188 COOK'S ADVENTURE WITH TEE WALRUS, 



they found the walrus, hitherto a partially unmolested ani- 

 mal, easy of capture. Stephen Bennet, the captain of the 

 God-speed, a vessel of sixty tons, writes : '* We saw a huge 

 morse putting his head above water, making such a horrible 

 noise and roaring, that they in the boat thought he would 

 have sunk it." In another place they found a multitude of 

 these monsters of the sea lying like hogs upon a heap." 

 They shot at them in vain until their muskets were spoilt 

 and their powder was spent, when " we would blow their 

 eyes out with a little pease-shot, and then come on the blind 

 side of them, and with our carpenter's axe cleave their heads ;; 

 but for all that we could do, of about a thousand were killed 

 but -fifteen." They filled a hogshead with the loose teeth 

 found on the island. The navigators became more expert in 

 their cruel onslaught upon the poor animals, for in a subse^ 

 quent voyage the same captain relates that in six hours they 

 slew from seven hundred to eight hundred, not only for the 

 sake of the teeth, but boiling the blubber into oil. They 

 also contrived to get on board two young walruses, male and 

 female ; the latter died on the passage, but the other reached 

 England, and was taken to Court, " where the King and 

 many honorable personages beheld it with admiration." It 

 soon, however, fell sick and died. 



Captain Cook, who was among the first to give anything 

 like a distinct account of this curious animal, says : 



" We got entangled with the edge of the ice, on which 

 lay an innumerable multitude of sea-horses. They were ly- 

 ing in herds, huddled one over the other, like swine, and 

 were roaring and braying very loud, so that in the night, or 

 in foggy weather, they gave us notice of the vicinity of the 

 ice before w^e could see it. They were seldom in a hurry to 

 get away until after they had been fired at, when they would 

 tumble over each other into the sea in the utmost confusion. 

 Vast numbers of them would follow us, and come close up tO' 

 the boats, but the flash of a musket in the pan, or even the 



