hat lend their skins to keep us warm, the
merchant would find no charms in that region. The fur coming from
Kamchatka was the cause of the Russian discovery and conquest. For
many years the trade was conducted by individual merchants from
Siberia. The Russian American Company attempted to control it early in
the present century, and drove many competitors from the fields. It
received the most determined opposition from American merchants, and
in 1860 it abandoned Petropavlovsk, its business there being
profitless.

In 1866 I found the fur trade of Kamchatka in the control of three
merchants: W.H. Boardman, of Boston, J.W. Fluger, of Hamburg, and
Alexander Phillipeus, of St. Petersburg. All of them had houses in
Petropavlovsk, and each had from one to half a dozen agencies or
branches elsewhere. To judge by appearances, Mr. Boardman had the
lion's share of the trade. This gentleman's father began the Northwest
traffic sometime in the last century, and left it as an inheritance
about 1828. His son continued the business until bought off by the
Hudson Bay Company, when he turned his attention to Kamchatka.
Personally he has never visited the Pacific Ocean.

Mr. Fluger had been only two years in Kamchatka, and was doing a
miscellaneous business. Boardman's agent confined himself to the fur
trade, but Fluger was up to anything. He salted salmon for market,
sent a schooner every year into the Arctic Ocean for walrus teeth and
mammoth tusks, bought furs, sold goods, kept a dog team, was attentive
to the ladies, and would have run for Congress had it been possible.
He had in his store about half a cord of walrus teeth piled against a
back entrance like stove wood. Phillipeus was a roving blade. He kept
an agent at Petropavlovsk and came there in person once a year. In
February he left St. Petersburg for London, whence he took the Red Sea
route to Japan. There he chartered a brig to visit Kamchatka and land
him at Ayan, on the Ohotsk Sea. From Ayan he went to Yakutsk, and from
that place through Irkutsk to St. Petersburg, where he arrived about
three hundred and fifty days after his departure. I met him in the
Russian capital just as he had completed the sixth journey of this
kind and was about to commence the seventh. If he were a Jew he should
be called the wandering Jew.

Trade is conducted on the barter principle, furs being low and goods
high. The risks are great, transport is costly, and money is a long
time invested b