The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [199]
Feeling that they had wasted the better part of a year in Alaska, and hoping to salvage the project, the Milottes wrote to Disney about possibly doing a film on saving the Pribilof Island seals. Disney seized on the offer. Theodore Roosevelt’s old friend David Starr Jordan, former president of Stanford University, had been a coauthor of The Fur Seals and Fur-Seal Islands of the North Pacific Ocean, about a legal battle of the late nineteenth century aimed at stopping the Russians and Japanese from slaughtering seals.6 (Jordan, a Darwinian scholar with a PhD from Indiana University, had been the commissioner in charge of Fur-Seal Investigations in the 1890s.) Disney hoped the Milottes could make a documentary that showed what wonderful, playful animals the Pribilof seals were. Disney was a staunch defender of seals—which had been his favorite animals ever since he watched them frolic at the Kansas City Zoo. The director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ira N. Gabrielson, who replaced Ding Darling at the Department of the Interior, had published Wildlife Refuges with the Macmillan Company in 1943, to great acclaim. The book was his counterpart to the duck stamp. Gabrielson wrote vividly of Alaska’s great seal herds: “birth and death, breeding, living, fighting,” he said; “the drama is continuous.”7
Disney loved drama. Off the Milottes went to the Bering Sea, motion picture equipment in tow, to live with fur seals on the principal Pribilof islands of Saint George and Saint Paul. The fog on the Pribilofs had caused other filmmakers to abandon working there. Seal hunting was supposed to have been banned on the islands (except that Aleuts and Indians were allowed to kill a few seals for subsistence). However, the Fouke Fur Company of Greenville, South Carolina, had contracted with the federal government to process seal pelts. The Milottes also encountered organized poachers. To Disney, the seal lover, the Pribilofs were the “Galápagos of the North,” a nirvana for naturalists. Sea urchins in tide pools of the Bering Sea interested Disney, not Aleuts removing blubber and meat from a seal pelt during the canning process. The black mound of Sea Lion Rock, about 100 yards away from Reef Point, the southernmost tip of Saint Paul, was magical to him, not Aleuts in Saint Paul boiling oosik, the penis bone of the walrus. Many of the 3 million seabirds on the Pribilofs, during migration season, came all the way from Asia to live with the seals and sea lions. When the Milottes sent back a box of film footage for Disney to look at, they received a two-word telegram back in reply: “More seals.”8
The prolific wildlife of the Pribilofs sometimes made the islands hard to protect. Sea otters, for example, were hunted to near-extinction during the nineteenth century in this far-flung part of the Bering Sea. While the lives of the approximately 150 Aleuts who lived on the Pribilofs were interesting, Disney thought their activities were too bloody for children to watch: a lot of finback whales were being sliced and diced. To Disney, the northern fur seal had the physical features and playful demeanor that kids loved. Pups were shiny black when born but soon turned an appealing silver gray. Pupping season! That is what Disney wanted to capture on film. During World War II, the Pribilofs had been evacuated by the Aleuts, who were worried about a Japanese invasion. But when they came back in 1944 they resumed slaughtering seals. With the approval of the U.S. government, more than 117,000 seals were slaughtered annually