Expeditionary· East Asia Operations
Bering Sea seal-poaching patrol
An unusual duty for the Corps: the enforcement of a maritime conservation regime in the far North Pacific.
From 1890 the United States moved to halt the unregulated killing of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands and in the surrounding waters of the Bering Sea, where Canadian and other sealing vessels were taking the herds at sea, and Marines served aboard the revenue cutters and warships sent to patrol the grounds and seize poachers. The duty was patrol and interdiction rather than battle, and no casualties resulted. The wider dispute with Britain over the seals was eventually settled by arbitration in 1893. The Bering Sea patrols were a curious episode in the Corps' history, an early instance of naval and Marine power applied to the protection of a natural resource, the warships and cutters policing a fishery in some of the bleakest waters of the American sphere.
Record no. 470