Explore "How They Took The Olga Out, A Story Of The Pacific Sealers" by Harold Bindloss on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It happened a few years ago that the three Powers ruling over the frozen shores of the polar Sea were engaged in a keen dispute as to the right of their respective subjects to kill the seal in the mist shrouded waters of the North. British, Russian, and American diplomacy was hard at work, and meantime ugly rumours flew up and down the coast, from Alaska to Puget Sound. Boats, it was said, had been ruthlessly fired upon by Russian cruisers, schooners wrongfully seized, and--so the whispers ran--crews had been sent inland and lost in the silence of Siberia. Probably the rumours were not all true; but there are schooners missing to this day, and vessels actually sailed from Portland and Astoria armed with quick-firing guns.
A group of ragged men, who claimed the rights and privileges of British subjects, were seated above the weed-grown ledges of a certain harbour on the dreary Kamtchatkan coast towards the close of one lowering day. Behind them rose a wilderness of rocky hills, their summits veiled in mist, and sombre pine-woods about their feet; before them the lonely waters of the Pacific rolled eastwards until the long undulations were lost in trails of clammy mist. And this is the general aspect of the shores of the North from Lawrence Island round by the Aleutians to Cape Lopatka--forbidding gray headlands, neutral-tinted sea, a sky of steely-blue, and belts of eternal haze. The writer speaks advisedly, for he has been there.