The author hunted bear and sheep in Alaska and Siberia and his book is now especially current as he hunted on the fabled Kamchaka Peninsula where hunting had just opened. The author bagged many brown bears and snow sheep.
First published in London by Rowland Ward in 1909, in a translation from German, describing a hunting expedition in 1906, an account full of adventure, some anti-Semitic jokes (chiefly re the ship’s captain), and needless killing of bears etc.
p. viii: While eminent explorers expand their best energies, and millions are squandered, in order to discover the North Pole, the regions which lie between the latter and the temperate zone remain neglected by Science….whilst the discovery of the North and South Poles of the early {twentieth century?] would only be of small value to Science and scarcely any to humanity at large.
p. 18, on the Kurile islanders: Their tradition relates that one day an Ainu god dined with a Japanese god, on which occasion the Ainu got drunk and fell asleep thereupon the Japanese stole his confrère’s grammar and alphabet, and taught his faithful worshippers the art of reading and writing, while the Ainu to this day are unacquainted with written characters.
p. 100 makes allusion to Nansen’s tales about the dangers of walruses.
p. 125 has an account of pederasty among Konjaks of Kodiack. “Acknutschik” are men dressed as women who were better respected, more than women were.
p. 135, Thlinkets customs and manners.
The second section of the book is on Alaska, mainly topographic and ethnographic with much less emphasis on hunting. Not the most sympathetic of authors but an interesting specimen of sporting literature.