Pelagic Seal Hunting

Pelagic sealing began when the first aboriginal hunter speared a fur seal from his canoe. For hundreds — probably thousands — of years, bone- or stone-tipped spears and harpoons provided a few primitive littoral tribes with food, clothing, and oil for heat and light. Yet the fur seal ranks had never been depleted. Then almost in a single season pelagic sealing became an industry of civilized man, and desolation spread throughout the northern seal kingdom. Small schooners lined the seals’ ocean migration paths and trailed like bloodhounds the traveling animals. Firearms replaced primitive weapons. For each seal killed by a bullet and recovered from the waves, six to ten sank and were lost.

Pelagic poaching captains, fitting out in the Canadian harbor of Victoria and other West Coast ports, generally preferred to hire Indian hunters and transport them and their canoes to the sealing grounds. The captains agreed that the Indians were more skillful hunters and cheaper labor. Most important they were not quarrelsome and behaved more honorably, in all transactions, than the majority of “white” sealers. For they fulfilled their contracts scrupulously, and their general deportment aboard ship was exemplary. But as United States revenue cutters began waylaying sealing schooners, the Indians proved reluctant to risk violence and court action. More and more, the seal hunters and boat steerers and handlers were recruited from the rough, lawless flotsam of the seaports, the sea wolves whom Jack London depicted in fiction, men indifferent to hardships and dangerous toil, unafraid to clash with law officers.

The new pelagic sealing began off the coast of Washington and Vancouver Island before 1867, before the fur seals became Americans. A Canadian trader, Hugh Mackay, was persuaded by Indians from whom he bought furs, to ship them and their canoes to the seal routes to save time, labor, and the risk of long voyages in their small boats. His sloop Ino proved too small to carry more than two or three canoes; so after his trial trip in 1866 proved profitable, he had the schooner Favorite built solely for sealing. A few other fur traders, each believing himself the pioneer pelagic sealer, tried the same experiment during the next few seasons and, for some years, found the business most profitable — too profitable to divulge to others and attract competition.

Available data, incomplete because of the traders’ secrecy, indicates that only four or five schooners were sealing in that neighborhood in 1879. There may have been more. Vancouver Island Indians and some from Cape Flattery had bought their own schooners and were carrying on large-scale independent sealing. They, too, were discreetly silent. These desultory beginnings were not seriously detrimental to the Pribilof herd.

Simultaneously, whaling captains in the Bering Sea were drifting into pelagic sealing. The market for whale oil and whalebone had dwindled. Decimated by decades of hunting, each year whales were more difficult to find. The first land raids on the Pribilof Islands, between 1872 and 1879, were perpetrated by disappointed whalers returning from arctic seas with empty oil casks. Passing the unguarded rookery shores, they yielded to the temptation to recoup their losses with a few hundred seal pelts. As whales became more scarce and London offered higher prices for seal furs, the serious outfitting of ships for sealing voyages began, probably in 1879. The following summer pelagic sealing emerged from its chance beginnings and became a flourishing, profitable, established industry. Representing a large investment of capital, it provided work for shipbuilders; trade outlets for food, clothing, and other merchandise; as well as employment for mariners and hunters.

Waiting for migrating seals off the coast of Washington in February, the schooners followed them northward, killing chiefly the slower-swimming gravid females. As more ships entered the chase each spring, in order to obtain a satisfactory catch the schooners had to pursue the seals between the Aleutian passes into the Bering Sea and, eventually, even to the shores of their breeding islands. From a known total of sixteen schooners in 1879, the sealing fleet by 1883 had increased to thirty-four; and in 1889 there were 115 fur pirates harrying the fur seals from Cape Flattery to the Pribilof Islands and beyond. A catch of fifteen-thousand pelts reported in market lists of 1882 rose to sixty-thousand a year by 1895. Marked by the hole where spear or bullet had penetrated, the pelagic skins were easily distinguished from the undamaged skins of Pribilof or Asiatic seals killed on land by clubbing. London furriers referred to these torn, less valuable furs as “the Northwest Catch.”

Mortality among fur seals was far more devastating than sales totals indicated. According to the pelagic hunters’ own admissions, the fifteen-thousand furs sent to London in 1882 represented the pelts recovered from between 120,000 to 150,000 slain animals. To attempt to estimate the number of slain foetuses was futile. Since the majority of those killed at sea were pregnant females, the death rate among the unborn was catastrophic.

Impulsively defending American property, the Treasury Department ordered revenue steamers to apprehend sealers no matter what flags the schooners flew, convoy them to Alaskan ports, and hand them over to an American District Court. No precedent existed to guide revenue officers, judges, or lawyers. Nor had the State Department, which had not protested to either Great Britain or Canada before the first seizures, found previous international judicial sanction to justify American interference with ships of other countries.

As soon as seal furs become commercially valuable, the creatures’ unique habits, their amphibious nature, introduced into international politics a legal conundrum more complex and confusing than any diplomats had ever faced in settling trade animosities between nations. Had the United States sought England’s co-operation earlier, before the Canadians had invested so much capital and received such high returns, seal protection beyond territorial waters might have been arranged amicably. But no one, not even Professor Elliott, suspected the fur seals’ plight, or realized the potential destructiveness of sea hunting. So the lowly, stupid sea bears innocently and fatally emerged from obscure commercial status to market fame and into the sphere of international relations as a disruptive, malignant political force. As the owner of their birthplaces, the United States, attempting to end their persecution at sea, rashly ventured beyond traditional legality into unknown diplomatic courses.

Evidence against the pelagic sealers was easily collected. They felt no guilt. They explained every detail of their methods. Hundreds of their affidavits frankly described the place and manner of killings and commented upon the elusiveness of their swimming targets, the abrupt sinkings of wounded seals, and the consequent wastage of seal life. Shamelessly they pictured the shambles of a schooner’s deck at skinning time. Prematurely ripped from their dead or dying mothers by the skinners’ cruel blades, tremulous viable foetuses stumbled blindly in the slippery white and crimson ooze of their mothers’ milk and blood smeared thickly over the planks. These terrible living unborn cried in anguished terror until a kindly foot mercifully kicked them overboard to a sea death.

Wiser than the antarctic seal destroyers, in the beginning of majority of fur pirates candidly agreed their killings would soon exterminate the Pribilof fur seal. What of it? Their only interest was a season’s profits. Neither the conservation of seal life nor the monetary and property losses of the United States or of a single American fur company concerned them. The seas were free to men of all nations. United States interference beyond the three-mile limit was illegal, hostile, an act of war against a sister nation. Swimming fur seals belonged to no one.

“I’ve got a strong government back of me,” a Canadian sealing captain warned the American officer boarding his schooner. “I’ve got a strong government backing me,” retorted the American, “and I intend to do my duty.” Queen Victoria’s ministers agreed with the pelagic sealers….

16. Where are the Fur Seals?

… [Henry] Elliott, fearful but still holding stubbornly after his winter studies to the hope that Goff’s report had been exaggerated, went back to the Pribilofs in the spring. From available data, he had compiled a casualty list, a memorandum submitted in February to Treasury officials. His own estimate of a million and a half victims of pelagic hunting had horrified him. Vehemently he urged the passage of the bill ordering an investigation of Goff’s report, an action his enemies were later to interpret as proof of excessive self-love and disgraceful chicanery to secure a job. However, it was the Treasury’s automatic duty to determine the report’s verity. And undoubtedly Elliott must have pressed his claim to be the investigator. Who had a better right? Naturally he was anxious to see for himself the state of his fur seals. Whom else could he trust after the years of false reporting? Considering his reputation, he was the Treasury’s best and only candidate — a fact his enemies were to forget or ignore.

The spectacle of the seal beaches frightened him; former rookeries were abandoned and grass-grown; others were shrunken. Of the host which had captured his heart and imagination in 1872, a “scant million” survived. Clearly he remembered the first day he had stood on Hutchinson Hill, the little volcanic cone on Northeast Point, gazing in bewildered ecstacy at the surging tide of fur seal life, many millions strong, fecund, virile, and magnificent. It was an awful hour when he climbed again to the crest of the same peak. Small, lonely clusters of fur seals were scattered along the shore. The lava boulders, so burnished by the passage of millions of flippers of countless generations, gaped like raw welts between the huddled groups. The empty earth, the untenanted rocks, accused him of murder. Not the lessees alone. Not only the slayers of the mothers. He, the careless shepherd, was equally guilty.

Barely a hundred thousand young males remained to replace the older breeding bulls. Chiefly, the swollen-bodied, slower-coursing gravid cows had been the pelagic hunters’ targets. Elliott knew from the killers’ own confessions as well as from the acknowledged routes and time schedules of pirate schooners, that the female routes were more regularly patrolled than the other seals’ sea lanes.

Where then had the bachelors gone? So many millions of swift-coursing young could not have been destroyed at sea. Had they been slaughtered on land? He studied the islands’ logs which contained the daily records of seal drives during the preceding twenty years. From the sealers whom he cross-examined energetically — their frightened half-answers enlightened him but were worthless as public proof of malpractice, certain to be denied in the presence of their immediate superiors — he heard of barbarous tactics the first lessees had employed when bachelors became scarce.

To drive the animals permanently from the less accessible shore rims, the rocks had been strewn with broken glass and rubbish. Straggling handfuls of bachelors loafing on rocks too close to the sea to be surprised in the usual manner, had been stampeded by clamorous, shrill police whistles the sealers wore those tucked under their shirts, Elliott discovered. Then the terror-stricken animals, having lost their sense of direction had been easily rounded up. The log showed why such cruelty was devised. Until 1877 the lessee’s quota had been filled by collecting seals from only a few rookeries. Then, to secure the maximum, the hunters had invaded every strip of seal beach.

Instead of herding the bachelors to killing fields adjacent to the newer hunting territories, the young seals had been marched mercilessly along an extended, rugged, rock-strewn course to the regular killing grounds. Rejected bachelors, culled, usually because of extreme youth and small size, from the herd along the line of march or at the site of execution, had probably been driven over and over that tortuous, exhaustive passage — since there were no longer undisturbed and peaceful beaches to which they might retire. The frequently repeated violent exertions must have devitalized the future fathers of the species and destroyed their virility.

The indignant Elliott could envisage no other explanation of depleted male breeding stock. The greedy lessees had concealed the awful pelagic casualties while maltreating and abusing the poor male refugees that had run the gantlet safely. They were more guilty than the sea killers and must share, with the latter, the blame for the murder of over four million seals.

Elliott and the resident Treasury agents headed by [Charles] Goff watched the new lessees’ foremen collect small herds of males daily. By July 20th, when the harems began to disperse, only 21,000 had been executed — a third of their quota. Backed by Elliott, Goff ordered [George R.] Tingle to stop killing. The new superintendent forgot his previous fervent admiration for the expert. Forgetting, too, that Goff had recommended the terminal sealing date the previous year, Tingle held Elliott alone accountable for the stoppage. He was the villain who had perverted the judgment of sensible government officials. Fine young males were arriving daily, asserted Tingle. Elliott was not merely defrauding the lessees of their rights. He was injuring the sealers. The Company need not support the Aleuts unless its sealing income covered its expenses. Elliott was condemning the sealers to starvation.

Aleuts, Tingle might browbeat successfully. His threats failed to intimidate Elliott or Goff or, confident of the fur seal expert’s prestige and support, the assistant agents. When the authority’s report was read in Washington, Tingle and his crowd would learn that they could not continue to destroy the already decimated herd nor gamble with the lives of wandering cows by prolonging killings late into the season.

Seal killing on land and sea must be stopped immediately, Elliott not only recommended but demanded. Only complete peace could save the fur seals. A zapusk, a Russian-style holiday from clubbing, for at least seven years, must begin at once. Swiftly and jointly British and Americans must devise a peaceful, a cooperative settlement of pelagic sealing. If the Americans corrected land abuses, if they stayed their hands from seal murder, their moral example and their display of unselfish regard for the fur seals would force the British to end open-sea killing.

Compensation of the pelagic interests might be necessary. Financial problems  — particularly the determination of the distribution of future profits from the seals’ furs  — were of minor importance. The only issue was the preservation of the fur seals. No longer would the “seal life candle” burn at both ends — the animals be destroyed both on land and at sea. He, the expert, would extinguish the consuming flames.

But it was Ellott’s flaming accusation which, because it shocked decorous government circles, was extinguished. Affrighted officials read his emphatic words and hastily took cover, transferring Agent Goff to a Canadian customs post and excluding the “Professor” from some inner fur seal conferences. The expert had blundered and run counter to conventional opinions. He had not backed up with incontrovertible evidence the American claim to the fur seals as their exclusive property by right of purchase of their birthplace, by yearly sojourn on American territory and because of the care and attention lavished on them.

His cutting denunciations of land management were phrased in terms so much sharper than his condemnation of pelagic sealing. It was impossible to assail the first lessees without censuring the agents as civil servants either too ignorant to see the gradual diminution of seal life, or too dishonest to tell the truth. Elliott’s attitude was unpatriotic, almost treasonable. Doubtless some personal, nefarious ambition, a spiteful determination to ruin the new lessees who had ousted his friends from the Seal Islands, inspired his reckless attacks on the fair name of his country. Otherwise his recommendations were inexplicable to official circles.

For domestically his suggestions were ruinous. His seven-year holiday was Utopian folly, horrifying to the officers of the new company and their friends in office. It was an attack on the very idea of leasing sealing rights, an attempt to undermine the system of private enterprise. The madman might next propose that government control replace private commercial sealing. Furthermore all seals would be killed at sea, and the Canadians would get rich while Americans lost money.

It was preposterous to think the British would be impressed by a zapusk. The Canadians would laugh and go about their sealing with better catches for a few seasons, grateful for American folly. So favorable were his proposals to Canadian interests, that the expert must be working for pelagic sealers. He was a British agent, a hireling of the Canadian pirates. His written word must be suppressed, and while officials politely wrangled with him about its effect on public opinion, his report could be locked up. But the expert himself could not be muzzled. He had a reputation, a public who deemed his utterances about fur seals infallible. He must be discredited. Rumors, contradictory and vicious, began to spread wildly throughout Washington. He was, at one and the same moment, the tool of the Alaska Commercial Company, the agent of British statesmen, and the lobbyist for pelagic fur pirates.

The strange furred creatures of land and sea had appropriately selected a strange personality to rescue them from jeopardy. He had truly been a doomed young man when he rode into their kingdom in 1872. Camped out on the edge of Washington, he subordinated all personal interests to the defense of his fur seals. A Don Quixote jousting at many windmills, but sometimes sending his point home to the very heart of ruthless commerce and organized greed, he was to continue from that summer of 1890 to his life’s end the fur seals’ loyal, though most imperfect, knight.