In rambling about Petropavlovsk I found the hills covered with luxuriant grass, sometimes reaching to my knees.  Two or three miles inland the grass was waist high on ground covered with snow six weeks before.  Among the flowers I recognized the violet and larkspur, the former in great abundance.  Earlier in the summer the hills were literally carpeted with flowers.  I could not learn that any skilled botanist had ever visited Kamchatka and classified its flora.  Among the arboreal productions the alder and birch were the most numerous.  Pine, larch, and spruce grow on the Kamchatka river, and the timber from them is brought to Avatcha from the mouth of that stream.

The commercial value of Kamchatka is entirely in its fur trade.  The peninsula has no agricultural, manufacturing, or mining interest, and were it not for the animals that lend their skins to keep us warm, the merchant would find no charms in that region.  The fur coming from Kamchatka was the cause of the Russian discovery and conquest.  For many years the trade was conducted by individual merchants from Siberia.  The Russian American Company attempted to control it early in the present century, and drove many competitors from the fields.  It received the most determined opposition from American merchants, and in 1860 it abandoned Petropavlovsk, its business there being profitless.

In 1866 I found the fur trade of Kamchatka in the control of three merchants:  W.H.  Boardman, of Boston, J.W.  Fluger, of Hamburg, and Alexander Phillipeus, of St. Petersburg.  All of them had houses in Petropavlovsk, and each had from one to half a dozen agencies or branches elsewhere.  To judge by appearances, Mr. Boardman had the lion’s share of the trade.  This gentleman’s father began the Northwest traffic sometime in the last century, and left it as an inheritance about 1828.  His son continued the business until bought off by the Hudson Bay Company, when he turned his attention to Kamchatka.  Personally he has never visited the Pacific Ocean.

Mr. Fluger had been only two years in Kamchatka, and was doing a miscellaneous business.  Boardman’s agent confined himself to the fur trade, but Fluger was up to anything.  He salted salmon for market, sent a schooner every year into the Arctic Ocean for walrus teeth and mammoth tusks, bought furs, sold goods, kept a dog team, was attentive to the ladies, and would have run for Congress had it been possible.  He had in his store about half a cord of walrus teeth piled against a back entrance like stove wood.  Phillipeus was a roving blade.  He kept an agent at Petropavlovsk and came there in person once a year.  In February he left St. Petersburg for London, whence he took the Red Sea route to Japan.  There he chartered a brig to visit Kamchatka and land him at Ayan, on the Ohotsk Sea.  From Ayan he went to Yakutsk, and from that place through Irkutsk to St. Petersburg, where he arrived about three hundred and fifty days after his departure.  I met him in the Russian capital just as he had completed the sixth journey of this kind and was about to commence the seventh.  If he were a Jew he should be called the wandering Jew.