From Langsdorff we have a general inventory of furs at the beginning of the century in the principal magazine of the Russian Company on the island of Kadiak, drawn from the islands, the peninsula of Alaska, Cook’s Inlet, Prince William Sound, and the continent generally. Here were “a great variety of the rarest kinds of fox skins,” black, blackish, reddish, silver gray, and stone fox,--the last probably a species of the Arctic; “brown and red bears, the skins of which are of great value,” and also “the valuable black bear”; the zisel marmot, and the common marmot; the glutton; the lynx, chiefly of whitish gray; the reindeer; the beaver; the hairy hedgehog; “the wool of a wild American sheep, whitish, fine, and very long,” but he could never obtain sight of the animal that produced this wool; also sea-otters, once “the principal source of wealth to the Company, now nearly extirpated, a few hundreds only being annually collected.”[150] Many of the same furs were reported by Cook on this coast in his day. They all continue to be found,--except that I hear nothing of wild sheep, save at a Sitkan dinner. There has been much exaggeration with regard to the profits of the Russian corporation. An English writer of authority calls the produce “immense,” and adds that “formerly it was much greater.” I refer to the paper of Mr. Petermann, read before the Royal Geographical Society of London, in 1852.[151] The number of skins at times is prodigious, although this fails to reveal precisely the profits. For instance, Pribyloff collected within two years, on the islands northwest of Alaska which bear his name, the skins of 2,000 sea-otters, 40,000 sea-bears or ursine seals, 6,000 dark ice-foxes, together with 1,000 poods of walrus ivory.[152] The pood is a Russian weight of thirty-six pounds. Lütke mentions that in 1803 no less than 800,000 skins of the ursine seal were accumulated in the factory at Oonalaska, of which 700,000 were thrown into the sea, partly because they were badly prepared, and partly to keep up the price,[153]--thus imitating the Dutch, who for the same reason burned spices. Another estimate masses the collection for a series of years. From 1787 to 1817, for only part of which time the Company existed, the Oonalaska district yielded upwards of 2,500,000 seal-skins; and from 1817 to 1838, during all which time the Company was in power, the same district yielded 879,000 seal-skins. Assuming, what is improbable, that these skins were sold at twenty-five rubles each, some calculating genius has ciphered out the sum-total of proceeds at more than 85,000,000 rubles,--or, calling the ruble seventy-five cents, a sum-total of more than $63,000,000. Clearly, the latter years can show no approximation to any such doubtful result.