[148] The Russian Imperial Government in 1841 ordered Governor Etholin, of Sitka, to select a skilled engineer to make this exploration, and accordingly, on July 10, 1842, Zagoskin was started for St. Michael’s. His expedition was the most extended of any white man ever made in Alaska prior to American search.
[149] Colymbus arcticus.
[150] The Archimandrite Jeromonakh Juvenal. The second of the priestly Russian service was Arch. Joassaf. He was drowned at sea in 1797. He was succeeded by Arch. Afanassy, who remained Bishop of Alaska until 1825, and he has been followed by many successors since.
[151] Visited then by Ivan Petroff, who made an extended trip for the United States Census.
[152] Coregonu ssp.
[153] The oil obtained from the beluga and the large seal (mahklok) is a very important article of trade between the lowland people and those of the mountains, the latter depending upon it entirely for lighting their semi-subterranean dwellings during the winter, and to supplement their scanty stores of food. It is manufactured by a very simple process. Huge drift-logs are fashioned into troughs much in the same manner as the Thlinket tribes make their wooden canoes. Into these troughs filled with water the blubber is thrown in lumps of from two to five pounds in weight. Then a large number of smooth cobble-stones are thrown into a fire until they are thoroughly heated, when they are picked up with sticks fashioned for the purpose and deposited in the water, which boils up at once. After a few minutes these stones must be removed and replaced by fresh ones, this laborious process being continued until all oil has been boiled out of the blubber and floats on the surface, when it is removed with flat pieces of bone or roughly fashioned ladles, and decanted into bladders or whole seal-skins, then cached on pole-frames until sold or used by the makers.
[154] Mount Tamahloopat: two thousand eight hundred feet.
[155] The Russians and natives always called the Yukon River by this name. Our change was first made by those Hudson Bay traders who came over to it from the Mackenzie, and was subsequently universally adopted.
[156] Rubus chamæmorus.