WALRUS. 129 



Kotzebue records that he saw thousands at the East Cape, in 51° N.L.* Cook saw " an inconceivable 

 number on the ice." In Purchas " His Pilgrims," it is mentioned in an account of the voyage of the 

 shii^ " God Speed," in 1608, to Bear Island, that they were found there "lying like hogges upon 

 heaps." Mr. Lament's account of a pack of them on ice shows how true a description of them 

 this is : " 13. At 3 a.m. this morning we were aroused by the cheery cry of ' Hvalruus paa Ysen ' 

 (Walruses on the ice!). We both got up immediately, and from the deck a curious and exciting 

 spectacle met our admiring gaze ! Four large flat icebergs were so densely packed with Walruses, 

 that they were sunk ahnost awash with the water, and had the appearance of being solid islands 

 of Walruses. . . . The monsters lay -n-ith their heads reclining on one another's backs and 

 sterns, just as I have seen rhinoceroses laying asleep in the African forests, or, to use a more familiar 

 simile, like a lot of fat hogs ia a British straw-yard. I shoidd think there were about eighty or 

 a hundred on the ice, and manj^ more swam grunting and sporting around, and tried to clamber 

 up among their friends, who, like surly people in a full omnibus, grimted at them angrily, as 

 if to say, ' Confound you ! don't you see that we are full ?' "f On another occasion he says, " There 

 cannot have been less than three hundred in sight at once." J 



These crowds of animals are, however, the mere ordinary herds in which they habitually 

 congregate, and doubtless they are much thinned from what they were in former times ; but 

 towards the end of the summer they pack like grouse. About the end of August, Mr. Lament 

 says, the}' usually congregate together in vast herds, sometimes to the number of several 

 thousands, and aU Lie down in a mass in some secluded bay, or some rocky island, and there 

 they remain in a semi-torpid sort of state for weeks together, without feeding or moving. I am 

 tempted to quote a passage from Mr. Lament's work, which gives one a better idea of their 

 immense numbers than anything I have met with elsewhere, but it is too long, and I must refer 

 the reader to the work itself. It will well repay perusal. It is the account of a massacre of 

 one of these packs by two sloops' crews a few years ago. It appears that a pack of between 

 three and four thousand Walruses — fancy three thousand or four thousand animals, as large 

 as elephants, lying crowded along the beach! — had gathered together in a protected corner, in the 

 south-westernmost island of the Thousand Islands. The two sloops found them there, got between 

 them and the sea, and the crew deliberately set to work to slaughter them. They attacked 

 them with lances, and after a long day's murderous work, they had killed nine hundred of 

 them. It was wanton slaughter, because the two ships could not have carried away the produce 

 of so many ; but during the night, heavy ice made its appearance, cutting them off from the 

 shore, which prevented their securing more than about two hundred. Seven hundred were 

 lost, and their carcasses left on the beach. There they rotted, and there their bones still lie, 

 and notwithstanding the distance of time, there the smell still lingers. Mr. Lament says it 

 would be a good specidation to freight a vessel for the bones. 



Mr. Lament calcidates that about a thousand Walruses, and twice that number of bearded 

 Seals, are annually captured in the seas about Spitzbergen, exclusive of those which sink or die 

 of their wounds ; so, he adds, it is clear that they are undergoing a rapid diminution of 

 numbers, and also that they are gradually receding into more and more inaccessible regions farther 

 north. 



* Kotzebue, " Entdeckangsreise in die Sud .Sec." I. S. l.J". 



t Lamont's "Seasons with Sea-horses," 1861, p. 74. J Ibid. p. 60. 



