Motor Matt's Close Call; or, The Snare of Don Carlos
Page 20
PERILOUS OCCUPATIONS.
Sealskins are a costly commodity, in more ways than one. More perilousthan almost any other mentionable pursuit, seal-hunting is yearlyexacting a greater penalty in human lives than it ever did before.Hunted for generations, the seals have become more wary, and year byyear they retire farther and farther into the well-nigh inaccessibleice of the highest northern latitudes.
It is not sport, this hunting the seal from the icy, storm-swept coastof Newfoundland; it is toil, whereby in part the hardy Newfoundlanderwins his scanty measure of bread, and the chase is beset withmultitudinous and unforeseen perils.
The wind gathers the ice into floes, and jams it against the coast, animmeasurable, jagged expanse of it, interspersed with plains; then theNewfoundlander takes his gaff and his food and his goggles, and setsout from his little harbor, starting at midnight that he may come upwith the pack at dawn. But the wind which sweeps in the ice inevitablysweeps it out again, without warning, in an hour, or a day, or a week;nor does it pause to consider the situation of the men who are twentymiles offshore. It veers and freshens, and drives the whole mass,grinding and heaving, far out to sea, where it disperses it into itsseparate fragments.
The lives of the hunters depend upon the watchfulness of the attenuatedline of lookouts, from the women on the headland to the first sentinelwithin signaling distance. But tragedies occur notwithstanding. Someyears ago of five sealing-schooners that penetrated the drift ice thenblocking the northernmost extremity of Baffin's Bay one only returned.Two or three years previously, at Kedy, near Cape Voronoff, Siberia,three hundred Russian sealers, at work upon an ice-floe, were drivennorthward into the frozen ocean, owing to the sudden springing up of asoutherly gale, and were never heard of again.
At St. Paul's Island, one of the Pribyloff group, off the coast ofAlaska, are the graves of seventy odd sealers, found frozen stiff andstark on an ice-floe that drifted ashore one night.
As with sealskins, so with pearls. The pearl-diver's occupationis among the most dangerous known. Generally either an Arab or afull-blooded negro, he is invariably a man of splendid physique andindomitable courage. Long practise has enabled him to remain underwater for two minutes at a time without apparent inconvenience.Nevertheless, the life of a professional pearl-diver is not consideredby experts to be worth more than six or seven years' purchase.
Many succumb every season to a strange and deadly form of paralysis.Many more are eaten by sharks, drowned through getting their feetentangled in weeds, caught in crevices in the rocks while exploringthe depths of the sea, or seized and devoured quickly by shoals ofgigantic octopi--those ghouls of the ocean--which invariably infest thefishing-grounds.
It is estimated that of the hundreds of egret-hunters who each yearset out for the heronries of Yucatan, a full ten per cent. neverreturn. Deep in the deadly, fever-laden recesses of the forest swampsof the hinterland these beautiful birds breed. The hunter pursues themremorselessly, his life in his hand, for the snow-white tail-feathersare worth from five to eight guineas.
The climate is deadly. The atmosphere is saturated with miasma andinfected with myriads of poisonous insects. Alligators lurk, too, inthe black slime of the tortuous bayous, which constitute the only meansof inter-communication. An egret-hunter who runs short of ammunition orquinin simply lies down in the bottom of his canoe and waits for death.Usually he has not long to wait. On the average, for every half-dozenaigrettes--one may see hundreds being worn any afternoon in BondStreet--a man's life has been sacrificed.
Hardly less perilous, if any, is the orchid-hunter's profession.Orchids love warmth and moisture, and warmth and moisture in tropicalcountries are synonymous with miasma and fever. Wild animals also andpoisonous serpents abound in the umbrageous depths wherein the rarervarieties lie hidden. Not infrequently, too, the collector has to seekhis specimens among savages or semicivilized peoples, who stronglyresent his intrusion into their midst.
One firm of orchid-importers reported a year or two ago that they hadhad five collectors killed in as many months by the wild tribesmen ofthe Western Himalayan slopes; while other three, even more unfortunate,were made prisoners and carried off to undergo the nameless horrorswhich have from time immemorial been characteristic of Central Asianslavery.
Rubber is purchased at a terrible price. The mortality in the Stateof Amazonias, in Brazil, corresponds with almost diabolical exactnessto the number of tons of rubber produced. In fact, it is said eachton costs a human life, and although there are no such horriblyfiendish atrocities in Brazil as has been charged against the Congo,it is nevertheless true that the laborers who are brought into therubber-fields do not average more than three years of life; and are,if not in law, at least in fact, subjected to hardships never known orendured by the slaves in the United States, or even by the slaves inthe coffee countries of Brazil.
Of nearly seven million pounds of camphor obtained annually, Formosaproduces all but about six hundred thousand pounds, but very fewpeople have the faintest conception of the dangers to which Japanesecamphor collectors are exposed in the Formosa hills when gatheringthis product. Up to the present, in fact, the Japanese have found itimpossible to control the head-hunting savages of the hills, and thedevelopment of this valuable industry depends equally upon the successof their measures for encountering and suppressing these determined andas yet unconquered tribes.
Formosa, which is shaped somewhat like a huge sole, has a rugged,mountainous back-bone, in which Mount Morrison towers into the cloudsto a height of twelve thousand feet. Throughout the wild penetralia ofthese mountains lurk a number of warlike tribes of varying strength,whose lives are devoted to hunting, fishing, and fighting with oneanother, their one community of interest being a passionate ardor inthe collection of human heads, whether of their tribal enemies or ofthe Chinese coolies who live on the verge of the hills or are engagedin the camphor industry.
The tree from which camphor is obtained is a species of laurelindigenous to Formosa, and it is on the mountains overrun by theseterrible hordes of head-hunters that the extensive forests from whichpractically the world draws its supply of camphor are found.