Across Greenland's ice-fields Author:Mary Douglas Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. SEALING, AND WHAT CAME OF IT. OF all the animals which inhabit the Polar regions, none—not even the reindeer—is more generally useful than the se... more »al. It is true, one never hears of his being employed to draw sledges, but nevertheless he is invaluable to the Eskimos: his skin provides them with clothing, his flesh with food, his blubber with fuel and light, his tendons with thread; in fact, every bit of him is turned to account in some way or other. His fame has spread far beyond his own icy haunts, and many people who would be mightily disgusted if asked to sit down to a dinner of seal-meat, or to partake of train-oil in Eskimo fashion, are remarkably well pleased to possess a garment of the beautiful, soft fur of the seal. Not that the fur seal is the fellow who is so useful to the Eskimos—far from it. His home is far away from Greenland, in Behring Sea on the opposite side of America, and during the last few years he r and his affairs have been the source of a vast amount of argument, not to say unpleasantness, between Britain and the United States. The chief seat of the fur-seal fishery is in the Pribylov Islands, off the coast of Alaska, where millions of seals come annually for breeding purposes. " Fishery " is rather a misleading term. One naturally connects fisheries with water, but the sealers of the Pribylov Islands do almost all their work on land. The finest skins are those of the young males of three or four years old, and it is with these almost exclusively that, the market is supplied. These youngsters, or " bachelor seals," are never allowed by their elders, who are fathers of families, to approach the breeding grounds, but have to take a back seat and retire to quarters of their own a little farther inland. Unfortunately for the seals,...« less