THE WALRUS IN BRITISH WATERS 85 
where in August 1852, sixteen men slaughtered 900 in a 
single day. This area exhausted, the mainland of Spits- 
bergen was next exploited, and thence the Walruses were 
driven to the banks and skerries still farther north. In 
1864 Alfred Newton wrote, “The time is not far distant 
when the Walrus will be extinct in the Spitsbergen Seas.” 
Southwell recorded that in 1880 Walrus-hunting had become 
uncertain in the Spitsbergen area “from the paucity and 
wariness of the animals,’ and in 1876 Lamont, in Yachting 
in the Arctic Seas, said that “now, although the Arctic Seas 
are exploited by steamers and visited annually by as bold 
and enterprising hunters as formerly, such a windfall as a 
herd of Walruses ashore is seldom heard of.” 
The point I wish to bring out is that about 1860 to 1870 
the last breeding-ground eastward of the British Isles had 
become practically depleted of its Walrus stock, so that the 
possibility of visitation from this area had now ceased. But 
I have indicated that the majority of the Walrus visitors to 
the British Isles probably hailed from more westerly breeding 
grounds, What, then, of the movement of the western 
Atlantic Walruses before the pressure of man? 
The Walrus used to be common off the coast of Nova 
Scotia, but about the middle of the eighteenth century it 
was exterminated in the region of the Gulf of St Lawrence. 
Thereafter it was hunted on the shores of Baffin’s Strait and 
on the Greenland coast, along which it was gradually driven 
northwards. Writing of 1867, Robert Brown (Proc. Zool. Soc., 
1868, p. 433) says that it occurred on the latter “but not 
south of Rifkol in lat. 657.2 In 1853 to 1655 Kane’ and 
Hayes found it abundant on the west of Greenland about 
Smith Sound in lat. 79°, but Feilden about 1877 (Zool, 1877, 
p. 360) saw none in that area. Indeed, writing in the same 
year, Rink states that “the Walrus is only rarely met with 
along the Greenland coast, with the exception of the tract 
between 66° and 68° N. lat., where it occurs pretty numer- 
ously at times.” Further details regarding its occurrence 
in these regions are to be found in Allen’s Azstory of North 
American Pinnipedes, 1880, but the outstanding fact is that 
about 1860 to 1870 the more southerly portions of the 
