Feodor Altasov, with a band of Russian Cossacks[64] and Tartar “promishlyniks,” were the pioneers of civilized exploration in Eastern Siberia, and finally arrived at the head of the great Kamchatkan Peninsula, toward the end of the seventeenth century. Here they found, first of all their race, the rare, and to them the exceedingly valuable, fur of the sea-otter. The animal bearing this pelage then was abundant on that coast, and not prized above the seals and sea-lions by the natives who displayed their peltries to the ardent Russians, and who in barter asked little or nothing extra from the white men in return. The feverish eagerness of the Slavonians, quickly displayed, to secure these choice skins, so excited the natives as to result very soon in the practical extirpation of the “kahlan,” as they termed it, from the entire region of the Kamschadales. The greedy fur-hunters then rifled graves and stripped the living of every scrap of the precious object of their search, and, for the time being, searched in vain for other haunts of the otter. Along by the close of 1743, the survivors of Bering’s second voyage of exploration and Tscherikov brought back to Petropaulovsk an enormous number of skins which they had secured on the Aleutian and Commander Islands, until then unknown to the Kamchatkans or the Russians. In spite of the rude appliances and scanty resources at the command of these eager men, they fitted out rude wooden shallops and boldly pushed themselves over dark and tempestuous seas to the unknown and rumored resorts of the sea-otter. In this manner and by this impulse the discovery of the Aleutian Islands and the mainland of Alaska was fully determined, between 1745 and 1763. In this enterprise some twenty-five or thirty different individuals and companies, with quite a fleet of small vessels and hundreds of men, were engaged; and so thorough and energetic were they in their search and stimulated capture of the coveted animal, that, along by the period of 1772-74, the catch of this unhappy beast had dwindled down from thousands and tens of thousands at first, to hundreds and tens of hundreds at last. When the Russian traders opened up the Aleutian Islands they found the natives commonly wearing sea-otter cloaks, which they willingly parted with at first for trifles, not placing any especial value upon the otter, as they did upon the bodies of the hair-seal and sea-lion, the flesh and skins of which were vastly more palatable to them and serviceable. But the fierce competition and raised bidding of the greedy traders soon fired the savages into hot and incessant hunting. During the first decade or two of pursuit the numbers of these animals taken all along the Aleutian chain and down the entire northwest coast as far as Oregon, were so great that they appear fabulous in comparison with the exhibit made now.[65]