Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 57, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 March 1908 — THE ISLAND OF SAKHALIN [ARTICLE]

THE ISLAND OF SAKHALIN

Territoiy Valuable for Its Oil, Coil and Fisheries A RUSSIAN PRISON HOLD

Salmon Yields $15,000,000 Annually Sea Coast 250 Miles Long and Mountains 5,000 Feet HI gin— Country Cold and Untillable— Many For Bearing Animals. ,

As big as Belgium-and Holland put together, very nearly as big as Ireland, and fully twice as big as Greece, Sakhalin is a long, narrow Island,, nowhere wider than the State of Massachusetts is long, and at certain points not wider than Nantucket, says the Boston Evening Transcript. But this ribbonlike island lying northwest of Japan, stretches along the coast of Siberia (from which a narrow sea separates it) for a distance of 670 miles. Sakhalin has a river 250 miles long and mountains 6,000 feet high. It’s by no means a vest pocket country. Only here and there is the soil at all fertile, and even then you must content yourself with raising market truck and expect to get malaria while weeding your garden. Such at least has been the experience of r Russian penal colonists who have tried to wrest a living from the soil. Moreover, the country looks every whit as Inhospitable as experiment has proved it to be. If it had no other claim to Importance Its dense forests would be enough to make It worth owning. Practically untouched, they stretch from one end of Sakhalin to the other.

Besides, there Is coal—not easily mined, but abundant. At Duey the toughest criminals have worked chained to their barrows, and each year they spent in the mines has counted as a year and a half toward/' hastening their discharge. Sakhalin has long supplied shlpß with fuel. According to C. 8. Patonoff the oil regions of Sakhalin are richer than those of America. Subterranean lakes—some of them with an area of 8,000 square feet—lie so close to the surface that natural gushers can be easily established. The oil regions lend themselves readily to exploitation, for the east coast Is only from twenty to twenty-five miles away, and there nature has provided harbors that boats drawing twenty feet of water can safely enter. For four months of the year, to be sure, those harbors are icelocked, but the ice can be broken by specially constructed steamers known as "ledokol.” Meanwhile another sort of game abounds—in the north a fine menagerie at large, composed of bear, foxes, sable, antelope and reindeer; in the south an occasional tiger; on the coast a remunerative profusion of seal, sea lions and dolphins, not to mention a species of plebeian whale little prized by blubber hunters. But the chief source of wealth in the Sakhalin of to-day is the fisheries. The rivers teem with salmon, the waters along the coast with herring. In a single year Sakhalin yielded $1,500,000 worth of fish, and this in spite of the most discouraging conditions. The Russians •wouldn't give the Japs a free hand, nor would they themselves develop the full possibilities of the fisheries. As long as the island remained a sort of Siberian backyard, into which exiles were constantly to be thrown, it was bad policy to encourage fleets of fishing boats to come prowling along the shore. The boats might thin out the population. Every year Sakhalin sends a million dollars' worth of fish fertilizer to the Japanese rice fields. This fertilizer, nee herring, is so indispensable to rice growing that when the war cut off the Japanese fishermen from the Sakhalin coasts two Japanese towns, Howkaido and Otaru, petitioned the Mikado to send troops to seize the island. The director general of prisons asked permission to organize an gmy of Japanese jailbirds for service in Sakhalin. Such overtures as these met with governmental discouragement, but the seizure of Sakhalin by trained troops was undertaken as soon as practicable. Nor did Japan fall to perceive that a Sakhalin in the grip of a foreign Power would constitute a standing menace to Japanese agriculture. It was the case of Corea over again, only with herring substituted for grain as the vital point.