[61] Trailing tendrils of the Empetrum nigrum.
[62] From the record made in the ship’s log it would seem most likely that he landed on either Popov Island, or else Nogai; the description will fit either locality.
[63] Captain F. W. Beechey in his voyage of the Blossom, 1825-27, discovered and located at Cape Beaufort, in the Arctic Ocean and on the Alaskan coast, a vein of coal; this has been subsequently revisited and mined to a small extent by the officers of the Revenue marine cutters of our Government, who pronounce it very satisfactory for steaming purposes. Its situation, however, is so remote that it has no economic significance, and no harbor is there for a vessel of any kind.
CHAPTER VII.
THE QUEST OF THE OTTER.
Searching for the Otter.—Exposure and Danger in Hunting Sea-otters.—The Fortitude, Patience, and Skill of the Captor.—Altasov and his Band of Cruel Cossacks.—Feverish Energy of the Early Russian Sea-otter Traders.—Their Shameful Excesses.—Greed for Sea-otter Skins Leads the Russians to Explore the Entire Alaskan Coast, 1760-1780.— Great Numbers of Sea-otters when they were First Discovered in Alaska.—Their Partial Extermination in 1836-40.—More Secured during the Last Five Years than in all the Twenty Years Preceding.—What is an Otter?—A Description of its Strange Life.—Its Single Skin sometimes Worth $500.—The Typical Sea-otter Hunter.—A Description of Him and his Family.—Hunting the Sea-otter the Sole Remunerative Industry of the Aleutians.—Gloomy, Storm-beaten Haunts of the Otter.—Saanak, the Grand Rendezvous of the Hunters.—The “Surround” of the Otter.—“Clubbing” the Otter.—“Netting” the Otter.—“Surf-shooting” Them.
Little does my lady think, as she contemplates the rich shimmer of the ebony sea-otter trimming to her new seal-skin sacque, that the quest of the former has engaged thousands of men during the last century in exhaustive deeds of hazardous peril and extreme daring, and does to-day—that the possession of the sea-otter’s coat calls for more venturesome labor and inclement exposure on the part of the hunter than is put forth in the chase of any other fur-bearing or economic animal known to savage or civilized man. No wonder that it is costly; what abundant reason that it should be rare!
The rugged, storm-beaten resorts of the sea-otter, its wariness and cunning, and the almost incredible fortitude and patience, skill and bravery, of its semi-civilized captor, have so impressed the writer that he feels constrained to rearrange his notes and touch up his field-sketches made upon the subject-matter of this chapter several years ago, while cruising in Alaskan waters, so that he may give to the readers of this work the first full or fair idea of the topic ever put into type and engraving.
Feodor Altasov, with a band of Russian Cossacks[64] and Tartar “promishlyniks,” were the pioneers of civilized exploration in Eastern Siberia, and finally arrived at the head of the great Kamchatkan Peninsula, toward the end of the seventeenth century. Here they found, first of all their race, the rare, and to them the exceedingly valuable, fur of the sea-otter. The animal bearing this pelage then was abundant on that coast, and not prized above the seals and sea-lions by the natives who displayed their peltries to the ardent Russians, and who in barter asked little or nothing extra from the white men in return. The feverish eagerness of the Slavonians, quickly displayed, to secure these choice skins, so excited the natives as to result very soon in the practical extirpation of the “kahlan,” as they termed it, from the entire region of the Kamschadales. The greedy fur-hunters then rifled graves and stripped the living of every scrap of the precious object of their search, and, for the time being, searched in vain for other haunts of the otter.
Along by the close of 1743, the survivors of Bering’s second voyage of exploration and Tscherikov brought back to Petropaulovsk an enormous number of skins which they had secured on the Aleutian and Commander Islands, until then unknown to the Kamchatkans or the Russians. In spite of the rude appliances and scanty resources at the command of these eager men, they fitted out rude wooden shallops and boldly pushed themselves over dark and tempestuous seas to the unknown and rumored resorts of the sea-otter. In this manner and by this impulse the discovery of the Aleutian Islands and the mainland of Alaska was fully determined, between 1745 and 1763. In this enterprise some twenty-five or thirty different individuals and companies, with quite a fleet of small vessels and hundreds of men, were engaged; and so thorough and energetic were they in their search and stimulated capture of the coveted animal, that, along by the period of 1772-74, the catch of this unhappy beast had dwindled down from thousands and tens of thousands at first, to hundreds and tens of hundreds at last. When the Russian traders opened up the Aleutian Islands they found the natives commonly wearing sea-otter cloaks, which they willingly parted with at first for trifles, not placing any especial value upon the otter, as they did upon the bodies of the hair-seal and sea-lion, the flesh and skins of which were vastly more palatable to them and serviceable. But the fierce competition and raised bidding of the greedy traders soon fired the savages into hot and incessant hunting. During the first decade or two of pursuit the numbers of these animals taken all along the Aleutian chain and down the entire northwest coast as far as Oregon, were so great that they appear fabulous in comparison with the exhibit made now.[65]
The result of this warfare upon sea-otters, with ten hunters then where there is one to-day, was not long delayed. Everywhere throughout the whole coast-line frequented by them, a rapid and startling diminution set in; so much so, that it soon became difficult to get from places where a thousand were easily taken, as many as twenty-five or thirty. When the region known as Alaska came into our possession, the Russians were taking between four and five hundred sea-otters annually from the Aleutian Islands and South of the Peninsula and Kadiak, with perhaps one hundred and fifty more from Cook’s Inlet, Yakootat, and the Sitkan district, the Hudson Bay traders and others getting some two hundred more from the coasts of Queen Charlotte’s and Vancouver’s Islands, and Gray’s Harbor, Washington Territory.