This diplomatic conflict between the United States and Great Britain originated in the 1880s when Canadian hunters began harvesting seals in the North Pacific, depleting the herds that nested on Pribilof Islands, a U. S. territory. Those islands, in the Bering Sea north of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, are the breeding grounds of 80 percent of the world’s fur-bearing seals. In 1870 the U. S. government gave a monopoly on seal hunting to the Alaska Commercial Company. The agreement stipulated that the company would pay a rental fee and royalties for the harvested skins and was allowed to hunt only 100,000 male seals per year. The killing of females was strictly forbidden. For the next 10 years the company’s profits soared and so did the seal population. As the price of sealskins increased, Canadian hunters began to engage in pelagic sealing (killing seals in the open sea) and to kill females. As a result the seal herd declined rapidly. In 1886 the United States, traditionally the defender of freedom of the seas, arrested several Canadian hunters in international waters.
Negotiations aimed at resolving the crisis stalled between Britain and the United States. The Canadians denied they were depleting the seal population and refused to accept any restrictions, while Britain maintained that the Bering Sea was not a “closed” American sea like Chesapeake Bay. To relieve tensions and revive negotiations, Secretary of State Thomas Francis Bayard convinced President Grover Cleveland to stop all arrests on the high seas. As a result, on November 22, 1887, a joint commission met in Washington to resolve the issue. Its work resulted in the Bayard-Chamberlain Treaty, signed on February 15, 1888, which the Senate then refused to ratify. Attempting to salvage something from the talks, both nations informally agreed to let American fishermen fish the coastal waters of Canada while Canadians could still engage in pelagic sealing.
This agreement, however, did not last. On March 2, 1889, Congress authorized—and Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland’s successor, soon resumed—the arrest of Canadian sealers in the Bering Sea. The British protested, dispatched four warships to the Bering Sea, and called for a joint commission to investigate the problem for two years, during which time pelagic sealing was to be prohibited. American seizures subsequently stopped. Despite war talk, diplomacy resulted in the Anglo-American arbitration treaty of February 29, 1892, which created an international (French, Swedish, and Italian) panel to resolve the sealing dispute.
In 1893 the panel denied that the Bering Sea was a closed sea and ruled that the United States owed Canada damages for the sealing vessels it had seized. Pelagic sealing was forbidden within 60 miles of the Pribilof Islands, and sealing on the high seas was prohibited from May 1 to July 31. Damages to Canadian shipping were assessed at $425,000. When Congress refused to appropriate the money, a joint commission met and increased the damages to $473,151.26. In June 1898, amid much grousing, Congress paid the amount.
Further reading: Charles C. Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F Bayard: 1885-1897 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1940); Alice F. Tyler, The Foreign Policy of James G. Blaine (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1945).
—Timothy E. Vislocky
World History
