d gone under.
Absurd as it seems that these plunderers of the deep always held
prayers before going off on a hunt--is it any wonder they prayed? It
was in such brigades that the Russian hunters cruised the west coast of
America from Bering Sea to the Gulf of California, and the whole
northwest coast of America is punctuated with saints' names from the
Russian calendar; for, like Drake's freebooters, they had need to pray.

Fur companies world over have run the same course. No sooner has game
become scarce on the hunting-grounds, than rivals begin the merry game
of slitting one another's throats, or instigating savages to do the
butchering for them. That was the record of the Hudson's Bay Company
and Nor'westers in Canada, and the Rocky Mountain men and American
Company on the Missouri. Four years after Bering's crew had brought
back word of the sea-otter in 1742, there were seventy-seven different
private Russian concerns hunting sea-otter off the islands of Alaska.
Fifty years later, after Cook, the English navigator, had spread
authentic news of the wealth in furs to be had on the west coast of
America, there were sixty different fur companies on the Pacific coast
carrying {303} almost as many different flags. John Jacob Astor's
ships had come round the Horn from New York and, sailing right into the
Russian hunting-grounds, were endeavoring to make arrangements to
furnish supplies to the Russians in exchange for cargoes of the
fur-seals, whose rookeries had been discovered about the time sea-otter
began to be scarce. Kendrick, Gray, Ingraham, Coolidge, a dozen Boston
men were threading the shadowy, forested waterways between New Spain
and Alaska.[2] Ships from Spain, from France, from London, from
Canton, from Bengal, from Austria, were on the west coast of America.
The effect was twofold: sea-otter were becoming scarce from being
slaughtered indiscriminately, male and female, young and old; the fur
trade was becoming bedevilled from rival traders using rum among the
savages. The life of a fur trader on the Pacific coast was not worth a
pin's purchase fifty yards away from the cannon mouths pointed through
the netting fastened round the deck rails to keep savages off ships.
Just as Lord Selkirk indirectly brought about the consolidation of the
Hudson's Bay fur traders with Nor'westers, and John Jacob Astor
attempted the same ends between the St. Louis and New York companies,
so a master mind arose among the