ADVENTURES OF A CENSUS TAKER.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2536, 7 May 1881, Page 2

ADVENTURES OF A CENSUS TAKER.

Census taking is not usually a romantic occupation; but there are exceptions to all rules ; and the enumeration of the population of Alaska seems to have been as adventurous an undertaking as any recorded in books of travel. Mr Petroff (writes the “ Pall Mall Gazette), who was deputed to take’ the census of Alaska, took seven months to count 30,146 inhabitants of that enormous territory. He sailed over 2,500 miles 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 overgrown with vegetation, and which at one place 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 of the Alaskans were astonished on learning that the Emperor had sold their country to “ Mr Government,” as they styled the American republic. The only change they had noticed was that whereas under Russian rule they were occasionally visited by vaccination officers, the Americans 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 than a mosquito martyrdom. The scenery, he reports, was magnificent, and tiie quantity of game incalculable ; but life was rendered intolerable by the mosquitoes, whose übiquity and voracity he describes in terms which occasion surprise that there was sufficient left of Mr Petroff to bring home the results of the Alaskan census.