Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

The great variation in the value of seal-skin sacks, ranging from seventy-five dollars up to three hundred and fifty dollars, and even five hundred dollars, is not often due to a variance in the quality of the fur originally; but it is due to that quality of the work whereby the fur was treated and prepared for wear. For instance, cheap sacks are so defectively dyed that a little moisture causes them to soil the collars and cuffs of their owners, and a little exposure makes them speedily fade and look ragged. A properly dyed skin, one that has been conscientiously and laboriously finished (for it is a labor requiring great patience and great skill), will not rub off or “crock” the whitest linen when moistened; and it will wear the weather, as I have myself seen it on the form of a sea-captain’s wife, for six and seven successive seasons, without showing the least bit of dimness or raggedness. I speak of dyeing alone; I might say the earlier steps of unhairing, in which the over-hair is deftly combed out and off from the skin, heated to such a point that the roots of the fur are not loosened, while those to the coarser hirsute growth are. If this is not done with perfect uniformity, the fur will never lie smooth, no matter how skilfully dyed; it will always have a rumpled, ruffled look. Therefore the hastily-dyed sacks are cheap; and are enhanced in order of value just as the labor of dyeing is expended upon them.

Another singular and striking characteristic of the Island of St. Paul, is the fact that this immense slaughtering-field, upon which seventy-five thousand to ninety thousand fresh carcasses lie every season, sloughing away into the sand beneath, does not cause any sickness among the people who live right over them, so to speak. A cool, raw temperature, and strong winds, peculiar to the place, seem to prevent any unhealthy effect from that fermentation of decay. An Elymus and other grasses once more take heart and grow with magical vigor over the unsightly spot, to which the sealing-gang again return, repeating their work upon this place which we have marked before, three years ago. In that way this strip of ground, seen on my map between the village, the east landing, and the lagoon, contains the bones and the oil-drippings and other fragments thereof, of more than three million seals slain since 1786 thereon, while the slaughter-fields at Novastoshnah record the end of a million more!

I remember well those unmitigated sensations of disgust which possessed me when I first landed, April 28, 1872, on the Pribylov Islands, and passed up from the beach, at Lukannon, to the village over the killing-grounds; though there was a heavy coat of snow on the fields, yet each and every one of seventy-five thousand decaying carcasses was there, and bare, having burned, as it were, their way out to the open air, polluting the same to a sad degree. I was laughed at by the residents who noticed my facial contortions, and assured that this state of smell was nothing to what I should soon experience when the frost and snow had fairly melted. They were correct; the odor along by the end of May was terrific punishment to my olfactories, and continued so for several weeks until my sense of smell became blunted and callous to such stench by long familiarity. Like the other old residents I then became quite unconscious of the prevalence of this rich “funk,” and ceased to notice it.

Those who land here, as I did, for the first time, nervously and invariably declare that such an atmosphere must breed a plague or a fever of some kind in the village, and hardly credit the assurance of those who have resided in it for the whole period of their lives, that such a thing was never known to St. Paul, and that the island is remarkably healthy. It is entirely true, however, and, after a few weeks’ contact, or a couple of months’ experience, at the longest, the most sensitive nose becomes used to that aroma, wafted as it is hourly, day in and out, from decaying seal-flesh, viscera, and blubber; and, also, it ceases to be an object of attention. The cool, sunless climate during the warmer months has undoubtedly much to do with checking too rapid decomposition and consequent trouble therefrom, which would otherwise arise from those killing-grounds.

The freshly-skinned seal bodies of this season do not seem to rot substantially until the following year; then they rapidly slough away into the sand upon which they rest; the envelope of blubber left upon each body seems to act as an air-tight receiver, holding most of the putrid gases that evolved from the decaying viscera until their volatile tension causes it to give way; fortunately the line of least resistance to that merciful retort is usually right where it is adjacent to the soil, so both putrescent fluids and much of the stench within is deodorized and absorbed before it can contaminate the atmosphere to any great extent. The truth of my observation will be promptly verified, if the sceptic chooses to tear open any one of the thousands of gas-distended carcasses in the fall, that were skinned in the killing-season; if he does so, he will be smitten by the worst smell that human sense can measure; and should he chance to be accompanied by a native, that callous individual, even, will pinch his grimy nose and exclaim, it is a “keeshla pahknoot!”

At the close of the third season after skinning, a seal’s body will have so rotted and sloughed down, as to be marked only by the bones and a few of the tendinous ligaments; in other words, it requires from thirty to thirty-six months’ time for such a carcass to rot entirely away, so that nothing but whitened bones remain above ground. The natives govern their driving of the seals and laying out of the fresh bodies according to this fact—they can, and do, spread this year a whole season’s killing out over the same spot of the field previously covered with such fresh carcasses three summers ago; by alternating with the seasons thus, the natives are enabled to annually slaughter all of the “holluschickie” on a relatively small area, close by the salt-houses and the village, as I have indicated on my map of St. Paul.

The St. Paul village site is located wholly on the northern slope of the village hill, where it drops from its greatest elevation, at the flagstaff of one hundred and twenty-five feet, gently down to those sandy killing-flats below and between it and the main body of the island. The houses are all placed facing north at regular intervals along the terraced streets, which run southeast and northwest. There are seventy-four or eighty native houses, ten large and smaller buildings of the company, a Treasury agent’s residence, a church, cemetery crosses, and a school building which are all standing here in coats of pure white paint. No offal or decaying refuse of any kind is allowed to rest around the dwellings or lie in the streets. It required much determined effort on the part of the whites to effect this sanitary reform; but now most of the natives take equal pride in keeping their surroundings clean and unpolluted. The killing-ground of St. Paul is a bottomless sand-flat only a few feet above high water, and which unites the village hill and the reef with the island itself. It is not a stone’s throw from the heart of the settlement; in fact, it is right in town, not even suburban.

The site of the St. George settlement is more exposed and bleak than is the one we have just referred to on St. Paul. It is planted directly on a rounded summit of one of the first low hills that rise from the sea on the north shore. Indeed, it is the only hill that does slope directly and gently to the salt water on the island. Here are twenty-four to thirty native cottages, laid with their doors facing the opposite sides of a short street between, running also east and west, as at St. Paul. There, however, each house looks down upon the rear of its neighbor in front and below—here the houses face each other on the top of the hill. The Treasury agent’s quarters, the company’s six or seven buildings, the school-house, and the church, are all neatly painted: therefore this settlement, by its prominent position, shows from the sea to a much better advantage than the larger one of St. Paul does. The same municipal sanitary regulations are enforced here. Those who may visit the St. George and St. Paul of to-day will find their streets dry and hard as floors for they have been covered with a thick layer of volcanic cinders on both islands.

On St. George the “holluschickie” are regularly driven to that northeast slope of the village hill which drops down gently to the sea, where they are slaughtered, close by and under the houses, as at St Paul. Those droves which are brought in from the North rookery to the west, and also Starry Arteel, are frequently driven right through the village itself. This killing-field of St. George is hard tufa and rocky, but it slopes away to the ocean rapidly enough to drain itself well; hence the constant rain and humid fogs of summer carry off that which would soon clog and deprive the natives from using the ground year after year in rotation, as they do. Several seasons have occurred, however, when this natural cleansing of the place, above mentioned, has not been as thorough as must be, so as to be used again immediately: then the seals were skinned back of the village hill and in that ravine to the westward on the same slope from its summit.

This village site of St. George to-day, and the killing-grounds adjoining, used to be, during early Russian occupation, in Pribylov’s time, a large sea-lion rookery, the finest one known to either island, St. Paul or St. George. Natives are living now, who told me that their fathers had been employed in shooting and driving these sea-lions, so as to deliberately break up a breeding-ground, and thus rid the island of what they considered a superabundant supply of the Eumetopias, and thereby to aid and encourage a fresh and increased accession of fur-seals from the vast majority peculiar to St. Paul, which could not ensue while big sea-lions held the land.