Beside whalers and casual ships, with which the Esquimaux are in the habit of dealing, the commerce in furs, on both sides of the continent, north of the United States, has for a long time been in the hands of two corporations,--being the Hudson’s Bay Company, with directors in London, and the Russian American Company, with directors in St. Petersburg. The former is much the older of the two, and has been the most flourishing. Its original members were none other than Prince Rupert, the Duke of Albemarle, Earl Craven, Lord Ashley, and other eminent associates, who received a charter from Charles the Second, in 1670, to prosecute a search after a new passage to the South Sea, and to establish a trade in furs, minerals, and other considerable commodities in all those seas, and in the British possessions north and west of Canada, with powers of government, the whole constituting a colossal monopoly, which stretched from Labrador and Baffin’s Bay to an undefined West. At present this great corporation is known only as a fur company, to which all its powers are tributary. For some time its profits were so considerable that it was deemed advisable to hide them by nominal additions to the stock. With the extinction of the St. Petersburg corporation under the present treaty, the London corporation will remain the only existing fur company on the continent, but necessarily restricted in its operation to British territory. It remains to be seen into whose hands the commerce on the Pacific side will fall, now that this whole region will be open to the unchecked enterprise of our citizens. This remarkable commerce began before the organization of the Russian Company. Its profits may be inferred from a voyage in 1772, described by Coxe, between Kamtchatka and the Aleutians. The tenth part of the skins being handed to the custom-house, the remainder were distributed in fifty-five shares, consisting each of twenty sea-otters, sixteen black and brown foxes, ten red foxes, and three sea-otter tails; and these shares were sold on the spot at from eight hundred to one thousand rubles each, so that the whole lading brought about fifty thousand rubles.[148] The cost of these may be inferred from the articles given in exchange. A Russian outfit, of which I find a contemporary record, was, among other things, “about five hundred weight of tobacco, one hundred weight of glass beads, perhaps a dozen spare hatchets and a few superfluous knives of very bad quality, an immense number of traps for foxes, a few hams, a little rancid butter.”[149] With such imports against such exports, the profits must have been considerable.