In 1785 five thousand sea-otter were sold in China for one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. A capital of fifty thousand usually yielded three hundred thousand dollars; that is--if the ships escaped the dangers of hostile Indians and treacherous seas. What the Russians made from sea-otter will probably never be known; for so many different companies were engaged in the trade; and a hundred years ago, as many as fifteen thousand Indian hunters went out for the Russians yearly. One ship, the year after Bering's wreck, {79} is known to have made half a million dollars from its cargo. By definite figures--not including returns not tabulated in the fur companies--two hundred thousand sea-otter were taken for the Russians in half a century. Just before the United States took over Alaska, Russia was content with four hundred sea-otter a year; but by 1875 the Americans were getting three thousand a year. Those gathered at Kadiak have totalled as many as six thousand in a year during the heyday of the hunt, at Oonalaska three thousand, on the Prybilofs now noted for their seal, five thousand. In 1785 Cook's Inlet yielded three thousand; in 1812, only one hundred. Yakutat gave two thousand in 1794, only three hundred, six years later. Fifteen thousand were gathered at Sitka in 1804, only one hundred and fifty thirty years later. Of course the Russians obtained such results only by a system of musket, bludgeon, and outrage, that are repellent to the modern mind. Women were seized as hostages for a big hunt. Women were even murdered as a punishment for small returns. Men were sacrificed like dogs by the "promyshleniki"--riffraff blackguard Russian hunters from the Siberian exile population; but this is a story of outrageous wrong followed by its own terrible and unshunnable Nemesis which shall be told by itself. [1] The price of the sea-otter varied, falling in seasons when the market was glutted to $40 a pelt, selling as high, in cases of rare beauty, as $1000 a pelt. [2] See John Burroughs's account of birds observed during the Harriman Expedition. Elliott and Stejenger have remarked on the same phenomenon. {80} CHAPTER IV 1760-1770 THE OUTLAW HUNTERS The American Coast becomes the Great Rendezvous for Siberian Criminals and Political Exiles--Beyond Reach of Law, Cossacks and Criminals perpetrate Outrages on the Indians--The Indians' Revenge wipes out Russian Forts in America--The Pursuit of Four Refugee Russians from Cave to Cave over the Sea at Night--How they escape after a Year's Chase "_God was high in the Heavens, and the Czar was far away_," as the Russians say, and the Siberian exiles--coureurs of the sea--who flocked to the west coast of America to hunt the sea-otter after Bering's discoveries in 1741 took small thought and recked no consequences of God or the Czar.