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Updated: May 13, 2025
Just as the beaver led French voyagers westward from Quebec to the Rocky Mountains, south to Texas, north to the Athabasca, so the hunt of the sea-beaver led to the exploration of the North Pacific coast. "Sea-beaver" the Russians called the owner of the rare pelt. "Sea-otter" it was known to the English and American hunters.
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.
Asia was not its home. Where did it go? Russian adventurers who rafted the coast of Siberia in crazy skiffs, related that the sea-beaver always disappeared northeastward, 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.
The Chinese merchants looked hard; then nodded knowingly to each other, and came furtively down amid the groups along the shore front and timidly fingered the matted pelts worn by the half-naked men. It was incredible. Each penniless castaway was wearing the fur of the sea-otter, or what the Russians called the sea-beaver, more valuable than seal, and, even at that day, rarer than silver fox.
Sailors of Kamchatka and eastern Siberia knew the sea-beaver well, for it had been found on the Asiatic side of the Pacific, and its pelt was regarded as priceless by Chinese and Tartar merchants. But where did this strange denizen of northern waters live? Only in rare seasons did the herds assemble on the rocky islets of Kamchatka and Japan. And when spring came, the sea-beaver disappeared.
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 one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars a pelt. After that, the Russians of Siberia needed no incentive to hunt the sea-beaver.
When the castaway crew of Vitus Bering looked about for means to exist on the barren islands where they were wrecked, they found the kelp beds and seaweed fields of the North Pacific literally alive with a little animal, which the Russians called "the sea-beaver."
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