204 MR. M. CHRISTY ON THE OCCURRENCE OF THE NARWHAL. 
XL 
ON AN EARLY RECORD OF THE OCCURRENCE OF 
THE NARWHAL (MONO DON MONOCEROS) 
ON THE COAST OF NORFOLK. 
By Miller Christy, F.L.S. 
Read 80th March, 1896. 
There have, I believe, hitherto been only three known instances of 
the occurrence of the Narwhal on the coasts of Britain— one near 
the Isle of May, in the Firth of Forth, in June, 1G48; one 
near Boston, Lincolnshire, in February, 1800 ; and one in the 
Sound of Weesdale, Shetland, in September, 1808. It is with 
pleasure, therefore, that I call attention to an apparently genuine 
and reliable record which seems hitherto to have been overlooked. 
The Rev. Samuel Purchas, in recounting Frobisher’s second 
voyage in search of a North-west Passage in 1577, says* that 
Frobisher and his companions met with “a great dead Fish, round 
like a Porcpis,+ twelue foot long, hauing a Horne of two yards 
(lacking two ynches) growing out of the Snout, wreathed and 
streight like a AVaxe Taper, and might be thought to be a Sea- 
Ynicorn. It was broken in the toppe, wherein some of the Saylers 
said they put Spiders, which presently dyed. It was reserued as a 
Iewell by the Queene’s Commaundmeiit in her Wardrobe of Robes.” 
The animal thus described was, of course, a Narwhal or Sea- 
Unicorn, and its “horn” was long preserved at Windsor. Several 
later writers mention having seen it there. Purchas, in the second 
and third editions of his ‘Pilgrimage,’ adds that it is “still at 
AVindsore to be seene.” 
That the horn in question should have been so long and so 
carefully preserved in the Queen’s “wardrobe” at Windsor was in 
* “ Purchas his Pilgrimage ” (Loud., fo., 1613;, p. 621 ; 2nd Ed. (Loud., fo., 
1614), p. 739; 3rd Ed. (Loud., fo., 1617), p. 917 ; and 4th Ed. (Bond., fo., 
1626), p. 811. 
t An old form of the word wo now generally write “ Porpoise,” and 
derived from the Latin porcis piscis (the hog-fish). 
