ADVENTUROUS CENSUS-TAKING.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3092, 26 May 1881, Page 3

ADVENTUROUS CENSUS-TAKING.

Census taking ■ (observes the Pall Mall Gazette) is not iisually a romantic occupation ; but there are exceptions to all rules, and the enumeration of the Province of Alaska seems to have been as adventurous an undertaking as any recorded in books of travel. Mr Petroff, who was deputed to take the census of Alaska, took seven months to count the 30,146 inhabitants in that enormous territory. Ho sailed 2500 milee in a sealskin canoe through regions where he found " occasional human beings, salmon in millions, mosquitoes in billions." His account of his journeyings along rivers which were over-grown with vegetation, and which at places ran through a wilderness where the banks and even the bushes and branches of the trees were covered for miles with rotting salmon is as interesting as any narrative of African exploration. Many of the natives lived in underground dwellings close to the river, which supplied them with their only food. Some of the more highly civilised on learning that the Emperor had sold their country to " Mr Government," as they styled the American Eepublic, said that only change they bad noticed was that the whereas under Eussian rule they were occasionally visited jby vaccination officers, the American left them to get along as best they could without vaccination. Mr Petroff was more than once in imminent danger of his life, but he escaped without suffering anything more serious than a mosquito rnartydom. Tho scenery, he reports as magnificent, and the quantity of game of all kinds incalculable ; but life was rendered intolerable by the mosquitoes, whose übiquity and voracity he describes in terms which occasion surprises that there was sufficient left of Mr Petroff to bring home the results of the Alaskan census.