[3] Thus the terrible Sitkan massacre of a later day was preceded by the slaughter of the first Russians to reach America. The Russian government of a later day originated a comical claim to more territory on the ground that descendants of these lost Russians had formed settlements farther down the coast, alleging in proof that subsequent explorers had found red-headed and light-complexioned people as far south as the Chinook tribes. To such means will statecraft stoop. [4] Coxe's _Discoveries of the Russians between Asia and America_ (Paris, 1781) supplies local data on Siberia in the time of Bering. _Voyages from Asia to America_, by S. Mueller of the Royal Academy, St. Petersburg, 1764, is simply excellent in that part of the voyage dealing with the wreck. _Peter Lauridsen's Vitus Bering translated from the Danish by Olson_ covers all three aims of the expedition, Japanese and Arctic voyages as well as American. {62} CHAPTER III 1741-1760 THE SEA-OTTER HUNTERS How the Sea-otter Pelts brought back by Bering's Crew led to the Exploitation of the Northwest Coast of America--Difference of Sea-otter from Other Fur-bearing Animals of the West--Perils of the Hunt When the castaway crew of Vitus Bering looked about for means to exist on the barren islands where they were wrecked, they found the kelp beds and seaweed fields of the North Pacific literally alive with a little animal, which the Russians called "the sea-beaver." Sailors of Kamchatka and eastern Siberia knew the sea-beaver well, for it had been found on the Asiatic side of the Pacific, and its pelt was regarded as priceless by Chinese and Tartar merchants. But where did this strange denizen of northern waters live? Only in rare seasons did the herds assemble on the rocky islets of Kamchatka and Japan. And when spring came, the sea-beaver disappeared. Asia was not its home. Where did it go? Russian adventurers who rafted the coast of Siberia {63} in crazy skiffs, related that the sea-beaver always disappeared northeastward, whence the spruce driftwood and dead whales with harpoons of strange hunters and occasionally wrecks of walrus-skin boats came washing from an unknown land. It was only when Bering's crew were left prisoners of the sea on an island barren as a billiard ball that the hunger-desperate men found the habitat of the sea-beaver to be the kelp beds of the Aleutian Islands and northwestern America. But what use were priceless pelts where neither money nor merchant was, and men mad with hunger were thrown back on the primal necessities without thought of gain?