1 18 THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. [chap. 



whom I have conversed on this subject — they keep a watch to 

 warn their comrades when danger is near. If necessary pre- 

 cautions are observed, i.e. if the hunters a23proach tlie beach 

 where the animals are assembled Avheu the wind blows from the 

 land, and kill with tlie lance those that lie nearest the water, the 

 rest are slaughtered without difficulty, being prevented by the 

 carcases of their dead comrades from reaching the sea. Now 

 such an opportunity for the hunter happens exceedingly seldom ; 

 there are famous headlands on which in former times the 

 walrus was found by hundreds, in whose neighbourhood now not 

 a single one is to be seen. 



In the sea too there are certain places which the walrus 

 principally haunts, and which are therefore known by the 

 hunters as walrus-baidvs. Such a bank is to be found in the 

 neighbourhood of Muffin Island, situated on the north coast 

 of Spitzbergen in 80° north latitude, and the animals that have 

 been killed here must be reckoned by thousands. Another bank 

 of the same kind is to be met with in 72° 15' north latitude, on 

 the coast of Yalmal. The reason why the walruses delight to 

 haunt these places is doubtless that they find there abundant food, 

 which does not consist, as has often been stated, of seaweed, but 

 of various living mussels from the bottom of the sea, principally 

 3f2/a truncata and Savicava rugosa. Their fleshy parts are freed, 

 before they are swallowed, so remarkably well from the shells, 

 and cleaned so thoroughly, that the contents of the stomach 

 have the appearance of a dish of carefully-shelled oysters. In 

 collecting its food the walrus probably uses its long tusks to 

 dig up the mussels and worms which are deeply concealed in 

 the clay.^ Scoresby states that in the stomach of a walrus he 

 found, along with small crabs, pieces of a young seal. 



The largest walrus tusks I have seen were two of a male 

 wali'us purchased in the summer of 1879 at St. Lawrence Island, 

 in the north part of Behring's Sea. They measured 830 and 

 825 millimetres in length, their largest circumference was 227 

 and 230 millimetres, and they weighed together 6,G80 gram. 

 I have seen the tusks of females of nearly the same length, but 

 they are distinguished from those of the male by being much 

 more slender. The surface of the tusks is always full of cracks, 

 but under it there is a layer of ivory free of cracks, which again 

 incloses a grained kernel of bone which at some places is semi- 

 transparent, as if drenched with oil. 



When the walrus ox gets very old, he swims about by 



^ Compare Malmgren's instructive papers in the publications of the 

 Koyal (Swedisli) Academy of Sciences and Scoresby's Arctic Regions, 

 Edinburgh, 1820, i., p. 502. That the wah-us eats mussels is already 

 indicated in the Dutcli drawing from the beginning of the seventeenth 

 century reproduced below, page 123. 



