Vl.J 
THE SPITZBERGEN HUNTING 
293 
hunting, during which the fattest reindeer are got; nor could 
the thick and valuable fur of the winter-fox be obtained without 
wintering/ But the hunting voyages of the Russians to Spitz- 
bergen have also long ceased. The last voyage thither took 
place in 1851-52, and had a very unfortunate issue for most of 
those who took part in it, twelve men dying out of twenty. On 
the other hand, the Norwegian voyages to Spitzbergen for the 
seal and walrus-hunting, begun in the end of last century, still 
go on. Their history, too, is, even here in the North, very 
incompletely known, at least to 1858, when the Swedish scien¬ 
tific expeditions began regularly to visit those regions, and to 
include in the narratives of their voyages more or less complete 
accounts of the Norwegian hunting, an example that has since 
been followed, though by no means ver}^ completely or systema¬ 
tically, by the editors of Norwegian and foreign journals, ii^ 
the first place by Petermann’s Mittheilungen. 
Between 1860 and 1870 the game (walrus, seal, bear, and 
reindeer) began to diminish in such a degree that the hunters 
were compelled to seek for themselves new hunting-grounds. 
They turned to the north and east, the less accessible parts of 
Spitzbergen, afterwards still farther eastwards towards Novaya 
^ Information regarding the mode of life of the Russian hunters on the 
coasts of Spitzbergen is to be found in P. A. le Roy, Relation des avantiires 
arrivees d quatre matelots Russes, &c. 1766 ; Tschitschagov’s Reisenach dem 
Eismeer, St. Petersburg, 1793; John Bacstrom, Account of a, voyage to 
Sgitzbergen, 1780, London, 1808 (as stated; I have not seen this work) ; 
B. M. Keilhau, Reise i Ost og Vest Finmarhen, saint til Beeren-Eiland og 
Spetshergen i Aarene 1827 og 1828, Christiania, 1831; A. Erman, Archiv 
fur wissenscliaftliclie Kunde von Russland, Part 13 (1854), p. 260; K. 
Chydenins, Svensha expeditionen till Spetshergen 1861 (p. 435) ; Duner and 
Nordenskiold, Expeditioner till Sqietshergen och Jan Mayen 1863 ocU 
1864 (p. 101). 
? Before 1858 there is to be found in Petermann’s Mittheilungen only a 
single notice of the Norwegian Spitzbergen hunting, the existence of 
which was at the time probably known to no great number of European 
geographers. 
