The Sea Hunters

The Sea Hunters by Roger Pocock

The Sea Hunters by Roger Pocock describes a remarkable and dangerous era of maritime adventure in the waters around Japan, the Kuril Islands, and the Bering Sea during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The narrative opens with an explanation of a peculiar Japanese maritime law enacted several centuries earlier, by which the shogun forbade shipbuilders to complete the stern frames of ocean-going junks, rendering them incapable of surviving the open Pacific without risk of being pooped and sunk. The law was intended to stop Japanese raiders from crossing to America for slaves, and it succeeded in ending that trade, but it could not stop storms, and disabled junks were sometimes carried across the Pacific by the great black current and westerly gales. During the first half of the nineteenth century, wrecked junks were cast away on American coasts at an average of roughly one every forty-two months. A further consequence of the law was that Japan could not effectively trade in the Kuril Islands, a fog-bound, storm-lashed, and volcanically active chain to the north, inhabited by a large and hairy people called the Ainu who lived by fishing and the taking of sea otter and fur seal. Their furs reached China, where sea-otter fur formed part of the costly official dress of mandarins and seal whiskers and other parts of the carcass had commercial value for cleaning opium pipes and for medicine. Because Japanese shipping was effectively disabled by law, the Russians arrived in the Kurils as colonists before any rival power could establish itself. Americans faced no such restriction, and when the sea otter population on the Californian coast gave out in 1872, a schooner called the Cygnet crossed the Pacific to the Kurils, where sea otters were plentiful, tame, and worth eighty to ninety dollars a skin. Word of this new source of wealth reached Japan, and a young Englishman named H. J. Snow purchased a schooner called the Swallow and set out for the hunting grounds. A gale dismasted her three days out and she was wrecked in the Kurils. Snow's second vessel, the Snowdrop, was likewise cast away on a desert island where her crew wintered, and Snow ruefully noted that both vessels had lived up to their names. During that same winter, another crew of white men on the same island of Yeturup were cooking their Christmas dinner when a dispute between two rival cooks over the proper method of frying fritters led to a pan of boiling fat capsizing into the stove and setting the dwelling ablaze. The men fled half dressed through the flames into snow and bitter wind, then sheltered behind driftwood, warming themselves at the burning ruin while gravely debating whether they ought to cremate the cooks upon the ashes of the building and the ruined dinner. The narrative then turns to the commercial and legal framework surrounding the fur trade. The Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco had leased the principal seal and otter islands from both the United States and Russia, including the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, home to nearly four million fur seals, as well as Bering and Copper Islands and Cape Patience. The company maintained armed native gamekeepers, patrol ships, and the support of American and Russian gunboats, and also controlled sympathetic newspapers that denounced independent sea hunters as criminals. The sea hunters, for their part, generally took their quarry on the open sea, where it was lawful, and at worst landed on forbidden islands as poachers. The essential difference between the two sides was that the sea hunters bore all the risks while the company bore none and took all the profits. In 1883 Snow raided Bering Island, and his crew had clubbed around six hundred seals when the garrison rushed them. Snow escaped to the water, hid among seals on an outlying rock, and made his way back along a brutal shoreline of boulders in the dark, harassed by foxes and nearly lamed by Arctic stones when he removed his sea boots, before reaching his schooner. He found the shipkeeper drunk and the Japanese boatswain in need of discipline. The following morning a Russian officer arrived and searched the ship; finding no direct evidence, the Russians nevertheless seized the vessel and imprisoned all aboard for several months at Vladivostok. In 1888, sailing the schooner Nemo, Snow returned and was ambushed by hidden marksmen while returning from an otter hunt close inshore. The fusillade was so rapid that a perfume of molten lead hung in the air of the boat. Three men were shot through grievous wounds, a fourth played dead, and Snow himself was struck in the leg, with several further bullets deflected by his woolen jersey, a phenomenon also observed in the Franco-Prussian War. With a sinking boat and most of her crew dead or wounded, Snow got her under sail and brought her alongside the schooner. The narrative also recounts the exploits of a Norwegian captain named Hans Hansen of Christiania, who sailed the schooner eventually known as the Adele. Hansen and his men were once marched in shackles through San Francisco, denounced as pirates, though the court found it had no jurisdiction and released them. This episode gave rise to the name Yokohama Pirates and to Hansen's own nickname of the Flying Dutchman. He thereafter declared perpetual war on the United States, sailed under whichever national flag suited him, and raided forbidden islands repeatedly while gunboats of four nations failed to catch him. The narrator sailed with Hansen as an ordinary seaman in 1889 on a winter raid against the Pribilof Islands, during which the crew clawed off a lee shore in a hurricane, survived a mutiny, and failed a third landing when boats were swamped and the garrison proved too strong. In 1890 the Adele took four hundred skins. In 1891 she was cast away on the North Island of the Queen Charlotte group without loss of life, and Hansen subsequently took to mining on the outer coast of Vancouver, where he rescued a shipwrecked crew before perishing in an attempt to save a drowning Indian. Snow recorded that of roughly fifty white men's schooners that sailed out of Yokohama in that trade, the Russians sank one and seized others, twenty-two were cast away, and twelve foundered with all hands, making a total loss of forty ships out of fifty. The narrator concludes that for daring seamanship and gallant adventure, sea hunting formed a school of manhood difficult to match in a tamer modern world.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1938 · Genre: Adventure Fiction, Historical Fiction, Maritime Fiction · 2,466 words

First lines

A. D. 1872

The Japanese have heroes and adventurers just as fine as our own, most valiant and worthy knights. Unhappily I am too stupid to remember their honorable names, to understand their motives, or to make out exactly what they were playing at. It is rather a pity they have to be left out, but at least we can deal with one very odd phase of adventure in the Japan seas.

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maritime adventure · naval history · ocean exploration · seafaring tales · historical fiction · adventure stories · nautical themes · sea voyages · exploration · action and adventure · historical accounts · ship captains

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The Sea Hunters is listed on Textopian as a short story by Roger Pocock, dated 1938 CE.

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