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Sea Otter Trappers and Traders
Joining the North Pacific hunters in quest of valuable, silky, sea otter pelts from the California Channel were ships from around the world. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Adele Ogden estimates in her book, "The California Sea Otter Trade, 1784-1848", that there at least 674 trading ships visited California from places like Nantucket and Boston on the Eastern American seaboard, and France, Spain, England, and Germany from Europe. From Central and South America ships were sent from Columbia, Peru, Ecuador, and Mexico. And ships also hunted the Channel that had home ports in the Hawaiian Islands and Asia.
During this period, 141 different ships from foreign lands made 232 port visits to Santa Barbara. The Channel region was no longer a secret as the world was rapidly learning about its lucrative potential. Ultimately the mass harvest of the small defenseless sea otter so thoroughly depleted their numbers that they became a protected species in the 1900s, and are now being nurtured back into sustainable populations in sanctuaries and reserves along the central and southern California coast.
At the early years of this time period, the waters were under the jurisdiction of the Spanish government as Mexico was their primary outpost in the Western Hemisphere. In 1808 Captain William Shaler, who had sailed the American ship, the Leila Byrd, on a four year commercial voyage that included trading in the Channel in 1801, published a report that drew attention to the valuable sea otter population. He reported " The sea-otter of the Channel were better than any other part of the coast " and estimated that American traders had been purchasing up to $25,000 a year in furs from local traders, in spite of the Spanish government’s efforts to discourage this incursion into their territories. These purchases were in addition to the pelts harvested by hunting ships that then took their catch to foreign ports.
This hunting was to take a serious toll on the environment, essentially decimating the native sea otter population, throwing the ecosystem out of balance as the animals, such as abalone that they fed on, no longer had their main natural predator. Even today, there are no Otters in the Channel, and steps are being taken to consider carefully reintroducing them back into their native habitat.
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