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The whole city of Boston was on the wharf to cheer him home, and the explorer walked up the streets side by side with Atto, the Hawaiian boy, gorgeous in helmet and cloak of yellow plumage. Governor Hancock gave a public reception to Gray. The Columbia went to the shipyards to be overhauled, and the shareholders met. Owing to the glutting of the market at Canton, the sea-otter had not sold well.
Wearing caps made of sea-otter fur, and shod in sealskin fishing boots, these two strangers were dressed in clothing made from some unique fabric that flattered the figure and allowed great freedom of movement. The taller of the two apparently the leader on board examined us with the greatest care but without pronouncing a word.
Oonalaska was the very centre of the sea-otter hunt. Here, eighteen thousand otter a year were taken. At once, Ledyard realized how he could pay the cost of exploring that unclaimed world between New Spain and Alaska: by turning fur trader as Radisson, and La Salle, and the other explorers had done.
A moment's examination proved to them that this was nothing less than a sea-otter cub, a small animal not much larger than a wood-chuck, but with a long, pointed tail, and covered with short, soft fur. All these boys had lived in Alaska long enough to know the great value of the fur of the sea-otter, which even at this time was worth more than a thousand dollars a skin.
The sea-otter catch of the Russians was made by brigades of Aleuts from the western islands, who went along the shores and to sea as far as 20 miles, in their wonderful skin boats called bidarkas, to hunt. When a sea-otter lifted its head from the water to breathe, within sight of a detachment of Aleut hunters, its fate was sealed, for it seldom escaped.
The martens from Northern Asia and the Mountains of Kamtschatka are much superior to the American, though in every pack of American marten skins there are a certain number which are beautifully shaded, and of a dark brown olive color, of great depth and richness. Next these in value, for ornament and utility, are the sea-otter, the mink, and the fiery fox.
The last voyage of that renowned but unfortunate discoverer, Captain Cook, had made known the vast quantities of the sea-otter to be found along that coast, and the immense prices to be obtained for its fur in China. It was as if a new gold coast had been discovered.
Here provisions were gathered for Sitka, and hunters despatched for sea-otter of the south. The massacres on the Yukon and the clashes with the Hudson's Bay traders are a story by themselves. The other doings of these "Sea Voyagers" became matters of international history when they tried to exclude American and British traders from the Pacific.
June saw Benyowsky far eastward at Kadiak on the south shore of Alaska, gathering in a cargo of furs; and from the sea-otter fields of Kadiak and Oonalaska, Benyowsky sailed southwest, past the smoking volcanoes of the Aleutians, vaguely heading for some of those South Sea islands of which he used to read in the exile village of Kamchatka.
As long as the little black head comes up, as long as the gurgling bubble tells of a struggling breather below, the hunters follow, be it near or far, till, at the end of two or three hours, the exhausted sea-otter is taken.
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