies affecting them in the aggregate but slightly. And, again, the same will hold good touching the females, the average natural life of which, however, I take to be only nine or ten years each.

Out of these two hundred and twenty-five thousand young males we are required to save only one-fifteenth of their number to pass over to the breeding-grounds, and meet there the two hundred and twenty-five thousand young females; in other words, the polygamous habit of this animal is such that, by its own volition, I do not think that more than one male annually out of fifteen born is needed on the breeding-grounds in the future; but in my calculations, to be within the margin and to make sure that I save two-year-old males enough every season, I will more than double this proportion, and set aside every fifth one of the young males in question. That will leave one hundred and eighty thousand seals, in good condition, that can be safely killed every year, without the slightest injury to the perpetuation of the stock itself forever in all of its original integrity.

In the above showing I have put a very extreme estimate upon that loss sustained at sea by the pup-seals—too large, I am morally certain; but, in attempting to draw this line safely, I wish to place the matter in the very worst light in which it can be put, and to give the seals the full benefit of every doubt. Surely I have clearly presented the case, and certainly no one will question the premises after they have studied the habit and disposition of the rookeries; hence, it is a positive and tenable statement, that no danger of the slightest appreciable degree of injury to the interests of the Government on the Seal Islands of Alaska exists, as long as the present law protecting it, and the management executing it, continues.

These fur-seals of the Pribylov group, after leaving the islands in the autumn and early winter, do not visit land again until the time of their return, in the following spring and early summer, to these same rookery and hauling-grounds, unless they touch, as they are navigating their lengthened journey back, at the Russian Islands, Copper and Bering, seven hundred miles to the westward of the Pribylov group. They leave our islands by independent squads, each one looking out for itself. Apparently all turn by common consent to the south, disappearing toward the horizon, and are soon lost in the vast expanse below, where they spread themselves over the entire Pacific as far south as the 48th and even the 47th parallels of north latitude: within this immense area between Japan and Oregon, doubtless, many extensive submarine fishing-shoals and banks are known to them; at least, it is definitely understood that Bering Sea does not contain them long when they depart from the breeding rookeries and the hauling-grounds therein. While it is carried in mind that they sleep and rest in the water with soundness and with the greatest comfort on its surface, and that even when around the land, during the summer, they frequently put off from the beaches to take a bath and a quiet snooze just beyond the surf, we can readily agree that it is no inconvenience whatever, when the reproductive functions have been discharged, and their coats renewed, for them to stay the balance of the time in their most congenial element—the briny deep.