68 ODOBiENUS EOSMARUS ATLANTIC WALRUS. 



tliey are arrived to a convenient distance the Ushermen, liaving^ 

 provided the necessary apparatus, take the advantage of a 

 sea wmd, or a breeze blowing rather obUquely on the shore, to 

 prevent the smeUing of these animals (who have that sense in 

 great perfection, contributing to their safety), and with the as- 

 sistance of very good dogs, endeavour in the night time to sepa- 

 rate those that are the farthest advanced from those next 

 the water, driving them different ways. This they call making- 

 a cut, and is generally looked upon to be a most dangerous 

 process, it being impossible to drive them in any particular 

 direction, and difficult to avoid them ; but as they are advanced 

 above the slope of the echourie, the darkness of the night de- 

 prives them of every direction to the water, so that they stray 

 about and are killed at leisure, those that are nearest the shore 

 being' the first victims. In this manner there has been killed 

 fifteen or sixteen hundred at one cut. They then skin them, 

 and take off a coat of fat that always surrounds them, which 

 they dissolve by heat into oil. The skin is cut into shces of 

 two or three inches wide, and exported to America for carriage 

 traces, and to England for glue. The teeth is an inferior sort 

 of ivory, and is manufactui'ed for the same purposes, but soon 

 turns yellow."* 



According to Dr. A. S. Packard, jr., its bones are still found 

 at the localities mentioned by Shiildham. "According- to tra- 

 dition," he further says, "it also inhabited some of the harbors 

 of Cape Breton ; and I have been informed by a fisherman in 

 Maine, whose word I do not doubt, that on an islet near Cape 

 Sable, Nova Scotia [probably the "Isle of Eamea" of the early 

 voyagers already quoted], its bones are found abundantly 

 on the sandy shore, fifteen to twenty feet above the sea. In 

 the St. Lawrence Gulf they were exterminated during- the 

 middle of the last century. The last one seen or heard of in 

 the Gulf, so far as I can ascertain, was killed at St. AugTist- 

 ine, Labrador, twenty-five years since. One was seen at Square 

 Island fifteen years since, and two shortly before that, and 

 another was killed at the same place about eight years since. 

 I saw the head of a young- Walrus, which was found floating, 

 dead, having been kiUed, apparently by a harpoon, in the drift 

 ice north of Belle Is]e."t 



Dr. J. Bernard Gilpin, writing a few years later (in 1869), in 

 referring to the former occurrence of the Wakus on the shores 



* Phil. Trans., vol. Ixv, p. 249. 



tProc. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist., vol. x, 1866, p. 271. 



