When the spray
cleared, the few panic-stricken survivors were washing ashore too
exhausted to be conscious that half their comrades had 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.
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