186 rORTUNATE DISCOVERT. 



hunter prays for by day and dreams of by 

 night, because they know that if they are for- 

 tunate enough to find the walruses under these 

 circumstances, they may be enabled to kill a 

 small fortune's- worth of them in a few hours. 



I never saw a walrus on terra firma my- 

 self; but I know that frequently on these oc- 

 casions, even of late years, prodigious numbers 

 of them have been slaughtered by the lucky 

 finders. 



At the close of my first visit to Spitzbergen, 

 in the end of August 1858, I visited a small 

 island, which I think is the south-western- 

 most of the Thousand Islands, for the pur- 

 pose of inspecting the scene of the latest 

 important massacre of this sort which had 

 taken place, and the details of which were 

 afterwards related to me by one of the per- 

 petrators. They are as follows : — 



It seems that this island had long been 

 a very celebrated place for walruses going 

 ashore, and great numbers had been killed 

 upon it at different times in bygone years. 

 In August 1852, two small sloops sailing in 

 company approached the island, and soon dis- 

 covered a herd of walruses, numbering, as 

 they calculated, from three to four thousand, 



