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Show the Island of Sakhalin An Interesting Article Descriptive of Japan's Latest Possession. As big as Rclglum ar.d Holland put together, very nearly as big as Ireland and fully twice as big as Greece. Sakhalin Sak-halin Island, one of the bones of contention con-tention between tho Russian and Japanese Jap-anese peace envoys and recently taken by Japan, will add about ,000 square miles of territory to the mikado's empire. em-pire. It Is a narrow Island, nowhere wider than the state of Massachus-sett Massachus-sett Is long and at certain points not wider than Nantucket, says the Ros-ton Ros-ton Evening transcript. Hut this rib-bonllkc rib-bonllkc Island, lying northwest of Japan, Ja-pan, stretches along the coast of Siberia Si-beria (from which a narrow sea separates sepa-rates It) for a distance of (170 miles. Sakhslin has a river i'0 miles long and mountains 5,000 feel high. It's by no means a vest pocket county. Japanese enterprise, then will hac plenty of rodm to knock about In, but square miles aren't everything, even when you can count them by the tens of thousands, and unfortunately Sakhalin's Sak-halin's climate is nothing to boast of. To be sure, the Island Isn't far north (It lies about the' same latitude as France), but the sky Is almost always clouded, and the cold currents flowing from the Okhotsk sea keep the eastern east-ern cost pretty well Ice strewn all summer, sum-mer, while on the western coast the Ice from the Amur clogs up the narrow nar-row space between the Island and the mainland and long remains unmclted. Nobody Is ever too warm on Sakhalin. Tho climate resembles thatof Siberia, and Alexandroffsky is colder in winter than Archangel. Another thing, equally discouraging as far as it goes you can't farm to advantage ad-vantage on Sakhalin. 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 jour garden. Sucli at least has been the experience of Russian penal colonists who have tried to wrest a living from tho soil. Moieovcr, tho country looks every whit as inhospitable as experiment has proved it to be. Thev say that when Russian exiles get their first glimpse of that rocky coast and those grim, cloud capped mountains they often burst into tears for very despair When such of them as are not life prisoners have served their term and become "free colonists," they aro almost al-most certain to leave Sakhalin and settle in Siberia. They call the country coun-try of their Imprisonment "the Isle of the Lost." Cold, untillable, but big. Is that the whole story? If it were, then wo should certainly be at a loss to know why the peace envoys at Portsmouth have been haggling over the question of who Is to own Sakhalin. Hut that isn't by any means the whole story. The Isle of the Lost is also tho Isle of Potential Wealth. 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, The Japanese will know what to do with them. Hesldes, there Is coal not easily mined, but abundant. At Duey the toughest criminals have worked chained chain-ed to their barrows, and each year they spent In the mines has counted as a year and a half toward hastening thejr discharge. Sakhalin has long supplied ships with fuel. Perhapstho Japanesv. will develop the coal mines to the full cxtcntof their possibilities, but it Is certain at all events that they will develop the oil llelds, According Ac-cording to C. S. PatonotL the oil re- glons of Sakhalin arc richer than those of America. Subtcrranlan 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. es-tablished. The oil regions lend themselves them-selves readily to exploitation, for tho cast coast Is only from twenty to twenty-live miles away, and there nature na-ture has provided havbors that boats drawing twenty feet of water can safely enter. For four months of the year, to be sure, those harbors arc Ice locked, but tho ice can be broken by specially constructed steamers known as "ledokol". The war promised to do wonders for the oil business. As coal couldn't be got for love nor money from England or Japan, Admiral Rumglnwhlsky (as tho Dogger Hank fishermen still call him) was to supply his armada with oil fuel from Sakhalin. Sak-halin. Under government auspices the Russian Sakhalin Oil company came suddenly Into existence, a glorious glor-ious monopoly that proposed'to employ em-ploy cheap Russian, Chinese and Korean labor, turn out from (JOO.OOO to 700,000 tons of oil a year and drive Mr. Rockefeller out of business In the cast. Meanwhile another sort of game will fall to the Japanese In the north a lino menagerie at large, composed of bear' foxes, sable, antelope and reindeer; rein-deer; in the south an occasional tiger, on the coast a remunerative profusion of seal, sea lions and dolphins, not to mention a species of pleblan whale little prized by blubber hunters. Rut the chief source of wealth in the Sakhalin of today is the fisheries. The rivers teem with salmon, the waters along the coast with herring. In a single year Sakhalin yielded $1,500,000 1 worth of fish, and this In spito of tho most discouraging conditions. The Russians wouldn't give the Japs a free hand, nor would they themselves develop de-velop the full possibilities of the fisheries. fish-eries. As long as the Island remained a sort of Siberian bacK yard, Into which exiles were constantly to be thiown.it was bad policy to encourage lleets of fishing boats to come prowling prowl-ing along the shore. The boats might thin out the population. Hut when once the penal colonies arc withdrawn and Japan takes contiol the Sakhalin : fisheries will have a chance at normal progress. Some day, unless all travelers travel-ers are liars, they may llval those of Newfoundland. Now.aboutthe moment you begin to talk about fish the Japanese prick up their cars. No fish, no rice; no rice,no Japs. Every year Sakhalin sends a million dollars' worth of fish fertilizer to the Japanese rice fields. The fertilizer, fer-tilizer, neo herring, is so Indispensable to rjee growing that when the war cut off the Japanese fishermen from the Sakhalin coasts two Japanese towns, Ilodkaldo and Otaru, petitioned the mikado to send troops to seize the is land or, If that could not be done, to permit the two Indignant towns to fit out an expedition of their own. The director general of prisons asked permission per-mission to organize an army of Japanese Japa-nese jail birds for service In Sakhalin. Such overtures as these met with gov-' eminent discouragement, but the seizure of Sakhalin by trained troops was undertaken as soon as practicable. Nor dl'd 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 Korea over again, only with herring substituted for grain as the vital point. |