| Summary: | This article and the four following ones arrived in San Francisco and were published on the same date under the general heading: ""The Arctic Search. First News of the Missing Whale Barks. Their Deplorable Fate . "" Concerning St. Paul, with 800 Aleuts, Muir comments: ""They are all employed by the Alaska Commercial Company as butchers, to kill and flay the 100,000 seals that they take annually . ""Muir learns that from three to four million fur seals mass on the islands during the breeding season. He describes the islands, saying, ""As seen from the sea all the Pribilof Islands . appear as mere rocks, naked and desolate, fragments of lava, wasted into bluffs where they touch the sea . Nevertheless, they are exceedingly interesting, not alone because of the marvelous abundance of life about them . but because they tell so grand a story concerning the ice-sheet that swept over them all from the north.""
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