ard,
whence the spruce driftwood and dead whales with harpoons of strange
hunters and occasionally wrecks of walrus-skin boats came washing from
an unknown land.

It was only when Bering's crew were left prisoners of the sea on an
island barren as a billiard ball that the hunger-desperate men found
the habitat of the sea-beaver to be the kelp beds of the Aleutian
Islands and northwestern America. But what use were priceless pelts
where neither money nor merchant was, and men mad with hunger were
thrown back on the primal necessities without thought of gain?

The hungry Russian sailors fell on the kelp beds, clubbing right and
left regardless of pelts. What matter if the flesh was tough as
leather and rank as musk? It filled the empty stomachs of fifty
desperate men; and the skins were used on the treeless isle as rugs, as
coats, as walls, as stuff to chink the cracks of earth pits, where the
sailors huddled like animals in underground caves with no ceiling but
the tattered sails. So passed a year--the most desolate year in the
annals of ocean voyaging, and when the castaways rafted back to Asia on
a skiff made of their wrecked ship, they were clad in the raw skins of
the sea-otter, which they had eaten. In all, nearly a thousand skins
were carried back; and for those skins, which the Russian sailors had
scarcely valued, Chinese merchants paid what in modern money would be
from {64} one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars a pelt.[1]

After that, the Russians of Siberia needed no incentive to hunt the
sea-beaver. Its habitat was known, and all the riffraff adventurers of
Siberian exile, Tartars, Kamchatkans, Russians, criminals, and officers
of royal lineage, engaged in the fur trade of western America. Danger
made no difference. All that was needed was a boat; and the boat was
usually rough-hewn out of the green timbers of Kamchatka. If iron
bolts were lacking so far from Europe as the width of two continents,
the boat builders used deer sinew, or thongs of walrus hide. Tallow
took the place of tar, deerskin the place of hemp, and courage the
place of caution. A Siberian merchant then chanced an outfit of
supplies for half what the returns might be. The commander--officer or
exile--then enlisted sailors among landsmen. Landsmen were preferable
for this kind of voyaging. Either in the sublime courage of ignorance,
or with the audacity of desperation, the poor landsmen dared dangers
which no sailors w