Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

ST. GEORGE’S ISLAND, PRIBYLOV GROUP

Viewed from a point at sea about 7 miles E. N. E., off Tolstoi Mees: these characteristic swarms of water-fowl, arries and choochkies, stirred up by an approach of the steamer, encircle the whole island in this manner, and give notice to a mariner, in thick weather, of the proximity of that island long before it can be seen

St. George has an area of about twenty-seven square miles; it has twenty-nine miles of coast-line, of which only two and a quarter are visited by the fur-seals, and which is in fact all the eligible landing-ground afforded them by the structure of the island. Nearly half of the shore of St. Paul is a sandy beach, while on St. George there is less than a mile of it all put together, namely: a few hundred yards in front of the village, the same extent on the Garden Cove beach, southeast side, and less than half a mile at Zapadnie on the south side.

Just above the Garden Cove, under the overhanging bluffs, several thousand sea-lions hold exclusive, though shy, possession. Here there is a half-mile of good landing. On the north shore of the island, three miles west from the village, a grand bluff wall of basalt and tufa intercalated rises abruptly from the sea to a sheer height of nine hundred and twenty feet at its reach of greatest elevation: thence, dropping a little, runs clear around the island to Zapadnie, a distance of nearly ten miles, without affording a single passage-way up or down to the sea that thunders at its base. Upon its innumerable narrow shelf-margins, and in its countless chinks and crannies, and back therefrom over an extended area of lava-shingled inland ridges and terraces, millions upon millions of water-fowl breed during the summer months.

The general altitude of St. George, though in itself not great, has, however, an average three times higher than that of St. Paul, the elevation of which is quite low, and slopes gently down to the sea east and north; St. George rises abruptly, with exceptional spots for landing. The loftiest summit on St. George, the top of the hill right back to the southward of the village, is nine hundred and thirty feet, and is called by the natives Ahluckeyak. That on St. Paul, as I have before said, is Bogaslov Hill, six hundred feet. All elevations on either island, fifteen or twenty feet above sea-level, are rough and hummocky, with the exception of those sand-dune tracts at St. Paul and the summits of the cinder hills, on both islands. Weathered out, or washed from the basalt and pockets of olivine on either island, are aggregates of augite, seen most abundant on the summit slopes of Ahluckeyak Hill, St. George. Specimens from stratified bands of old, friable, gray lavas, so conspicuous on the shore of this latter island, show an existence of hornblende and vitreous felspar in considerable quantity, while on the south shore, near Garden Cove, is a large dike of a bluish and greenish gray phonolite, in which numerous small crystals of spinel are found. A dike, with well-defined walls, of old close-grained, clay-colored lava, is near the village of St. George, about a quarter of a mile east from the landing, in the face of those reddish breccia bluffs that rise from the sea. It is the only example of the kind on the islands. The bases or foundations of the Pribylov Islands are, all of them, basaltic; some are compact and grayish-white, but most of them exceedingly porous and ferruginous.[100] Upon this solid floor are many hills of brown and red tufa, cinder-heaps, etc. Polavina Sopka, the second point in elevation on St. Paul Island, is almost entirely built up of red scoria and breccia; so is Ahluckeyak Hill, on St. George, and the cap to the high bluffs opposite. The village hill at St. Paul, Cone hill, the Einahnuhto peaks, Crater Hill, North Hill, and Little Polavina are all ash-heaps of this character. The bluffs at the shore of Polavina Point, St. Paul, show in a striking manner a section of the geological structure of the island. The tufas on both islands, at the surface, decompose and weather into the base of good soil, which the severe climate, however, renders useless to good husbandmen. There is not a trace of granitic or of gneissoid rocks found in situ. Metamorphic boulders have been collected along the beaches and pushed up by heavy ice-floes which have brought them down from Siberian coasts far away to the northwest. The dark-brown tufa bluffs and the breccia walls at the east landing of St. Paul Island, known as “Black Bluffs,” rise suddenly from the sea sixty to eighty feet, with stratified horizontal lines of light-gray calcareous conglomerate, or cement, in which are embedded sundry fossils characteristic of and belonging to the Tertiary Age, such as Cardium grœnlandicum, C. decoratum, and Astarte pectunculata, etc. This is the only locality within the purview of the Pribylov Islands where any palæontological evidence of their age can be found. These specimens, as indicated, are exceedingly abundant; I brought down a whole series, gathered there at the east landing or “Navastock,” in a short half-hour’s search and labor.

Although small quantities of drift-wood lodge at all points of the coast, yet the greatest amount is found on the south shore, and thence around to Garden Cove; this drift-timber is usually wholly stripped of its bark, principally pine and fir sticks, some of them quite large, eighteen inches or two feet in diameter. Several years occur when a large driftage will be thrown or stranded here; then long intervals of many seasons will elapse with scarcely a log or stick coming ashore. I found at Garden Cove, in June, 1873, the well-preserved husk of a cocoanut, cast up by the surf on the beach: did I not know that it was most undoubtedly thrown over by some whaler in these waters, not many hundred miles away at the farthest, I should have indulged in a pretty reverie as to its path in drifting from the South Seas to this lonely islet. I presume, however, that the timber which the sea brings for the Pribylov Islands is that borne down upon the annual floods of the Kuskokvim and Nooshagak Rivers on the mainland, and to the east-northeastward, a trifle more than two hundred and twenty-five miles; it comes, however, in very scant supply. I saw very little drift-wood on St. Matthew Island; but on the eastern shore of St. Lawrence there was an immense aggregate, which unquestionably came from the Yukon mouth.

The fact that fur-seals frequent these islands and those of Bering and Copper, on the Russian side, to the exclusion of other land, seems at first odd or singular, to say the least; but when we come to examine the subject we find that those animals, when they repair hither to rest for two or three months on the land, as they must do by their habit during the breeding-season, require a cool, moist atmosphere, imperatively coupled with firm, well-drained land, or dry broken rocks or shingle, rather, upon which to take their positions and remain undisturbed by the weather and the sea for a lengthy period of reproduction. If the rookery-ground is hard and flat, with an admixture of loam or soil, puddles are speedily formed in this climate, where it rains almost every day, and when not raining, rain-fogs take rapid succession and continue the saturation, making thus a muddy slime, which very quickly takes the hair off the animals whenever it plasters or wherever it fastens on them; hence they carefully avoid any such landing. If they occupy a sandy shore the rain beats that material into their large, sensitive eyes, and into their fur, so they are obliged, from simple irritation, to leave and return to the sea for relief.

This inspection of some natural characteristics of the Pribylov group renders it quite plain that the Seal Islands, now under discussion, offer to the Pinnipedia very remarkable advantages for landing, especially so at St. Paul, where the ground of basaltic rock and of volcanic tufa or cement slopes up from many points gradually above the sea, making thereby a perfectly adapted resting-place for any number, from a thousand to millions, of those intelligent animals, which can lie out here from May until October every year in perfect physical peace and security. There is not a rod of ground of this character offered to these animals elsewhere in all Alaska, not on the Aleutian chain, not on the mainland, not on St. Matthew or St. Lawrence. Both of the latter islands were surveyed by myself, with special reference to this query, in 1874; every foot of St. Matthew shore-line was examined, and I know that the fur-seal could not rest on the low clayey flats there in contentment a single day; hence he never has rested there, nor will he in the future. As to St. Lawrence, it is so ice-bound and snow-covered in spring and early summer, to say nothing of numerous other physical disadvantages, that it never becomes of the slightest interest to fur-seals.

When Pribylov, in taking possession, landed on St. George a part of his little ship’s crew, July, 1786, he knew that, as it was uninhabited, it would be necessary to establish a colony there from which to draft laborers to do all killing, skinning, and curing of the peltries; therefore he and his associates, and his rivals after him, imported natives of Oonalashka and Atkha—passive, docile Aleutes. They founded their first village a quarter of a mile to the eastward of one of the principal rookeries on St. George, now called “Starry Arteel,” or “Old Settlement”; a village was also located at Zapadnie, and a succession of barraboras planted at Garden Cove. Then, during the following season, more men were brought up from Atkha and taken over to St. Paul, where five or six rival traders posted themselves on the north shore, near and at “Maroonitch,” and at the head of the Big Lake, among the sand-dunes there. They were then, as they are now, somewhat given to riotous living if they only had the chance, and the ruins of the Big Lake settlement are pleasantly remembered by the descendants of those pioneers to-day, on St. Paul, who take off their hats as they pass by to affectionately salute, and call the place “Vesolia Mista,” or “Jolly Spot”—the aged men telling me, in a low whisper, that “in those good old days they had plenty of rum.” But, when the pressure of competition became great, another village was located at Polavina, and still another at Zapadnie, until the activity and unscrupulous energy of all these rival settlements well-nigh drove out and eliminated the seals in 1796. Three years later the whole territory of Alaska passed into the hands of the absolute power vested in the Russian American Company. These islands were in the bill of sale, and early in 1799 the competing traders were turned off neck and heels from them, and the Pribylov group passed under the control of a single man, the iron-willed Baranov. The people on St. Paul were then all drawn together, for economy and warmth, into a single settlement at Polavina. Their life in those days must have been miserable. They were mere slaves, without the slightest redress from any insolence or injury which their masters might see fit, in petulance or brutal orgies, to inflict upon them. Here they lived and died, unnoticed and uncared for, in large barracoons half under ground and dirt-roofed, cold and filthy. Along toward the beginning or end of 1825, in order that they might reap the advantage of being located best to load and unload ships, the Polavina settlement was removed to the present village site, as indicated on the map, and the natives have lived there ever since.

On St. George the several scattered villages were abandoned, and consolidated at the existing location some years later, but for a different reason. The labor of bringing the seal-skins over to Garden Cove, which is the best and surest landing, was so great, and that of carrying them from the north shore to Zapadnie still greater, that it was decided to place the consolidated settlement at such a point between them, on the north shore, that the least trouble and exertion of conveyance would be necessary. A better place, geographically, for the business of gathering the skins and salting them down at St. George cannot be found on the island, but a poorer place for a landing it is difficult to pick out, though in this respect there is not much choice outside of Garden Cove.